The new Kindle is with me

I’ve had it for a couple of weeks now, and used it for a variety of things.

The main one was a semi-duvet day I had last Sunday almost entirely unrelated to the stag-do in the pub the night before. Feeling slightly under the weather and unable to face up to some of the more physical demands facing me, I spent the day on the sofa in my dressing-gown with an e-book.

The e-ink the Kindle uses is very weird. The resolution and the black and white display reminds me of our family Atari’s hi-res black and white monitor from the mid-90s. The thing is very very light, pretty simple to use, very easy to read.

On Sunday, I read pretty much all of Monstrous Regiment. And I coped. It felt a bit weird. Terry Pratchett’s lovely use of footnotes didn’t work very well – they were displayed as end notes and required you to click on them to read them, which destroyed the flow a bit in a way you don’t have when it’s just a case of flicking your eye to the bottom of the page.

I also got to play a little with some of the other options, including subscribing to Informed Traveller Magazine (and then rapidly unsubscribing because the content was pretty lousy) and also buying an e-copy of The Independent as a one off just to see what it was like. It was quite good for comment, but had almost no use at all.

I think it’s going to be an excellent solution to the problem of taking enough books on holiday. Will they let me use it on a plane?

It won’t entirely replace actual books as half of the titles I’ve bought are things I know other members of my family will want to read that I’ve bought on paper.

I was half-wondering to what extent it would be possible to use it for committees or for paperless working at conferences. I don’t think this is going to fly terribly well, having had a brief try this afternoon at an informal meeting. Lots of people were intrigued by the device and wanted a bit of a play. But it wasn’t great for working with. You can’t juggle two documents at once (eg an agenda and the paper you are working with.) It completely reworks pagination, which means finding the same reference as someone else is tricky. And it seemed not to work at all well with MS Word tables, which feature rather a lot in committee papers.

But it’s absolutely fine for leisure reading.

Latest skirmish in war of central heating

Sep26

Bah. On any given day, there’s only about a 50% chance the central heating in our house works.

As the central heating season faded out in April and May this year, we had a heating zone control valve stick. Since the valve didn’t send a “complete” signal to the controller, this pretty much overode all of the controls. The thermostat and the timer just didn’t work. The heating was either on or off. So for the last few weeks we just used the isolating switch on the boiler when we wanted a bit of heat boost. And we got used to the idea that the heating wasn’t automatic.

I let it fester a bit over the summer unfixed. We turned the gas boiler off entirely and relied on the immersion heater and the solar panel for hot water over the summer. I eventually tidied my office enough for an engineer to get to the airing cupboard, and phoned up the insurance company.

Phoning the insurance company is always a pain, but the engineers they send usually know what they’re doing. They located the central heating pump – it’s unhelpfully under the floor – replaced it, replaced the zone control valve, fine tuned the boiler, and it all seemed to be working just fine when they left.

But now, a few weeks later, and there’s another fault. The boiler is definitely working, and it seems to be heating the hot water just fine. The HZCV doesn’t seem to be stuck. The pump is running, and you can hear water swilling around the radiators. But barely any of them are getting warm. Gah!

Techi nerdgasm II: portholes

Sep21

My colleagues believe that the most animated I’ve been all week was when explaining to them what the portholes in the walls are for.

Basically, when theatres and arenas used to be built, they tried to bury enough cabling in the walls to satisfy all the end users. In older theatres this is much more of a problem since the technical parts of stagecraft have changed so much in the last years. In more recent buildings like this – and in particular versatile multi-use buildings which take on a lot of touring shows using their own equipment, it simply isn’t possible to predict what sort of cabling might be necessary and bury it all in the walls at construction for a building that will hopefully have a life of 30-50 years.

So instead they make it as easy as possible for incoming technical teams to recable the building the best they can, by making sure there are these portholes running through the building. There are also suitable cable supports between the portholes to hold the weight of a ton of multicore after it’s brought in.

Techie nerdgasm in the Liverpool Arena

Sep19

So, I’m here in Liverpool in a largely behind-the-scenes role. I am benefitting from a Party Staff pass, which lets me get into all sorts of interesting places.

The LDV office is directly behind the stage, so one of the main routes in is right behind the giant screen. Which looks like this:

Today we held a fringe in a large room in the Arena, and so I got there early to to a bit of setup. They had a giant screen, so I could wangle my way into the tech room at the back so we could choose what we showed – a live screen of our website, in the end.

And oh my, the room is techie heaven. Part of me is still thrilled by my teenage years spent working both as an actor at school and a stage techie at sixth form college, and I am really stage struck when it comes to the technicalities of theatre. (NB it’s one of many really good reasons to see the Nottingham Playhouse panto every year – they cram the panto with some really interesting coups de théâtre.)

