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End User
Spotted these speakers in Currys audio department yesterday. They had “do not count” written on a label on top of each one. I therefore counted them. Don’t think anyone spotted me. The moment was captured on video and is now on YouTube for all to see. I’m a rebel, me.
Other weekend reads:
I was sat one Friday night in the packed snug of the Victoria pub1 on Union Road and the conversation somehow came to the subject of allotments. Turned out pretty much everyone in the room had an allotment! It may be that real ale pubs attract a certain type. I doubt the same would have been true for Walkabout or any of the other trendy pubs in town.
We gave up our allotment a few years ago. It was handily placed just over our back fence but it at 60m x 10m it was too big and with four kids could never find the time to work it. The plot has now been spit in two and is properly tended to as it rightfully deserves.
This morning I was up early to set kid4 off on his travels to Sutton Bridge for a hockey tournament (90mins drive away) followed by a football match this pm in Burgh Le Marsh (also a long distance). At 7.30 am the scene outside the landing window was almost autumnal. There had been a lot of rain overnight but with the deciduous trees overhanging the garden not yet in leaf one sensed an absence of spring freshness that makes this the best of seasons.
Over in the allotments a couple of people were already up and at it. Wow. That is commitment. They will reap the benefit later in the year. All credit to them2. I took a photo. You can just about make out one of the men – clicking on the pic brings up the full size version.
This morning I’m finishing the building of my woodstore. A rudimentary construction but hopefully one that will do the job. Fotos will be phurnished.
Other agriculture related posts:
50 mighty quadtracs all in a row
Lincolnshire pea crop – feeding the nation
Tom Wood beer and wooden biros
1 Everyone moved from the Victoria to the Strugglers when one Friday evening they put the price of a pint of bitter up by 30 pence in between rounds!!!
2 I don’t like sprouts anyway!
This sign, on the pedestrian crossing near my house, is on red. Red means do not cross. It could be unsafe as there might be traffic coming that could hurt you. Badly.
When the sign turns green it is safe to proceed as any cars should have stopped to let you cross. Usually there is a beeping noise when the sign is green which makes you want to hurry across.
Sometimes if they think there are no cars coming people are tempted to cross when the sign is on red. This is a personal decision. No responsibility is accepted here if you are run over.
Occasionally people press the button and cross before the sign has changed to green. This tends to annoy drivers who may find themselves sat there waiting when there do not appear to be any pedestrians wanting to cross. Most of us will be guilty of this. Ah well.
Latest photo in the series #plaques passed on the way to work. This one is to be found at the bottom of Steep Hill in Lincoln.
Photographed in train loo between Manchester Piccadilly and Sheffield en route home from 4G panel at Convergence Summit North. Not in perfect focus as train wouldn’t stop shaking:)
More bog tales:
The radio program I present, Lincoln A to Z, is formulated by 52 randomly selected grids from the Lincoln A to Z map. We have a basic structure, but the tone and timbre of each program is guided by the contents of the grid. Out of the 30 programs we’ve made so far, its fair to say that a couple have left my producer and I scratching our heads and wondering what went wrong. By no means are these programs terrible, they just didn’t flow or turn out how we planned.
OK, one was particularly terrible, but once the program was over we retired to the office (pub) to discuss how to improve and avoid making the same mistakes again.
During a period of training, at least one run will be atrocious. It can be the simplest thing that knocks you, a stitch, traffic lights or tripping over a dog. Its frustrating at the time, feelings of failure kick in, heightened by the fact that you are out of breath. But I know that like the occasional below par radio programs (you try making an hour and a half radio program about a bungalow heavy street in suburbia), I know that its not the end of the world and that rather than it be a failure, it is in fact these hiccups that make you better in the long run.
The internet, bless it, is full of annoyingly positive statements like this:
“Lily Allen sounds crap and uninterested”, said my wife as she listened to BBC Radio 2.
A few weeks previously I’d heard Dermot O’leary saying that Lily Allen would be sitting in for him while he went on a filming trip, “or she will be,” he said, “if she ever answers the phone to my producer!” Maybe an early sign that this whole thing might have been a hindrance for her, rather than a privilege to be broadcasting on the most popular radio station in the UK.
