2013 Reading Challenge

Completing Antony Beevor’s The Second World War yesterday evening at about 9.30 means that:

  1. I clearly had a wild New Year’s Eve
  2. I just barely succeeded in my 2013 Reading Challenge to finish 40 books this year.

At 783 pages it was a heck of a way to end, but I’ll save my thoughts on that book in particular for another post.

So, what have I learnt from this?

Reading this many books is surprisingly hard

As evident from only hitting the magic number 40 on the last day, it was a close-run thing. Things never fell too far behind schedule, but I did often struggle to find time to read around the other things in my life. However I managed to resist the temptation to give up, or the almost equally strong temptation to pad my number by reading lots of short books. I certainly benefited from having a few long distance flights, as well as…

Audiobooks

This is something I discovered a while ago, but audiobooks can be brilliant. Once again I did a lot of walking throughout the year, whether with the dog, into town, or just random jaunts to clear my head. Then there’s the large amount of travelling mentioned above: whilst being sat on a plane is an ideal time to read a real book or ebook, there’s all the walking around airports and long waits standing in queues associated with it too (especially you, US immigration). I’ve never understood those people who seem able to walk around with a book in front of their face (and heaven forbid trying to do that and keep the dog under control at the same time!) So audiobooks are a great way to make better use of that time.

With these I mainly caught up on some sci-fi classics, and am currently working my way through A Song of Ice and Fire (which also deserves its own post in the future).

The Kindle Paperwhite is great

My old 3rd generation Kindle finally gave up the ghost mid-way through this year. Actually it was still working, but the battery was clearly knackered and it would never seem to be charged when I wanted it. With the above mentioned travelling in mind, I decided to splash out on a new Paperwhite model.

Whilst I loved my old Kindle too, the Paperwhite is just nicer. The screen is better, the faster refresh is very noticeable, and I actually find the touch screen keyboard easier to use than the physical one. Plus losing the physical keyboard means it fits better in my pocket, and the light comes in handy for reading in the dark. Overall there’s nothing really revolutionary, but it all adds up to a very pleasant and convenient reading experience.

It was totally worthwhile

I’m really glad I decided to do this challenge. It meant I got round to experiencing some great books, some of which I’d wanted to read for a long time. Goodreads gave me just enough motivation, without nagging me and making it seem like a chore. And in what was often a very turbulent year for me personally, it was always nice to have reading, and with an overall goal in mind, to fall back on.

Obviously I’ll be doing it again in 2014. I’m raising my goal to 45, which is hopefully not too ambitious. We’ll see in a year!

 

Here’s the full list of what I read.

Dreams

I’m visiting my parents for the Christmas holidays, and am certain that I have stranger dreams whilst here. Normally my dreams are completely unmemorable, but from the past two nights:

  • Controlling Turk from Scrubs in a very violent (and quite glitchy) computer game. At the end of the level I progressed to the next, where my character suddenly morphed into Ned Flanders.
  • Buying a blinged up robotic pony for one of my colleagues. Then the tech team had a Strictly-style competition to see who could program it with the best dance.

Perhaps it’s the cheese…

Review: The Professor and the Madman

The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary by Simon Winchester

The core of the book is the fascinating human story of Dr W.C. Minor, and how he made incalculable contributions to the first Oxford English Dictionary from his rather unusual dwelling: Broadmoor lunatic asylum. However the book also covers the wider history of dictionaries, and the OED in particular. All this is very well told by Winchester.

★★★★★ 5/5 stars

Review: Dear Undercover Economist

Dear Undercover Economist: Priceless Advice on Money, Work, Sex, Kids, and Life’s Other Challenges by Tim Harford.

Disappointing. I’m a fan of Tim Harford, having enjoyed the original Undercover Economist and Adapt, as well as being a regular “More or Less” listener. This format didn’t really seem to work though. The replies are too short to cover the economic concepts properly. Worse, the concepts often seem to have been shoehorned in. I realise that’s partly for humorous effect, but to be honest I found it to wear thin rather quickly.

There are a few genuinely funny and insightful replies. However I would recommend the original Undercover Economist book as far more informative.

★★☆☆☆ 2/5 stars

JavaScript perversities

Just looking at Douglas Crockford’s “JavaScript: The Good Parts” once again. One of the definitely Not Good parts is the NaN value, supposedly standing for “Not a Number”.

Given that, what would you expect from typeof NaN? Probably not 'number'.

Even better:
NaN === NaN gives false
NaN !== NaN gives true
NaN is not equal to itself!

