After many years as a dedicated user of Thunderbird as a mail and news client, along with the Lightning add-on for calendar and tasks, my list of gripes suddenly reached breaking point this week. I won’t go through them all, but here’s a small selection:
Via one of Tim Bray’s tab sweeps, which are always good for picking up something interesting you might have missed, I happened to click through to an article telling me all about how to publish things. The first point was “Design for Reading”, but as you will gather from the screenshot of what I saw, it didn’t seem like a worthwhile use of my time to go any further.
Update: A fine bit of investigation and a workaround.
Whoops. That’s what happens when an ‘indestructible’ AMOLED screen meets a stone driveway. To be fair, it must have to meet it at just the wrong angle, because I’ve dropped it zillions of times before without so much as a scratch. Impressively, despite the cracks covering the entire screen, and one point where there was an actual hole going right through it, the touch screen and display still worked perfectly. What about fixing it though?
As defined by Douglas Adams and John Lloyd in The Meaning of Liff, to aboyne is to beat an expert at a game of skill by playing so appallingly that none of his clever tactics or strategies are of any use to him.
I read that definition this morning and was immediately reminded of the chess game reproduced below. Now, I’m no chess master at the best of times, and particularly not when playing 3 minute blitz. I keep doing that though, which is quite silly because it seems to me you should only play at that speed (if at all) when you’re already extremely good. Playing like that when you’re not good makes you worse. The point being that I’m not making any excuses for my appalling play, triumphant thought it turned out to be. I just thought it was a funny game, worth preserving:
Time to try and catch up with the “what books I’ve been reading” thing. Here’s a partial list since last time. I’ll let the rest roll over into the next one, and I’ll be more brief than ever about these…
I made a shelf today, which I have decided is going to be called the Royal Wedding Commemorative Shelf. I’m going to paint that on the bottom, perhaps with an appropriately tacky picture if I’m feeling artistic at the time – just to give some future DIY freak a “WTF?” moment when they inevitably rip it out.
Actually, to be honest, they’ll be saying that anyway on account of it not being cut even remotely straight due to me blasting through a sheet of plywood a metre in one direction and half a metre in another with a jigsaw, by hand, without even marking a line. I might mask the curvy edges with filler, or I might not bother.
TL;DR – Take your DRM and sling your hook
It all started when I finished reading one book and got a few pages into another I didn’t really want to read. It occurred to me that it must be about time for another Ian M. Banks book to be out (it’s been this long since I read the last), and perhaps even one of his Culture novels. Sure enough, it turned out that that Surface Detail came out last year.
One snag – after years of stubborn nay-saying, I’ve finally come to the conclusion that ebooks are good thing, for various reasons which I’ll save for another day. This shouldn’t have been a snag, of course, it should have made it easy – instead of an hour’s round trip to the bookshop, complete with the costs of petrol and parking and the need to mingle with shoppers, I could have had it there and then. Or, relatively painlessly if I was prepared to wait for the postman.
Not particularly topical or relevant to anything, but Longrider just reminded me about it by complaining about people not addressing letters properly.
If you don’t know the address, the answer is simple – draw a map:
Obviously this worked, otherwise I wouldn’t ever have seen it. It was eight years ago, but I still suspect the perpetrator of this crime against postal workers is going to pop up in the comments and identify himself. Let’s see…
Part of me wishes I’d never started doing this. It should be easy to write a couple of sentences about every book you read, but for some reason it seems to be really hard and I end up leaving it for months before I actually finish it, by which time there’s another list waiting to be written.
On the other hand, another part of me wishes I’d started doing it when I started reading. If nothing else, it’s really nice to be able to look back for a reminder when you forget what a particular book was, so I’m going to keep doing it. Here’s the latest batch (or at least, it was the latest in August):
It’s no secret that I like to get simultaneously annoyed and amused by the ridiculous instructions and warnings that suddenly seem to be necessary on the packaging of even the most innocuous of products. It’s a hobby I normally try to keep to myself, except when things are getting particularly out of hand. But not today.
Exhibit A – it’s the packaging for a pair of scissors, or rather a pair of pairs. I have no idea when scissors started coming in packs of two. I suspect the factory misunderstood the order – number of items per packet: pair.
The warning not to cut up raw meat and vegetables with the same pair caught my attention. Who needs a warning like that? Maybe the kind of person that prepares up their meat and veg with scissors. Maybe this is just part of the War On Knives, which I understand are due to be phased out except for licensed professional chefs. All amateur food preparation will soon be done with scissors, and later (when scissors are also banned) with wooden spoons.
Somewhat horrifying is the complete lack of warning not to run with scissors, but I don’t doubt this will be added to the next batch.
My favourite bit though is the instructions on how to open the packet – yes, even that is apparently too complicated and dangerous for the average ‘consumer’ these days. So how do you get your scissors out of the packet? With scissors, of course.
P.S. As the photo reveals, I stabbed the packaging with a knife instead. It would have been easier with scissors (if they weren’t inside the packet) but nowhere near as satisfying.