Earlier this year I was moaning about my Nexus 6. Motorola's crappy battery technology is well documented, my phone was running so hot that the glue holding the device together became unstuck! Eventually, the battery failed. It would report being fully charged, but only run for a few minutes before switching off. Recalibrating and resetting the battery statistics failed to improve the…
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You may have heard of Chuck Lorre. He's the producer behind Big Bang Theory, Two and a Half Men, and a bunch of other comedies. He also wrote the theme song for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles! This is a quick delve in to the various international versions of the theme song. UK Perhaps the weirdest thing about the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles to me is that they are Ninjas. When I was…
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Earlier this year, I received SMS Spam from Paddy Power. I went into full-on Taken mode! I have a very particular set of skills, skills I have acquired over a very long career. Skills that make me a nightmare for spammers like them ☺ It culminated with barrage of complaints and an interview on BBC Radio 4. A few months on, it's time to see what my complaining has achieved. First up, a p…
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What happens if you search the web for the Unicode character "☺"? On the one hand, it's a symbol just like the letter A or the punctuation mark "!" - on the other, it contains semantic meaning. A smiling, happy face. I decided to look at a few popular search engines to see what they'd return. First up, a surprisingly poor entry from Google. The site at the top by Tim Whitlock is fine - but i…
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See this update for a better way to do this. Being mostly notes to myself and following on from my post on Quadrophonic files. I have: A DTS album stored as a .WAV A .cue file with chapter markings I want: The single large file to be split into individual chapters with one file per chapter. Each file to be multitrack (that is, to stay in surround sound) It turns out,…
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After three years of driving a nifty little hybrid, it's time for my company car to be replaced. Of course, being a hippy, it's only right that I choose an electric vehicle (EV). Why? Cost, obviously. I've been obsessively tracking my fuel consumption using the Fuelly app. If I'm lucky, I get around 60MPG (UK) - given my mileage, the yearly cost is around £1,350. That means that my average …
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I'm currently test-driving a BMW's all-electric i3 REX. One of the options the demonstrator model has is a web browser! Yes, for just £95 per year, you can get a slow and painful browsing experience IN YOUR CAR! (Only to be used when fully stopped - or in autonomous drive mode.) Here's a quick run-down of its features. HTML5 A fairly miserable score of 268 out of 555 points on …
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I love my MS 4000 keyboard. it's one of the best pieces of hardware developed by Redmond. It has some drawbacks, sure, no USB ports, weird function keys, no backlight - but the real problem with it is its heft. It's a chunky-monkey that's really only suitable for leaving in a fixed location. It's far to big and bulky for a laptop bag - and life's too short to type on a non-ergonomic keyboard. …
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As much as I love my MacBook, 2 USB ports just isn't enough! Between phone charging, memory sticks and a keyboard and mouse, I'm sick of swapping cables in and out of ports. I wanted a USB hub which didn't have a trailing wire (one more thing to get tangled or lost) and would fit neatly onto a laptop. Enter the Sabrent 4-Port USB 2.0 Rotatable Hub a £6 hub available on Amazon. It's a tiny hub …
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Twitter have just released Periscope for Android. I'll do a full review of it later (tl;dr it's Qik with worse resolution) - but for now, I want to focus on the sign up process. You can only sign in with Twitter. That's fine, it's a Twitter product. So I pressed the sign-in button and this is the screen I saw. Is that the Twitter mobile website embedded into the app or is it a phishing…
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This is a quick review of the ZeleSouris Vertical Mouse and a guide to setting it up on Linux. Four years ago, I got the latest Evoluent Vertical Mouse. It's a great device, but it's starting to show its age a bit. So, time for a new model. I'm doing a lot of travelling, so a wireless mouse is a must. Sadly, the Evoluent Wireless Mouse is £75. As good as their mice are, I wanted something …
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I actively resent having a Google+ account. It's a bloated desert of half-finished ideas. Even the Google employees I know seem to have stopped using it. It's a necessary evil when dealing with Google products, sadly. I haven't used it in months and my profile tells people not to contact me there. That doesn't stop all manner of spammers from adding me to their "circles" - which, in turn,…
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