And best of all, for some reason NaN isn’t a constant, but a global variable. So if you want to change it to something else (e.g. NaN = 'fishcake') you can. Anyone who does should probably be shot, but the fact that it can be done at all is baffling.

My favourite Android apps

Thought I’d write a quick blog on some of the Android apps I’ve found most useful. I haven’t included any of the built-in apps here – obviously Gmail, Google Calendar, Maps etc. are great but you don’t really need me to tell you that! Also I’ve not included any games, maybe will do another post for them later.
I’m using a Samsung Galaxy S II with Ice Cream Sandwich, but all these apps should work perfectly well on most phones. Most are free, a few are paid but I consider them all excellent value.
  • aTimer – A simple concept (multiple simultaneous countdown timers) fantastically executed. The interface design is both beautiful and easy to use, and it comes in really handy for cooking.
  • BeyondPod – I’d experimented with podcasts on my PC a bit in the past but never really got into them, probably due to the annoyances of iTunes. I’d fire it up occasionally, but most of the time just wanted to avoid it, so hardly kept up with those I did try.
    It was quite a while after getting my first smartphone that I thought “hmmm… this could be used for podcasts”. (It was possibly the BBC’s excellent “In Our Time” that finally got me into it.) As it turned out, it became basically the killer app for my phone, and BeyondPod is the slickest one I’ve tried by far. Keeping up with podcasts is so easy, variable playback speed and support for audiobooks just seal the deal.
  • Catch That Bus – Just an incredibly useful app for finding live UK bus times. Good use of maps, plus the ability to set stops as favourites and even create shortcuts for them on the homescreen is handy.
  • GTasks – Task list with the crucial ingredient: seamless integration with Google Tasks. Also supports multiple lists, and has some nice looking widgets.
  • Minimalistic Text – A widget that does what it says on the tin. Simple but endlessly customisable text widgets for time/date, battery, weather and other things. Particularly great combined with Tasker (see below) as it can use variables set by that, and with Widget Locker.
  • Pomodroido – A bit niche, but this is a simple and brilliant timer for the Pomodoro Technique (http://www.pomodorotechnique.com/)
  • Screen Filter – For when the minimum screen brightness is still too bright, this just lets you dim the screen even more. Saves burning your eyes at night.
  • Spotify (beta) – There was no way Spotify was going to be on the list originally. The previous version of their app a buggy piece of crap, arguably the worst app I’d tried on Android – especially so as I was paying a monthly fee for Spotify Premium largely for the ability to use it on mobile. Confusing interface, constant crashes, and an even more annoying bug – it would sometimes start playing tracks completely unprompted!
    But the new beta version (not in the market yet, you have to get it from their website, linked above) is an immense improvement. Hasn’t crashed once on me yet, plus the interface is beautiful and fits right in with Ice Cream Sandwich. Also the options for higher quality streaming are nice. There are some features missing (main one for me is last.fm scrobbling), but these are minor and promised to be coming soon.
  • Tasker – If you haven’t come across Tasker, it’s an amazingly powerful app for automating your phone. For example if I’m at home (connected to home wi-fi) and it’s late at night, Tasker will switch my phone to silent mode and dim the screen (using Screen Filter). When I leave the house it automatically switches off wi-fi, until I turn it on again. The only issue I have, is that I’m not using it to anywhere near its full potential. There’s a subreddit with some more great examples.
  • Twitter – Some people swear by alternative Twitter clients, and personally I love Tweetdeck on the PC. However the official Android app works great for me, and looks nice too.
  • Unified Remote (free, full) – It’s a remote control for your PC that works over a wifi connection. Or more accurately it’s several remotes, covering a wide variety of programs as well as basic mouse and keyboard control. The VLC remote is my personal favourite. The whole package is nicely done, and surprisingly easy to set up.
  • Widget Locker – By far the app I use the most, because it entirely replaces the lockscreen. And it doesn’t even need root. As the name suggests you can add widgets (looks great with Minimalistic Text), but you can also choose different unlocking styles. One fantastic feature is that some styles allow you multiple unlock options, for example mine is set up so that swiping right unlocks normally, but swiping left jumps straight to the camera. I think this is now a standard feature in Android 4, but Widget Locker meant I could get it beforehand and it’s more customizable.
  • Winamp – It took a while to find a music player on Android that I was really happy with, and Winamp was it. It hasn’t seen many updates recently, and it seems the competition has greatly improved since, but it still does everything I want, and does it excellently. Plus if you use Winamp on the desktop like I do – wireless syncing!
  • Yaaic – IRC client, which often comes in handy for work. Nothing particularly fancy, but does it well.

