Happy Birthday Herta!

 The inventor of the Currywurst, Herta Charlotte Heuwer, 30 June 1913 - 3 july 1999...

 

Claise th' border!!!!....

Scottish border blockade: SNP threatens police checks on roads leading from England....

 

Traffic reports. Not.

Local radio presenters who hit the traffic report button then subject us to their inane babble while I'm sat in a queue of traffic waiting to figure out if I have to find an alternative route home. AAAARRRRGGGHHHHH.......

Gasgasbones strap

S.M.A.R.T. Status : failing....

Last week, when I was importing some photos into my MacBook Pro, it just locked up and after several attempts to restart it, I eventually managed to check the hard drive using the Disk Utility. Turns out the hard drive is on its last legs. The "S.M.A.R.T. Status" was showing up as "failing"!

It's just over two years since my last round of visits to my local Apple Store with the previous laptop, and today I found myself checking in to see if they had any 'walk-in' appointments free. Luckily they did, and after a short explanation of my problem and a diagnostics check, the MacBook Pro was duly whisked away for a hard drive replacement.

As 750GB hard drives are no longer listed as an option, I will be getting an "upgrade" to a beefy 1TB! I just hope it has a bit of a longer life span...

24 hours later...

"Your product is ready for pickup "

Just restored from my Time Machine backup and 673GB free (think it was about 450GB on the old drive).
All back to 'normal'...

As hard as I look...

The 'house number' style CAPTCHA puzzles are getting more difficult...

Selling 101 : Atishoo, atishoo...

If you're going to sell The Big Issue, throwing them down and saying "Fuck this, I can't be bothered anymore" is not going to do your sales figures one bit of good!

A year on...

Seems I have been a little lax in keeping my readership updated with various happenings. Life is still going on and the only real update I can give is that I have buckled and finally joined the ranks of the iOS7ners.
I took delivery of a new "iPad mini Retina" last week. I'd grown weary of waiting for apple to release a phone with a bigger screen  and in frustration I leapt aboard the mini train.
I have to say I am quite pleased with the device and am slowly getting used to the snow blindness which seems to come with the new operating system.  I have discovered that if I go into the accessibility settings I can opt for a black background, though at the moment I can endure the whiteness...

On another front I  picked  up a Sonos Play1 speaker and Air Bridge  package. Have to say the sound quality is pretty good and the convenience of being able to control the speaker from any iOS device  or Mac which is running the Sonos controller is great. Listening to a lot of streaming music at the moment, in particular Soma FM's "Groove Salad", and have added various artists to my collection as a result!
I'm using the Play 1 in the dining room currently and it manages to fill the room without a problem. I'm so impressed I may be adding another Play 1 to another room. It's not as bass heavy as the Play 3 or 5 and for a speaker the size of a coffee can it can certainly belt out the tunes!

UPDATE: Added a second Play1, in the living room, to the Sonos system.

MacBook Woes with some to's and fro's..

So after seven, or is it eight, visits to my local Apple Store with no resolution of the freezing problem I was experiencing on my MacBook, I had ended up with virtually a new machine wrapped in a slightly worn skin.
With more RAM (up from 2 to 4 GB), a new hard drive (up from 250 GB to 500), a new Logic Board and finally a new Airport card I went away hoping that things had been sorted.
Unfortunately it was not to be.
After a few days the freezing issue crept back in and got to the point were it was freezing mid boot as well as doing simple tasks. I had been told to return by the very helpful guys on the Genius Bar and so today I did just that.
I expected to hear the stampede of Geniuses out the back door of the store as they spotted me arrive but no, I was greeted as usual. I sat down and explained to the allocated Genius (who I had seen before) that the problem was still there.
Enough is enough was the answer - we'll give you a new machine.

Surprise or what?

This is (was) a four and a bit year old MacBook (late 2008 model) and the Applecare had expired in December 2011, so to be informed it was being replaced was not what I'd expected.

Sure enough, after a short wait, a new MacBook Pro was brought out (13.3", 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i7, 8GB RAM, 750GB hard drive) and handed over to replace the old MacBook.

