James

I just meant every time I sign up to a network. So once for Vodafone, once for T-Mobile, then once for Vodafone again, except that time the first person didn't actually do anything, so I had to call them again. Also, on the subject of apps streamlining website functionality, it's worth noting that Google may actually be shifting its favour towards web apps. They're working on introducing standards by which websites can interact with phone hardware like cameras and GPS, which may lead to a situation with very few local apps and more streamlined remote services. Of course, the effectiveness of that depends on one's Internet connection at the moment you want to use something, and whilst it's true that a large portion of local apps rely on remote data anyway, the experience is likely to be smoother and more reliable when it's not being rendered in-browser. I may be misinterpreting or overstating Google's intentions -- in all likelihood it'll just be a concurrent channel -- but it seems reasonable to expect it to rise in prominence. Re: No duplication of official Apple app functionality: That seems silly and regressive. Re: Golf with contextual volume thing: I guess I just travel in the shittiest of cars. Well done car companies for implementing it, anyway.

Evidently I don't travel in or know anything about posh cars. Is that the general content block, or are they really awful enough to specifically block the Android market? Are they trying to sell their own apps or something? Or are they just paranoid about people dicking around with their phones? Actually, if it were the general content block, you should be able to get it on wi-fi. Also, you could just get the block lifted (although every time I do that I assume the person on the other end thinks I want to look up porn on my phone at the back of the bus or something).

I don't pay for apps, as I haven't found any that useful to me yet, but I did seriously consider Locale. Then I saw people complaining in the comments that it didn't work properly, so I didn't bother. My most-used non-included-as-standard app is Listen, which is a fantastic podcast manager. You can set it to download podcasts automatically, specifying whether you want the phone to be on wireless or plugged in when it does so, to manage data and power consumption respectively. When American podcasts go online overnight they're waiting for me on my phone in the morning, without me having to involve a computer in the process at all. Now, the app is by Google, so it's not representative of the quality of apps in general. Still, it's very handy. After that my most-used app is probably Movies, which unsurprisingly displays showing times for your favourite cinemas. It's information you could find online, but it keeps track of your favourite cinemas, finds ones near your current location, is mobile-display-friendly, shows Rotten Tomatoes ratings (not that you should pay much attention to those), and so on. Then there's stuff like Shazam, which will try to look up music picked up by the microphone, and AR stuff like Layar and Google Goggles, which overlay local information on the camera. I don't use them much, but theoretically they could be quite handy. There's e-book apps and web comic aggregators and of course a billion Twitter and chat clients. Then there are replacements for the default software. Opera Mini is good if you're trying to save bandwidth (this is available on non-smart phones, however), and Dolphin and Firefox have different takes on things like tabs, I believe. Swype takes a different approach to software keyboards, and there are plenty of more conservative alternatives. Of course, none of this is essential, and perhaps none of it appeals to you. But lots of people live quite happily without a mobile phone at all, so it doesn't really mean a great deal. I'd agree that apps probably aren't as world-changing as some would have you believe, but I find some use in them. EDIT: I had an idea similar to FoxyRing, except it would be to regulate the volume of their car stereo. I find people turn their stereos up when they're on the motorway to hear it over the engine and road and everything, and forget they've done so, and get a bit of a shock when they next get in their car. Perhaps that would become less relevant as cars get quieter, though.

Sounds about right.

Hoeppy boerthdoey Joeff EDIT: belated

She says in her first e-mail that she's going to photocopy the poster.

I would have thought most people would be able to throw together a lost poster pretty easily. Even if you're not technically savvy you can just assemble it from separate bits and photocopy that. And failing even that, surely she should know that she could mask the reward bit with a bit of blank paper. Are people really that hopeless?

It might help to imagine that the phone is incredibly dirty, or that you are a technophobe terrified of breaking it and yourself. In other words, hold it with your fingertips like you're scared of it. In fairness, I have no first-hand experience of any of this. It's just a bizarre and amusing recommendation.

You get two exclamation marks! That's pretty extravagent.

