Holey Stupid

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I’ve got a new desk. Gone are the bright red Ikea ones that weighed substantially less than the things we put on them. Now I have a big strong counter which hopefully won’t move much when I strap a steering wheel to it.

Anyhoo, I wanted some holes for cables to go through. And I also fancied the device above, which sets a rather useful mains socket and some powered usb ports into the desk. I discovered that these are 80mm diameter. So I asked for some holes which were 80mm diameter. Big mistake. Turns out that two things which are exactly the same size don’t fit together properly. The result you see above is the result of a bunch of frantic extra sanding on my part…

Out of date spam

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Does anyone know how I can delete all the emails from a particular sender on Gmail using the web client? You would think that this would be easy. There would be some way of specifying the sender and then a convenient button that you could press to delete everything.

If there is such a button, I’ve not been able to find it. All I can do is work my way through pages of mails, deleting everything in each page. It’s almost as if Google want to make it hard for you to get rid of dross so that your email fills up and you have to pay them for extra storage….

Windows Phone has still got it going on

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They say it is important to keep in mind how far we’ve come in technology. But I think that sometimes it is a good idea to consider how far we haven’t come as well. In the trip into the garage that yielded my Zune HD I also found a couple of Lumia Windows Phones, including the wonderful 1520 that I got in 2013. It still works fine (although it took a few reboots before it got past a recurring alarm). Even the battery is holding up. I also found a 1020, the one with the amazing camera. That works fine too.

If either of these phones worked like they did in their heyday, with all the apps and integration that are now long gone, I’d be back on them in a heartbeat. Apple AI or no Apple AI. In my opinion the user interface beats the iPhone hands down. All this “Liquid Glass” stuff is really lipstick on a very old pig.

They don’t feel heavy, they don’t feel slow and they don’t feel old. We watch the Apple presentations and then dutifully traipse along to buy the latest upgrades (and I’m as bad as anyone for this) but it seems to me that the fundamentals of my life could be quite easily underpinned by a 12 year old design. There must be something which has moved us beyond what the Lumia can do but at the moment I’m not sure what that is.

Liquid Glass - Thanks but no thanks

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First reaction to Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” display: “That’s pretty”

Second reaction to Apple’s new “Liquid Glass” display: “I wonder how you can turn it off”

Note to graphics developers who have impressed themselves with their ability to overlay text on a background image and make the background blurry: There’s a reason why newspapers, magazines and books are not printed on semi-transparent paper. It’s because a distracting background makes something much harder to read.

Thunderbirds on the Big Screen

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To celebrate 60 years of Thunderbirds (blimey!) they’ve re-mastered a pair of the best episodes and are showing them in movie theatres in the UK. You can find out more here. The show was shot on 35mm film so it should look great on the big screen. They’ve re-mastered the audio too, so it should also sound terrific.

We’ve got our tickets. Looking forward to it.

Gone Flying

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We’ve done a lot of fake flying. We have regular meetups where we tour the world in Microsoft Flight Simulator 24. It’s very good. But no substitute for the real thing. Today one of us got to fly a real plane and I went along to take pictures using a variety of cameras and lenses. We were at Beverley Airfield. The weather was great, the conditions were clear (if a bit draughty) and everything passed off without a hitch. The only real problem was that they serve bacon butties for breakfast in the café and we’d already eaten. But we’ll know for next time.

You should be playing Cheese Finder

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I’ve just renewed the domain for Cheese Finder. I made it a little while back when I was writing Begin to Code: Building Apps and Games in the Cloud. The board contains hidden cheeses. When you click a square it changes to a colour that represents the distance that square is from the nearest cheese. You have to figure out where the cheese (or cheeses) are with the smallest number of clicks. The puzzle above went well. I only needed four clicks. I clicked in three corners, which all came up the same colour. Which meant that the cheese was somewhere in the middle.

It’s quite fun. You get a different puzzle every hour with a different number of cheeses and different colour mapping.

This one was a bit harder to solve, what with there being four cheeses to find.

Leeds Industrial Museum

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Today finds us at Leeds Industrial Museum. We like museums. Especially this one. It used to be a Mill, and not a great place to work.

All around they have put up descriptions of the horrible afflictions inflicted on the workforce. The ear defenders above are for visitors to wear when they fire up the spinning machine. Not something that the employees got. They just had to put up with going deaf after a while. All the machines were powered by a steam engine which turned long shafts that ran along inside the roofline. Canvas belts transferred power to the huge machines that took wool into one end and then produced cloth at the other. There were no covers on the belts or the machine mechanisms. Getting mangled was just something you had to try to avoid doing.

It’s interesting to think that at the time the mill was opened these places would have seemed like the ultimate in technical advancement and heralded as the next great thing. Oh well. It’s not as if our generation would widely adopt new technology without thinking hard about the implications and the effects on people using it..