I’ve listened back to that program on the mainly brilliant, yet occasionally frustrating BBC iplayer Radio Android App, and I don’t think it was as bad as my wife made out. Sure,
Picked up my Acer C720 WiFi Chromebook. Granite Gray not Ash as foretold in this previous post but hey. Might never know what colour ash was 🙂 Also it’s a shame that international language seems to have dumbed down to the lowest common denominator of Americun English. Ah well.
Back at the office I thought I’d bang out some words of wisdom for you before user testing the product. I bought the Chromebook from PC World Business. One does this ostensibly when one requires a VAT receipt from PC World, dont ya know.
Whilst hanging around waiting for the PC World Business system to boot up I got into conversation and casually asked whether there were any discount codes available. The “sales advisor” (I imagine that’s how it’s speld) tapped his keyboard and hey presto a £20 discount appeared.
So my Acer C720 WiFi Chromebook Granite Gray was not £199.99. It was £149.99 plus VAT which I’m sure your quick thinking minds will have totted up to £179.99 give or take a bit of rounding. Result eh? 🙂
I took a look at other Chromebooks on sale whilst hanging around. They were pretty much identical to the Acer. Small differences in build quality perhaps but these are all commodity items. It’s like buying bags of cement, or tins of baked beans.
Now what is interesting is I happen to know the discounts are not available from PC World’s Retail arm. This is because PC World Retail buys its stuff from Dixons Retail who in turn get it from a UK Distributor who buys his from the European Disti who gets it from the manufacturer. I also happen to know (it’s spring – a little bird told me) the manufacturer’s price is £90 so there is plenty of margin in there if you can buy direct from the manufacturer but sod all if you have to slice it 4 ways.
Apparently most of the Samsung products bring good margins – it’s only Apple who are greedy. What do I care? I got an Acer C720 Chromebook for £179.99.
More on this as it happens.
Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Just bought an Acer Chromebook Ash – review to follow.
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles
Just bought an Acer C720 WiFi Chromebook Ash. I assume that ash is the colour:) I have to go and collect it from PC World on Tritton Road in Lincoln in an hour. It’s OK – it’s only a short walk from the office in case you’re wondering.
I already have a Samsung Series 3 Chromebook – pictured here lying on top of my old Dell laptop (bless). I’ve decided to buy a second so that I don’t need to bother taking a bag to the office. I’ll just leave one in the office and one at home. All the content is in the cloud so no messing about transferring stuff.
The other reason for buying a second Chromebook is because I want to force a separation between my business gmail account – trefor.net and my personal one. I will still be able to access both from either machine but I want to build up the business profile on Google and other social media platforms and it can get confusing having two live accounts on the same machine.
Before buying I went online to look at reviews. Tbh they are all rubbish. You get side by side lists of specification features plus a bland analysis concluding in why you should by one nearly identical mass produced consumer commodity product over and above another.
I cogitated over thickness, battery life, screen size and price and ended up buying one of the cheapest which also seems to be amongst the best on battery life and thickness. Battery life is increasingly important – if you can get a day out of your machine when out and about then that is a result. I’m sure the Acer 720 WiFi Chromebook Ash will do the job. You can be sure I’ll also let you know if the colour doesn’t turn out to be ash, which will get us all thinking:)
I did think about just buying another Samsung Chromebook but figured it would be just as well to do a comparison between the two. Also there don’t appear to be many reviews out there that offer real user experience of the machines.
To finish off it is worth noting that when I last tried to buy a Chromebook from PC World they didn’t have any in stock. Shows how the Chromebook stock has risen innit?
Ciao amigo.
Read other posts on Chromebook – there are loads:
Samsung Chromebook crash fix and print drivers – who needs em?
Footnote to Samsung Chromebook Free Galaxy Phone offer
Samsung Chromebook offer not very customer friendly
or search chromebook for lots of useful articles
PS I did ponder buying a chromebox but it only seems worth doing if you need more horsepower.
Satellite image of a bald patch. This is an anonymous bald patch photographed by a passing spy satellite en route to a help search for flight MH370 missing in the Indian Ocean. GPS coordinates suggest the person in the photo was in the Leeds area at the time although no information is available about his identity.
