I was recently asked to recommend a tablet. I thought my reply might be generally useful, so below is a lightly edited version of what I wrote.
The machine I’d recommend depends. It depends mostly on how much you want to pay and what it might used for. The good news is that, by and large, you get what you pay for. (Corollary: don’t get any of the really cheap ones. Argos, for example, do a really cheap one. Avoid it.)
This weeks theme is “Autumn 2013” and while I was out on a quick walk this afternoon I spotted this pile of leaves. Nothing says “autumn” like leaves falling from trees and their colours.
I’ve been using iOS 7 for a while now — for a couple of months on my iPad and about half that on my iPhone — so thought it was worth a quick summary of my experience. I’m certainly not going into the depth that Arstechnica have; I’ll do it all in a few bullet points.
The good
The bad
This weeks PhotoFriday challenge is “Frozen” and, I suppose, technically this snow might not actually be frozen. But snow is something you think of when you the word frozen comes up so I think it’s a valid interpretation of the theme! It was taken (in July!) near Lake Tahoe.
This post is a rant. I can offer no solutions, no help. Some sympathy perhaps but that’s not terribly useful.
The story: we’re moving house. So we need to deal with lawyers and mortgage companies. For sound reasons, they both need to prove that we’re not laundering money.
Frankly, until I had to do a number of anti-money laundering courses at work I would have had no idea how to launder money. I’d be stuck like the characters in Office Space looking up the definition in a dictionary. Or, more to the point, looking it up online.
I’m sure that this is exactly what the PhotoFriday people had in mind when they created the challenge, “Mobile Phone Photo.”
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Structures.” I’m entry 81.
There have been a few blogs recently about people finding their true vocation and discovering that it’s not developing software. This is not a “me too” post. I do still develop software for a living and I don’t intend becoming a writer or anything else any time soon. But like most people (I assume) my career has taken turns that I never would have imagined when I started out.
In fact when I was at school I took quite some time trying very hard not to be a software developer for a living. I took geography rather than the rather more obvious (if you know me) chemistry because I wanted to be a pilot. I was so determined to keep programming computers as a hobby that I almost took woodwork instead of computer studies when I was fourteen.
Yet another long gap between entries to PhotoFriday, but when I saw that the theme was “Structures” I immediately thought about, first, the Sagrada Família. But I didn’t have any pictures of the outside that I liked so second thought was the Oslo Opera House. I think this picture of the inside shows the structures better than any image of the outside.
Since I wrote about iTunes Match nearly eighteen months ago I thought it was worth revisiting and seeing how things have changed in that time.
Oddly, the short answer is “not very much.”
The problems that I identified last year are still very much present. Indeed there are some new examples. This is my favourite: when listening to “Man Machine” by Kraftwerk, iTunes Match seems to have decided that track four, which should be “The Model,” is really “Wouldn’t it be nice” by the Beach Boys. I don’t even own a copy of “Wouldn’t it be nice.”
I went to the north of Spain twice in the early nineties and visited Barcelona for a day each time. I only remember bits and pieces — walking down the Ramblas and how weird the Gaudi cathedral was — and can’t find any pictures from either trip, so it made sense to make it the first city break of 2013 and the first time we’ve done something like this since the birth of Junior1