On the subject of trackers/sequencers/whatever: zGK-EzEa45U Wait, the Wikipedia article I linked to refers to Hitman: Codename 47, Unreal Tournament and Deus Ex as "modern games". Could that be some of the most outdated text on Wikipedia? Aren't those games older than Wikipedia itself? I guess it depends how loosely and in what context you're defining "modern" -- they're hardly retro -- but they're not exactly evidence of a thriving tracker community.

And Subtle and Themselves and 13&God and probably a billion other projects I've forgotten or never heard of. The man keeps busy! Themselves: eyw_IdBlbKs 13&God (stick with this one – it picks up quite dramatically through the course): hG08anKTA8A And a Boom Bip track because it's one of the better concert openers I've seen (not in person, sadly): FCmsog4KjSg He also guests on a load of stuff, like this Fog song, which is where I first encountered him (weirdly enough, I think it was Dose who was responsible for Ninja Tune picking Fog up, so perhaps my path was kind of backwards): l5EreOf7ruo And this Hood track that sounds a bit like the CD is fucked, but is nevertheless quite appealing: dMlxQPZjW38 (He and Why? actually appear on several tracks on that album.) ===== Finally, and completely unrelated, this an excellent Eels cover by Moog Cookbook, who do or did many excellent covers of things with analogue synthesizers: HcpX3yCyauY ===== EDIT: Sorry if this is too many embedded videos for one post.

Yeah, one of the reasons the prospect is appealing is that it would presumably be a good way for me to back things up sensibly rather than copying files haphazardly onto an external hard disk with copious duplication. I guess I could just use some proper software for that instead, though. I've only got one computer with anything vital on it (my netbook is pretty much just for fiddling about in Linux, which I don't do a great deal of). I'll be moving into a flat with a friend soon, so I guess there would be the potential for a certain degree of shared usage there, but I'm not really sure if he's at all bothered by any of that stuff. He is much more into ripping DVDs than I am, though, so perhaps he'd like having them available on all devices rather than just his PS3. Or maybe as long as it's all accessible from the main TV it doesn't really matter. Dammit, I'm no closer to any conclusions.

Hey, it's my thread! Did this silly thing really leave that much of an impression that you thought to dig it up? Anyway, yes, computers ate weird and sometimes seem to have ghosts? Were it not for the standoff thing I'd suggest that perhaps the motherboard had done something awful to all your sticks of RAM, ruining them. I'm very much not an expert, though, as evidenced by the above nonsense, so that would have been entirely a guess. I've heard harsh warnings about standoffs, though. While we're on the subject of computer-assemblage, a recentish video on Tested.com concerning the building of a Windows Home Server machine once again put the idea of setting up some sort of server or other always-on device of my own in my head. I've considered this before, and consistently come to the conclusion that I'd have no need for one and that it would be a waste of electricity, but I can't shake the feeling that it would be cool to have one. I think the main reasons are that I'd quite like to have it as a project in a hobby kind of way, and that I have the carcasses of two old PCs lying about that I'd like to make some sort of Frankensteinian use of. But some of those components are buggered and I start to get enticed by shiny new stuff, so that kind of goes out the window. In the interests of making this a discussion and not a blog, do any of you guys have something along those lines set up, what do you use it for, and do you think it's worth it? One of the things I came up against when looking into the idea was what exactly mine would be. I was looking at FreeNAS, and that was looking fairly cool, but then I started looking into integrating a TV tuner into that because to me it makes complete sense to put one in a device that's always on and has oodles of disk space, but apparently DVR is more of a media server thing and FreeNAS is more of a file server. To me it would make a lot of sense to combine the two. I saw some talk of having the two as virtual machines on the same box, but there was no consensus on how well that would work. Anyway, I'm trying not to fall down the rabbit hole here, because like I said I think it would be fairly pointless and potentially horrendously wasteful for me, but the concept interests me.

Does that include the totally bananas laughter?