Speculation abounds concerning whether the bald patch was at the 24th Euro-IX Forum at AQLs Salem datacentre though there is no hard evidence to support this. We shall probably never find out who’s bald patch this is.
Amazing what technology can do now innit?
Photo courtesy of Edward Snowden.
Other Peering Week posts on trefor.net include:
UK internet history – The Early Days of LONAP by Raza Rizvi
INEX’s IXP Manager – Tools to help manage an Internet Exchange by Barry O’Donovan
Regional Peering in the UK by James Blessing
Noticed a piece on the Guardian talking about Google Chromecast becoming available in the UK from Wednesday. Interestingly this review of Chromecast has had 12,578 views since it was written in October last year. Also did a second review a short while later.
I occasionally use the Chromecast to watch stuff on YouTube when there is nothing I fancy watching on “normal” TV.
It’s traditional for me to start wearing shorts as soon as the clocks go forward in the spring. The British summer is not very long and you have to cram in as many summery activities as you can in a short space of time. The clocks don’t go back until next weekend but today is such a nice sunny one that I have donned said shorts.
I have a regular routine when I put a pair of shorts on for the first time in the year and that is the “now where did I put the shorts away for winter” routine. There’s also the “hmm do I actually have any shorts left from last year” thought that goes through my head. Summer does inflict wear and tear on a pair of shorts, especially when tightening waistbands are involved. The consequence of a barbeque culture.
Fortunately over the last couple of years I’ve been able to pull in 4 notches on the belt so I’m working my way back through some older pairs of shorts. Not quite at the lissome “take a look at my sixpack” stage yet which will be the point at which I treat myself to some new and cool gear. Don’t expect anything soon:)
If this weather continues into next week I’m also thinking of bringing the bbq out of deep hibernation. It’s a Weber 3 jet gas job. There are some purists who won’t touch gas but in my experience it’s far more reliable and the food tastes the same. Less likely to be burnt if anything. By havign a gas bbq we also have more meals cooked outside. Anne likes to know when the kids are going to be fed and the process of lighting a charcoal bbq is very hit and miss where timing is concerned.
Ciao Amigo!
Read a post with a picture of a fire pit in it here.
All week you’ve been sat in that office in your grey suit, stripy tie dangling from your white collar bound neck, shackled to your desk by the oppressive chains of conformity. Bowler hats may no longer be the mode but routine still binds. The 7.25 to Waterloo is still the 7.25 to Waterloo. There are leaves on the line and signal failures at Clapham Junction remain a blight on your ever lengthening commuter day.
The weekend is here. The suit now hangs safely out of sight in the wardrobe and the pair of jeans has made it out of the drawer for its weekly outing. It is spring in the Kingdom of Elizabeth II. The cherry blossom is out and it is time to add some colour to your drab and uneventful life1.
The time has come to break free.
I once had an idea for a radio program based on Top 10 Lists. I shared this idea with a very talented and occasionally furious radio producer, who informed me that “Lists are what people produce when they run out of ideas”.
So with that in mind here’s a list of my bad running habits.
I woke up in the middle of the night, took a spin round my phone and noticed that someone I followed on twitter had died.
I had never met this guy but at one time he had been a fairly frequent tweeter and you got his whole life story. He was out of work with a broken marriage. It looked as if he had been prone to aggression and had an alcohol problem. Then he kicked the habit and seemed to be pulling himself together.
At some point he disappeared off my timeline. I didn’t really notice. I follow 1,772 people at the time of writing. A lot of them come and go and many of them hardly tweet at all. Also it doesn’t take much of a change in your personal habits to not be looking when they are tweeting. I don’t try to read all the tweets in my timeline.
So last night when I saw someone mention that he had died it came as a surprise. I took a look at his timeline and he seemed to have gone quiet on social media platforms from around the middle of last summer and he died in the autumn. There was a reference somewhere to intensive care.
I have no idea what the story is. I’m not really interested and it is really none of our businesses. What is interesting is the fact that his life was in some small measure played out online. I have over the past few years been researching my family tree (hence the mention of me buying the History of the Welsh Baptists in a previous post). I’m at a point where there isn’t much to go on. It’s all hard slog in records offices in West Wales.