Google Glass

Oh wow, so I haven’t blogged here in a long time. But this annoyed me and was too lengthy for twitter, so here we go…

Saw an intriguing tweet from Google’s corporate account earlier:

Project Glass: building tech to help you explore your world & put you back in the moment. We’d love your feedback: g.co/projectglass

No context about what it actually was (sigh 1), but sounded interesting and I guessed it would be some kind of augmented reality thing based on recent news stories so clicked through on my phone. Was taken through to a Google+ profile page (sigh 2), which read:

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

We started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment.

Follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too.

Which again, told me basically nothing about the project (sigh 3). Clicked on the “Posts” link to see if that had more useful information. “Please sign in to Google+”. (Sigh 4)

Signed into Google+. Immediately taken back not to the Google Glass page, but to my home feed (sigh 5) populated by the few people I know who are still actually using Google+. There was however a helpful banner at the top of the page telling me I could download the Google+ app for Android. Which I already have (sigh 6), and which it should have opened in to start with to save the signing-in hassle.

So jumped back to Twitter, and clicked the link once again to get back where I was. Clicked on “Posts” and lo-and-behold, was able to read a single post:

We think technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t.

A group of us from Google[x] started Project Glass to build this kind of technology, one that helps you explore and share your world, putting you back in the moment. We’re sharing this information now because we want to start a conversation and learn from your valuable input. So we took a few design photos to show what this technology could look like and created a video to demonstrate what it might enable you to do.

Please follow along as we share some of our ideas and stories. We’d love to hear yours, too. What would you like to see from Project Glass?

Again, basically information free. (Sigh 7). Still clicked on the video, since Google are apparently no longer capable of explaining things with text, only with cutesy videos. And boy was this cutesy and hipstery. (Sigh 8).

But anyway, my point is: this is definitely something I’m interested in. I wanted to learn more about it. So why were so many roadblocks in my way? They even say it themselves: “technology should work for you—to be there when you need it and get out of your way when you don’t”, which is basically the exact opposite of my experience.

I do love Google, many of their tools are incredibly useful and they are still kings of search. But in my opinion they would be far better off fixing annoyances and doing a better job of explaining/marketing their existing products than constantly churning out new things. With an experience like this, there’s no way I’d want them in my eyes all day long.

Reddit – Doing it right

Over the past few weeks I’ve been spending more and more time at reddit.com. It’s a site I’d known about for a long time, but only through occasional links via it. I never had it in my favourites or made a habit of checking. Now I’ve delved a little deeper, and found it’s a remarkably nice community (well, actually a collection of separate communities, which is part of the attraction).

Things I really like:

  • The huge choice of sub-reddits, and how you can subscribe/unsubscribe to them for the front page
  • A remarkable self-policing community
  • A clean, simple interface
  • I switched off AdBlock Plus for reddit today, as I’d heard their ads were fairly unobtrusive and I want to support them. First thing I see? “Reddit would like to use this ad space to say: Thanks for not using AdBlock!” with a thumbs up from their cute alien logo. Clever both technically and psychologically, it raised a smile (and prompted me to write this post) :)

Big Bang Theory

Watched an episode of The Big Bang Theory on the plane, but laughed harder at the episode description than anything else: “Sheldon atttempts to invent 3-player chess”. Because my housemate had been trying to do that just a couple of weeks earlier.

It really is the most inconsistent series. Some episodes are brilliantly funny with clever references. And some are just poor, with terrible “jokes” followed by a gale of canned laughter. Sadly this was one of the latter type.

Journey review

Just because.

Cambridge-Peterborough, Crosscountry
Fairly quiet, punctual. Nothing to complain about. Still think Cambridge station is being greedy by having 3 AMT coffee stands and should share them with less fortunate stations.

Peterborough-York, East Coast
Fast, quiet and on-time. Ridiculously huge amounts of legroom. Loads of power sockets. “Free Wi-Fi” did turn out to be free for only 15 minutes, after giving away all your personal details, and be slower than just using the intermittent 3G. But on the whole A++ would ride again.

York-Blackburn, Northern Rail
Absolutely rammed, especially after Leeds.

Blackburn-Darwen, Northern Rail
Late. Inexplicably swapped destinations with another Northern train arriving Blackburn at the same time, causing much confusion. Also fairly certain train was on fire. Well done Northern Rail.