So, the most exciting thing about the room by far is the fact that the entire set of 500 fixed seats are on a giant turntable. The same is true of Hall 1C.

So depending on how they want it set up you can either have one large hall with two smaller halls nearby, or you can rotate the two giant drums and add 1,000 seats to the large hall.

This explains why there are emergency exits apparently 4m high in the air. When the drum is rotated, the gap lines up with the stairs.

Presumably it also makes the site an ideal location for recording “This is your life!”

Up in the tech room, there was lots to look at. The sound boards in professional theatre seem to changed so much since I last set up a sound board, I didn’t even recognise it as a sound board. So much for my geek points 😦

The full array of technical stuff was probably more than I can cope with, so I was very happy to leave it in the capable hands of the tech team who come with the venue.

We tried for a few minutes to work out whether it was possible to get a live feed out of the sound board into my Zoom H2 – but in the short while available before the event kicked off, it proved not possible, so we resorted to the usual of balancing the recorder on seat towards the rear of the room and then amplifying afterwards. (This has the unfortunate side effect of making the applause painful to listen to)

Imagine my surprise and delight when at the end of the fringe, one of the tech guys came down the steps and said, “we made a CD for you of the sound.” That is really helpful.

Unfortunately, none of the LDVers has both a laptop with a CD player, and something to rip the audio to MP3, so it will have to wait until I get home before I can do anything with it. But hopefully we’ll be able to replace the rough and ready version we made at conference with a more professional sound in the fullness of time.

The podcast of the fringe meeting is here.

Daily tweet posts should be back

Sep16

I have finally figured out what was stopping me upgrading the twitter plugin in on my blog. What follows will be incomprehensible unless you vaguely know about computers like me.

Twitter changed their authentication system to OAuth. Twitter Tools plugin upgraded, but needed PHP5 to work. Dataflame used PHP4 on my blog.

I asked Dataflame to upgrade me. They did.

Twitter tools plugin still didn’t work.

Check cPanel – definitely says that I now have a version of PHP > 5.

Plugin still not working.

Today I re-read the help email I got from Twitter Tools “your file is still being executed under PHP4”.

Logged in with cPanel. Played with PHP configuration tool. Found an option to say “which version of PHP should files be executed under.” Choices are PHP4, PHP5, Server Default. Change to PHP5.

All is now hunky dory. Apparently the plugin can now run.

Now this place should be fairly automatically be updated every day, even when I don’t blog. Thanks for your patience.

Why, yes, I am prevaricating. Thanks for asking!

Weird direct mail

Sep16

Two odd bits of target mail from charities and estate agents this week.

The first was from estate agent Harts (who used to have the excellent marketing slogan: “Harts is where your home is”). It’s a postcard. The picture on the front is the kitchen of of one of my neighbours. They appear to have mailed it to everyone in my street. We’ve just let one house like yours, we can let yours too, is the message.

The second is from British Red Cross. It’s a bumper thick envelope, and can’t have been cheap to mail. It’s unaddressed. It contains two blank notelet cards with flowers on, and a matching bookmark. Added to that is a letter asking for money, and a reply envelope that asks you to cross out the freepost line if you can afford a stamp. The letter says that a pen is included, but it wasn’t in mine.

No sign of whether it’s targetted, but I can’t say I’m a big user of notelets, let alone flowery ones. And it does seem a little passive-aggressive – “Well – you have the notelets now, you might as well make a donation!” And it must cost a fortune! Stephen Tall (who should know) tells us that charities have to invest to raise money, but still…

Charlotte Gore’s train experience

Aug29

Really loved Charlotte Gore’s blog post about taking the California Zephyr, a truly epic four-day train journey the entire length of the USA, from New York to San Francisco

[W]aking up in Denver and then making our way through the most literally breathtaking landscape I’ve ever seen – first the Colorado Rockies then watching the sun go down on the monumentally epic mountains in Utah… I don’t know how I’m going to ever be content with Yorkshire now. Damn. The day after the train goes through the Sierra Nevada mountains and it’s goo goo time, your brain is gone. That’s it.

America… it turns out… is a truly beautiful country. The magnificence of the scenery is then added to by the sheer audacity, courage and engineering-fu to build a train line all the way through it, not to mention everything else they’ve done to this continent.

The only halfway epic rail journeys I’ve done have been sleeper trains across Europe – from Magdeburg to Paris when I switched countries half way through my degree year abroad; and more recently I travelled to Munich by sleeper. On the return leg of that journey, I had the brain-wrenching experience of trying to translate from German to French whilst half asleep at 3am. ((“‘Travailler’, das heisst reisen, oder? / Nein, ‘travailler’ das heisst arbeiten”)) I had been rather surprised that in the four berth sleeper car, it was me and a woman who got on two hours after me, when all the literature suggested the sleeper cars would be segregated by gender. Three hours into the night, and the German woman woke me up to tell me that her handbag had been stolen – lifted off her feet by someone who opened the door from the outside. I helped a little in the conversation between the French-speaking guard and the German woman. In fact, I had probably heard the burglary happen whilst barely asleep, as the door opening makes a noise. I had just assumed it was my co-passenger getting up for a toilet break.