However any descendant of my twitter friend, indeed your descendants and mine, are likely to have a wealth of information about our day to day lives like never before. In some respects we are planting trees that will only be enjoyed by people that come after us. Much of what I post is private and shared only with the family, which could be an issue downstream. The family is a specific named set of individuals so my details could be closed to 4G grandchildren (for example). This might require some thought re sharing rules but the principle is there and in any case my Twitter timeline is open for anyone to read.
We are also here relying on the continued existence of today’s social media platforms and their data bases far into the future which is by no means a racing certainty.
It doesn’t really matter anyway. I’ve waxed on long enough.
RIP my twitter friend.
Take care now…
Whiling away the time on Twitter end route from Manc to Linc and spotted this tweet:
RT @madebyjuan: On my way to work and then BOOM! Building explosion collapse on 116th. NYC #explosion116 pic.twitter.com/revfnFA3oV
I clicked on the link to get a better look at the photo and found an interesting insight into how news journalism works these days.
@madebyjuan Hello. I’m a journalist with @CP24, a TV station in Toronto. Can we use your photo?
@madebyjuan Juan, are you in a safe place? Can you talk to CNN about what you’re seeing?
Looks like a bit of action going down in New York City and it’s been picked up on twitter by the media. I wonder if they just have a column looking for “newsworthy” keywords such as, in this case, “explosion”.
Interesting how it works innit?
Related posts:
On the way from Lincoln to Manchester yesterday for the Convergence Summit I changed trains at Sheffield. A man got on and sat opposite me.
The bloke looked a bit stressed. He was dark haired with a little beard and wore a shawl around his shoulders that gave away the fact that he was from somewhere in the Middle East.
He was continuously on the phone and regularly frowned at his iPhone when the signal kept disappearing. We are on a train I thought to myself! The signal is going to be crap!
The person at the other end kept ringing him back but then seemed to give up. We were through tunnels and out into the Pennines.
Turns out he wasn’t carrying a ticket. The conductor came along and charged him £25 to get to Manchester Airport. The return was about £34. He considered it but decided only to go for the single. Seemed like a good saving to me. He was clearly planning on coming back otherwise he wouldn’t have asked how much the return would be. Nowt as queer as folk.
As we approached Manchester his phone started to work again and I began to pick up snippets as he occasionally lapsed from Arabic into English. The conversation went like this:
“if …….. my life is finished. I will call you. I will call you. I will try and cross the border. Turkey… Syria.”
Wow. No wonder this guy looked stressed. He was on his way to Turkey and then trying to cross the border into Syria. There’s a big untold story behind those few words. Something we only ever see on the news played out in front of me on the train.
The train arrived at Manchester Piccadilly and I got off. I wish him luck…
More train posts:
Yesterday I took delivery of a book: “History of the Welsh Baptists from the year 63 to 1770”. I had to refer to this post for the exact dates – I’m on my way to Manchester, the book is at home and the acknowledgement email cuts the title off at the number 6.
I’m happy enough with the book although the paper has a distinctive odour. Much of it is fictitious rubbish sourced from medieval tracts. It serves a purpose as I am interested in Welsh Baptists in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries1, particularly from the area between Caerfyrddin and Castell Newydd Emlyn 🙂
The book is a photocopy of an abbreviated English translation of an early Welsh text but it has done the job for me. It’s a print on demand job from India. The service was good.
This morning I woke up to an email from someone called
Took me an hour and a half to walk to work yesterday whereas it normally takes around 30 mins. Only kidding. Forgot to switch off Runkeeper:) The app seems to be intelligent enough to realise that I’d arrived and was just making a cup of tea, writing blog posts etc.
The other by product of walking to and from work, apart from inducing amnesia, is that it makes your glasses steam up when you get home. Last night I walked in to a warm kitchen and was blinded by the heat. See the header photo. It must be so.
I’m used to it. When I’m in the pool of a morning I usually have to ask an attendant what time it is despite there being a big clock on the wall. There is no point asking any of the other swimmers. After 8am they are all of an age and suffer from the same problem.