How about your kill-suicide ratio? When your helicopter pilot crashes you into the sea, it's suicide, you know. In seriousness, interesting stuff everyone. It's a shame there isn't really a single thing to take away from it all, but I guess these problems are complex and nuanced and very personal.

I saw Rashômon on Saturday. I thought it was pretty good. This may be horribly uninformed and patronizing of me, but it seemed like the camera work was very modern for 1950. There was one shot that particularly caught my eye in which the camera took a curved path that crossed the path of the woodsman guy just ahead of him as he walked. I'm not describing it very well, and there's probably an elegant term for it, but it struck me as being very dynamic for a period I associate more with largely stationary camera work. I read that it was some of the earlier use of handheld cameras in film, which would explain it. Also, there's obviously the structure stuff which I understand was very influential, but with my modern perspective and stupid brain, I don't have anything to add on that subject. Also also, I have no problem with stationary cameras. Indeed, I tend to prefer static or more slow and precise camera work to shakycam and quick cuts and all that (though that too has its place). But while this was a bit shaky (being handheld), it was very very deliberately planned and effectively realized.

That's not multiplayer! Wrong forum!

I have an Android phone and am pretty thoroughly sold on it as a platform (I find myself assuming all my future phones will be Android too, without ever having made a deliberate decision on the matter), but I see the appeal of the iPhone and get quite annoyed when people rail against it like it's some great evil. I also get pretty annoyed by the kind of mentality that treats it as a unique class of device completely distinct from everything else and untouchable by competitors. It's like the iPod thing again, when people treated that device as though it was somehow profoundly different than every other MP3 player. I don't mind the devices themselves, but I wish people didn't buy into the branding quite so much. I guess that's what Apple is so good at, anyway.

Some maths guy should do some statistical analysis of the properties of the posts in this thread. For example, most of them end with a single word sentence: "Thanks!", along with a few variations, such as swapping the exclamation mark for a full-stop, or attaching it to the end of the previous sentence. There are quite a few that follow the formula: "[short sentence declaring badge arrival]. Thanks!". It would be totally fascinating and not at all tedious and I'm certainly not a tiresome moron for even posting this.

Hey Miffy, I hate people who gets Firsts. Fuck you.

A hyperwang? A 4-todger? That's what you get for sticking your business into four-dimensional space. A... uh... tesserpeos? Sorry, I don't really know how to invent words from classical etymological roots.

Mine arrived this morning. Thanks!

I just saw Four Lions. I was worried I was going to miss it, so I decided to watch it on my own on the way home from work. I really liked it, which was a relief, since I wasn't too sure what to expect, and the trailer didn't quite do it for me. It may have helped that I was in a nearly empty screen, so my own reaction wasn't too tainted by everyone else's -_ apparently some people have been in hysterics throughout, even during the more tragic scenes, which could be quite off-putting, and impose a degree of tastelessness and exploitation which I don't think is actually present in the film. Of course, the film treads fully intentionally on very sensitive ground (mixed metaphor, anyone?), but it never seemed to me as though it was doing so crassly. There were grim gags, but they all served to drive home the personal tragedy. That's not to say it was miserable, either. I can definitely understand differing reactions to it, but I thought it was pretty great.

As it turned out, both times ThunderPeel got to zee choppah, I got there immediately afterwards and jacked it from him. The first time it was a devious plot, but the second it was beautiful serendipity. I'd been running from way across the airport to where all the action was, and could see TP making his way towards the helicopters, and by some amazing fluke managed to arrive just as he was taking off. I stole it and immediately ascended into the bottom of another helicopter, which I was completely unaware of, annihilating us both. That was my favourite bit of the night.

New episode in my flat-renting saga: The guy I was (and still am) hoping to share with learnt last week that he's losing his job. I asked him whether this would affect the whole thing, and he said he was going to think about it. We seem to be working on the assumption that it will still happen, and I hope it does, but obviously if his financial situation can't support it he has to consider that. Then again, he does have to live somewhere. It does kind of feel like the universe is making every effort to ensure I never make any progress in my life, though. Well that's obviously untrue. Any stagnancy in my life is my fault and mine alone.