So, if you ever travel by sleeper train, make sure you lock your door at night.

USA, Europe – I have occasionally been reading the website www.seat61.com and getting carried away by the ideas of some of the epic journeys you can do – in particular, the 9 day journey from London to Beijing, via Brussels, Cologne, Moscow and the Trans-Mongolian or the Trans-Siberian railway.

Just how many books would you need to occupy yourself in all that time? ((would it be safe to take one’s Amazon Kindle or would it be flaunting Western wealth and inviting robbery? Would you even be able to charge it?)) How much would it be entertaining and how much of an ordeal?

I particularly like the detail that Russian trains have a samovar in each compartment, so if you stock up with tea bags and instant soup you can provide some of your own food.

A more general problem with holidays and travel

I’m skint and fairly time poor. As a result of making a few ferry journeys, investing a wee bit of an inheritance in HPB, and joining the Camping and Caravanning club, ((I want to build a camping pod in the garden to replace the current battered shed)) every week brings more and more interesting glossy holiday brochures through the letter box.

There are all these wonderful offers and interesting places to visit, and there’s little prospect of me being able to do any more than a fraction of them. Meh.

What have I been cooking this week?

Aug29

Well. After a few weeks of cooking nothing at all and eating rubbish, this week I’ve cooked loads – but not necessarily eaten terribly well.

For Pudding Club on Tuesday, I made celery and stilton soup, rillettes de porc, and onion and bacon fougasse.

Celery and stilton soup as per this Gordon Ramsey recipe, pretty much as writ. Ended up rather stringy, and apparently the way to avoid this is to take a potato peeler to the ridgey side of the celery sticks before you chop them up.

Twenty years ago, when my despairing parents were trying to get us to eat more vegetables, celery made its appearance for the first time in our household, finely chopped, in casseroles. We were deeply suspicious – and they wouldn’t tell us what it was. It went by the name “crinkle cut onions” for a quite a while. These days, I’m a big fan of celery, raw with cheese and grapes, with the leaves sticking out of a Bloody Mary, finely chopped in soffrito-based sauces and cooking, and of course in casseroles.

The rillettes de porc came from this recipe on Dried Basil and again was pretty much as per the recipe. Except… I used pork belly rashers rather than a single joint, as that was what was available. 500grams of pork rendered down to two ramekinsworth. Halfway through the cooking it looked scarily like all that water was never going to disappear, but all was fine by the end of the cooking. And it proved quite tricky to pour the melted fat from the baking dish to the serving dish without just getting it everywhere. This would make a fantastic dinner party starter, but a whole ramekinsworth is way too much for an individual serving, so I would have to find some way of presenting it in smaller portions if being fancy.

The bacon and onion fougasse came from this recipe, again, made pretty much as per the instructions, except that their picture of a fougasse is awful! I was really trying to make mine look a little more like these gorgeous pictures on a random Scandiwegian flickr account:

But it didn’t quite come out like that, and my version was more like the BBC Good Food version that I would have liked. It was also more than halfway to pretzel – but tasted damn fine, if I do say so myself.

So, that was Tuesday. Also this week, Kathryn’s post prompted me to make a carrot cake – I think the recipe is the same one, and can be found on the net here. Mostly per recipe, but I didn’t have the right nuts so used mixed chopped; and discovered very late in that I have run out of sultanas, so substituted candied peel, which I did have.

I think this was also my second use of my food processor’s grating attachment. I remember it as being hugely wasteful, but it got through the three carrots in the blink of an eye and did a really good job, with only a small amount of the tail end of the carrot ungrated.

http://rcm-uk.amazon.co.uk/e/cm?lt1=_blank&bc1=000000&IS2=1&bg1=FFFFFF&fc1=000000&lc1=0000FF&t=nileshomepag&o=2&p=8&l=as1&m=amazon&f=ifr&md=0M5A6TN3AXP2JHJBWT02&asins=B002BC9YGQ And rewatching 30 Rock last week sent me googling to try and find out what a “snickerdoodle” is – at one point Liz Lemon is being nice to her team and they start expecting her to bake snickerdoodles for them.

Turns out they are pretty simple but tasty biscuits. I found a recipe on Joy of Baking. By the time it came to make them, I was running low on eggs, so I halved the recipe. That still came out with well over two dozen finished biscuits, which is more than enough for us.

Chatting about 30 Rock on Tuesday was enough to finally convince P he would like to try and watch it, so a box set has been procured to take with us on honeymoon. I have no objection to watching it yet again!