That’s all. See you later.
Other good reads
Working Time
Internet routing pedestrian style
Trafalgar Square has a spare plinth. So has my phone, since I ditched the Facebook app.
They let different people exhibit on the spare plinth in Trafalgar Square.
I’m proposing to do the same. Of course not as many people will see whatever is exhibited in my spare spot, perhaps.
You will note that there is no email icon on the front screen. Dont bother suggesting it. Email is relegated to the second division as a means of communication. It’s on the next screen along.
I don’t regularly use all of the apps on the front screen. Mostly Chrome, Camera, Twitter, Phone, Calendar and LinkedIn.
The others are pretty much ad hoc. I only occasionally need the alarm clock. The idea for this post came to me in bed so I drafted a post, title only, using the WordPress app. Oh and I use Runkeeper every day I am in the office.
So there you go. I wonder which app I should display on my spare plinth!?
More good reads:
Facebook intrusion continues with App upgrade
51 years old and still single? Yes and no Facebook.
Just began the process of buying a Bitcoin. Only the one. A small investment but an affordable investment or loss if it all goes tits up.
I’m working with Dan Hewitt of Coinative on this. Dan gave me a little job to do over lunch so that we could crack on when he got back.
The first step is to
Choosing the stone for the new Eleanor Cross for Lincoln project at the CDS quarry in Metheringham Heath.
Last week we covered the launch event for the new Eleanor Cross project for Lincoln. It’s been quite a wait to get the right piece of rock to start carving the statue. The quarry is only digging out new rock on a few days a month and often the pieces that come out are not of a suitable size or shape.
Moreover whilst the giant digging equipment that is occasionally brought can handle them the larger “lumps” are difficult to move using the quarry’s onsite kit and have to be carefully drilled to facilitate cutting into manageable sizes.
This first candidate on the right had already been moved into the main quarry working area. It might
Our first ever program on Siren FM was called The Reading Room, it went against the grain in trying to make a radio program about books and creative writing that was accessible – no oxbridge language here, I worked in a factory and read popular fiction. Lots of my colleagues read popular fiction too. So we made a program to appeal to them. It achieved some success that I wont embarrass you with now.
In our current program, Lincoln A to Z, we’ve acknowledged one of the few rules that Siren FM insist on – that every live program should have some ‘What’s On’ listings. We’ve gone about this a little differently too. We call it ‘City / Suburbs’, Jonny the programs esteemed producer, who lives in and loves the city, reads out the events that he fancies going to himself, and I a recent resident of the suburbs gives a largely fictional account of my slow acclimatisation to that way of life. One act of rebellion I regularly take part in is
Planning to buy a Bitcoin next week. The guys in the next room to us have a Bitcoin business. Dan Hewitt wrote a post a few days ago.
The process in the UK is not particularly straightforward as UK banks don’t currently support Bitcoin. All will be revealed next week.
Stay tuned…
How to buy a Bitcoin – Part1
What’s going on? A plane trying to land on Russell Square? Surely not? If it needed an emergency landing there are better places nearby to do this. Hyde Park for example.
Probably wouldn’t have gone down well with the Royal Family. I’m sure we would have heard about this on the news. It would have hit global headlines. Unless the news was suppressed…
Makes you think doesn’t it? Wasn’t Russell Square closed off for refurbishment for a few weeks one summer? Can’t quite remember. Maybe it was whilst they were repairing the damage to the plants and removing the wreckage, bodies etc. It’s possible…
Maybe there wasn’t a crash. Perhaps the pilot came in low to wave to his mum or girlfriend or someone else. It’s possible. Although I’m not an expert on this sort of thing I don’t think this plane is on a standard flight path so he would have taken a risk to do this. Would have got told off by his boss when he got back to the office.
Before anyone says anything I doubt whether this photo has been photoshopped. Google just don’t od that sort of thing, I think. I certainly haven’t photoshopped it myself.
I have to say I don’t know. I just don’t know what’s going on here. If anyone else has any thoughts on this puzzling pic I’d be glad to hear them.