I've railed against Apple previously over software (iPhone and Mac) but I cannot do anything but praise the staff of the Apple Store - they could quite easily have sent me packing with a 'we can do no more" attitude, but having waived the costs of the repairs carried out previously, the final solution was a new MacBook Pro.

MacBook back....

Been having some issues with the late 2008 MacBook recently. It had started to freeze up at odd times since installing Lion and refusing to wake from sleep. After various attempts to figure out the issue I took it into the Apple Store for a "genius" to check.
My 2GB of RAM was pretty much useless as the "genius" pointed out using Activity Monitor - just running a couple of YouTube videos dropped the spare memory down to around 20MB.
So, installed more RAM in the hope that would sort it out.

No use, still freezing, so back to the Genius Bar. Next diagnosis was a possible faulty hard drive connector cable and a overnight test bench session to see what was occurring.
News came back the other day that the hard drive was on it's way out.
I was tempted to install a 256GB SSD if the HD was the culprit, but in the end opted for a like for like replacement as the failed HD had lasted four years and if the new one lasts as long I'll be getting something a bit more modern by then.

So, having reinstalled everything from Time Machine I appear to be back up and running...

21/12/12

The end of the world didn't happen, so I wish you all....

New for 2012

Fed up of going for a slash and finding someone has finished off your pint of Bitter & Twisted? You can now leave your pint, safe in the knowledge only a blind person will quaff your ale!

The new BeerTeeth pint glass only available from the Phurphuxake Cornershop...

Still here....

Still being a curmudgeon...

2012 ticket fiasco...

Seems a lot of folk are getting blown out/off trying to buy tickets for the 2012 London Olympics...

...yes it does look a bit like a Simpsons character...

Ice balls II...

...and the quest for that perfect lump of ice to go into the gin & tonic goes on.

•••

The Muji ice ball mould (posted a few days ago) has had varying levels of success, with different mixes of water (plain tap, filtered tap, distilled, twice boiled distilled) and methods of freezing (straight in freezer, wrapped in freezer, in cooler bag in freezer).

The speed of freezing is producing cracked ice balls but by placing the Mujis in a cooler bag, the freezing process is slowed enough to result in a solid ball which, while clear towards the outside, is still featuring the spear-like 'air bubble tracks'.

It looks like an Xmas bauble but is in one piece and definitely melts at a far slower rate than your regular ice cube.

Twice boiled distilled water

Why all the fuss? Blame it on a G&T I had in Vegas in January this year at José Andrés' "e" restaurant...

It had a crystal clear ice sphere in it, more than likely produced using one of these... Ice Ball Maker

Another new gin, chin chin...

From the makers of the world champ vodka, comes a Gin...

The Most Complicated Gin in the World...

It is a relatively unknown fact that gin is made from vodka. So, unlike other gins, our gin is truly single estate from field to bottle.

We press our organically grown cider apples, ferment them into cider, then distil into vodka then re-distil this into gin by infusing eleven carefully selected wild botanicals and our naturally pure water taken from our aquifer that runs underneath our orchards.

The result is our full bodied, sharp, yet fruity gin with tears and true provenance.

Our botanicals: Juniper, Coriander, Angelica, Liquorice, Orrice, Orange, Lemon, Hops, Elderflower and Bramley apple.

...to make the perfect gin martini and the ultimate British Gin & Tonic

For more info: Chase Distillery / Williams Gin

High Dynamic Range photos

Have been experimenting with a bit of 'pseudo' HDR tweakery on my photographs using a bit of software called HDRtist Pro (£19.99).
The results can be quite good and as well as using multiple image exposures it can also edit single images to produce the effect of an HDR image.

I'm not going to go into the details of HDR, as there is plenty of info on the web, but the image above (with a vertical slice of HDR through the centre) demonstrates how dark areas in images can be 'brought out' to varying degrees.

A free version of HDRtist is available but it doesn't allow the same scale of manipulation as the Pro version.

Ice balls...

Silicone Ice Ball mould

Bargain...

Microsoft has paid £5 Billion for Skype...


Obviously nobody told them they can download it for free from the website..