Here’s a pic of the weekend’s cakes:

Technology update – Kindle ordered

Aug28

A bit of tech banter with Labour activist ((how demeaning to reduce a person to one trait. I’ve never met him or spoken to him in person, but I know he’s also a beer drinker, a cricket watcher and Scampi Fries enthusiast – and I fear that if I say anything even vaguely positive about him it will end up in a leaflet with TOP LIB DEM RECOMMENDS LABOUR VOTE all over it at the next Council elections)) reminds me to share the news that I have made one decision after my tech wavering, leaving plenty more up in the air.

So, I convinced myself that I do, in fact, need an Amazon Kindle, and have plumped for the Wifi version, which I have pre-ordered and hope to receive before Lib Dem conference.

I can’t possibly carry that many books with me on our honeymoon, and so a technological response is called for.

If I’m canny, I could even subscribe to free fortnights worth of trial magazine subs and cancel them on my return.

An entirely technological response however, won’t be feasible, as I will still be buying some books. The basic compromise I have made with myself is that those books that I would normally pass around the family, that can be bought cheaply second hand, will still be bought as books. I shall need the latest secondhand paperback Evanovichs and Graftons and Reichs. ((I still wouldn’t spring for the hardback prices)) And I’ll always have a quick look at prices across multiple formats to check there aren’t cheaper alternatives.

(commercial break:)

So in preparing for my new arrival, I have already bought a few books to put on the Kindle. I thought I would go for stuff I know I like, because I can probably get absorbed into that quickly enough to get over the weirdness of a new format.

The four titles I’ve paid for for my Kindle are:

Monstrous Regiment – a Pratchett. Haven’t read any pterry for ages, so now is as good a time as any to catch up.

Girl with a Dragon Tatoo – Stieg Larsson, I think I remember reading somewhere, has made a massive milestone in terms of ebook sales, so I thought I would help out.

Pride and Prejudice and Zombies – well, why not?
4-hour Work Week – I keep buying self help titles and then ignoring them. I read Getting Things Done
when we were on holiday, so why not this too?

In addition to paid-for titles, there is a wealth of free, classic texts available for Kindle, including anything available on Gutenberg. So the following have also made their way onto my Kindle, when it finally arrives:

Adventures of Sherlock Homes
Treasure Island
Homer’s Iliad
Heart of Darkness
The Detective Stories of Charles Dickens
Chocolate and Cocoa Recipes
Dracula’s Guest
Life on the Mississippi
The Captain’s Toll-Gate
Welsh Fairy Tales
The French Revolution (Thomas Carlyle)
A Rogue’s Life (Wilkie Collins)
Prisona of Zender
Beasts and Superbeasts (Saki)
When William Came (Saki)
The Toys of Peace (Saki)

Unresolved tech decisions

Still no decision made about new laptop – and I still need it before Conference in late September.

I have totally ruled out an iPad. Nice, but too expensive.

And still no decision about a new phone. Orange have confirmed that I am now entitled to a free upgrade, although it would be another few months before I could freely leave for another network.

I think I have decided to go for an Android phone not an iPhone as the latest iPhone is so expensive and not readily available.

I’m seriously considering changing networks – only really for better reception in the vicinity of Nottingham city centre, and London. It’s all but impossible to connect to the internet on 3G anywhere in the city centre and anywhere in London. There’s a point on the Mansfield Road coming home from town, usually around the General Cemetary, when all the text messages I should have had during the afternoon suddenly arrive at once, as I change cell towers. When I came home from London after the week singing, all the photos I’d been trying to send to the internet for a week just magically uploaded in a few minutes, when it wasn’t possible to send them at all before.

Having looked closely at tariffs, it doesn’t appear any other company can beat what I currently have on Orange, particularly now they are rewarding my decadesworth of monthly payments, so the only question is – is it worth the hassle of changing networks for the unknown carrot of better 3G reception on another operator? I can’t know whether I will get better reception until I’ve already committed to a two year contract with someone else!

Two web cartoons

Aug23

Firstly Unshelved – they’re currently actively recruiting new followers.

The comic is a mix of daily library based antics, weekly book recommendations that are half just interesting, and half intended to be printed out and displayed in libraries.

It reminds me of my time working in a library as a teenager. I still don’t quite understand how, but somehow, while I was doing four A Levels, I still found time to work in a library every other Saturday and make full use of my borrowing privileges. How did I have time for so much reading as well as the school work?

The other cartoon is Adam and Andy, a very sweet innocent cartoon about two gay guys in a long term relationship.

A scary sweet and innocent cartoon that very often seems to be spying on us.

Take this. And this.

It’s almost like they know about my aversion to cleaning and all the cake wrappers in the footwell of the passenger seat of my car.

Niles's Blog

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