Thanks to Dan Winfield for pointing this out. He was trying to find out where my hotel was and out popped the plane! 🙂
Other reading:
Sat in the lobby of the Hilton Metropole yesterday waiting for UC Exec Dinner special guest Alan Johnston when I hear a voice from afar. “Hey Tref wot you doing here?”.
It was Nominet’s Ray Bellis up on the balcony. He popped down and we chewed the fat for a while. Explaining why I was hanging round Ray mentioned a new WebRTC service called appear.in. This is a WebRTC video conference facility free for up to 8 guests.
You might say to yourself so what? This can already be done through the likes of Google Hangouts. Appear.in though is a brilliant ad hoc service that you can fire up in seconds with anyone anywhere through a browser. The site allows you to generate an instant conference room or reuse one you “made earlier”. I’ve bagsed /tref obv.
It just worked. We used Ray’s laptop and my Droid and were up and running. Looked a bit daft me getting up and chatting to Ray from a few yards away. Had to to it to avoid the feedback He was using the hotel WiFi. I had 4G on O2.
I got into a bit of a fluster when my cellular device actually rang whilst we were in the middle of the WebRTC session but hey… Modern day problems eh?
I’d give Appear.in a go if I were you. Let me know how you get on or drop me a note and we can conference in.
Ciao (bebe).
Other posts you might want to read:
ITSPA WebRTC Workshop at Google Campus
That Alexander Graham Bell moment – WebRTC at IPCortex
PS not sure if i should call this an app as I have done in the post title. It’s a web based service really. I associate an app with something you install on your phone.
I’ve just caught up with the inaugural BBC Radio 6 Music Festival, held last weekend at Victoria Warehouse in Manchester, a city that is to music, what London is to making money.
I hope that next year they hold it somewhere else because something didn’t work and it wasn’t the bands. It was the audience. They didn’t turn up. Not that it was empty, just that those that were there appeared to be stood around in a contemplative stance with folded arms. Was this really the city that inspired rave culture?
You might argue that this is
Best toppings for pancakes on Shrove Tuesday.
Some things are more important than all things technical. Beer for example. Bacon with brown sauce, especially after a night out on the beer.
Then there are pancakes. Pancakes are important. You have to make them yourselves because when bought in a cafe or restaurant they are not as good. Thinner usually. Although there are many recipes for batter mix it doesn’t seem to matter what proportions you use for your eggs, flour and milk. It all turns out ok usually, as long as you use a non stick pan and have it heated to a high enough temperature. The first one is never as good because of the temperature issue.
The most important and thing about the pancake is the topping. This is also what starts more debates. I am happy to inform that the correct topping for a pancake is butter, lemon juice and sugar. No debate.
See below for useful images to help with your topping selection. Usually it would be a Jiff lemon but there is no culinary or scientific reason why this is so. Time was you could only get Jiff. I’m not sure the implied health benefits of this particular brand of lemon juice are any more applicable than any other brand. Freshly squeezed is probably best.
That is all.
Other food related posts:
breakfast cooking on George Foreman Grill
New Eleanor Cross for Lincoln – a project of national significance with exclusive coverage at the weekends on trefor.net.
Eleanor of Castile, wife of King Edward I of England died in 1290 in Harby in Nottinghamshire. Her body was taken to the Gibertine Priory at St Catherines in Lincoln where it was embalmed and the viscera remove to nearby Lincoln Cathedral.
After four days and nights in Lincoln the body was removed, accompanied by the King and his retinue to London, a journey that took twelve days. Following the burial in London King Edward commissioned a cross to be erected at each overnight stopping point.
Most of the crosses were destroyed by the Roundheads during the English Civil War. A fragment of the original Lincoln cross remains inside Lincoln Castle. A new cross has been commissioned to be erected outside St Catherine’s Church, the starting point in Lincoln of the journey.
In December a meeting was held at St Catherine’s church at South Common to launch the project. The two videos below were recorded at the launch event. The first is with artist Alan Ward and the second is with the parish priest Father Ian who offers some particularly interesting insights into the history of the Eleanor Cross.
Tune in every weekend for updates on this project. Coverage was initially planned for philosopherontap.com but this is interesting enough to merit the wider readership that trefor.net offers.
