So I decided to treat myself to a decent pen for a change. A Cross Apogee rollerball (specifically with gel ink which I’m a very big fan of) …
It is a little fatter than I’m used to but it is already feeling pretty comfortable. It is a heavy pen, enhancing the feeling of quality. If you are considering getting a decent pen, the Apogee could well be a decent candidate.
I am not an audiophile – perhaps indicated by buying a QTV-2 rather than something more “serious”. I certainly did not want some sort of complicated setup that required tons of wires and another complicated remote control. So the QTV-2 looked like a fairly simple way of improving the audio on my TV without going to a great deal of effort.
So I took a chance and bought one. It’s a large box when it turns up, and unpacking it reveals the speakers themselves – packaged in a flat array designed to bolt onto the back of the TV, various accessories including a bewildering array of bolts, washers and “spacers”. I instantly thought “Uh oh! Looks complicated”, but it turns out that most of the bolts and washers are unnecessary – they’re provided to allow the speakers to be strapped to the back of a range of different TVs. So why cannot TV manufacturers come up with a standard fixing mechanism ?
After spending about 30 minutes connecting the speakers to the back of the TV – fairly easy, although I would have one of those TVs whose connectors are a little obscured by the speakers! After a brief attempt to use the the RCA connectors (unsuccessful because I could not be bothered to hunt down the TV manual!), I resorted to the headphone connector and managed to get the sound working.
For a while I was listening BBC News 24 (or whatever we are supposed to call it now), and immediately noticed that I could lower the volume and still hear the talking much more distinctly than with the TVs speakers. In addition the sound seemed to fill the room much more.
Switching to a film (2001 on Blueray), started to show the benefit of the subwoofer much greater bass; probably a touch too much, but that will be because of the sound adjustments for the TV speakers. But the overall effect was far greater detail in the sound and a greater ability to speech even when mixed in with other sound.
Overall, worth having if you are not interested in a full home cinema system. It greatly increases the clarity and quality of sound over standard TV speakers. In fact in a noisy environment such as my flat (with a high volume of traffic outside the window), it is possible to decrease the volume and yet still hear the sound from the TV clearer than before.
On the news this morning are increased figures for those killed by acting stupid with rail level crossings. Given the level of stupidity shown in some of the videos :-
It is perhaps time to concentrate more on the effect these accidents have on the train drivers and train passengers. And those who have to scrape up what is left behind after this sort of accident.
After all those who mess around on train lines and level crossings should really be taking responsibility for their own stupidity. You do not have to be too bright to realise that taking the risk of crossing a train line when the barriers are down (or when the lights are red) is taking the risk of being hit by a train. And you don’t live through being hit by a train.
I have recently heard “push” email referred to as “gold-standard” mail by someone who should have known better. I disagree, although in many senses of the word, my own mail has been setup as “push” for many years now – far longer than “push” mail has been supported! Before kicking the idea of “push mail” being the cure for all ills into the grass, lets have a little review of what email is and the difference between “push” and “pull”.
Electronic mail is the computer version of those postcards you drop into letter boxes telling everyone (including the postman) what a great time you are having on holiday. It is not particularly private and is not necessarily very fast. We have gotten used to email normally arriving quickly – within minutes or even seconds, but that is not always the case. In common with the ordinary postal service (I am excluding special services such as recorded delivery), there is not even a guarantee of delivery – it is done on a best efforts basis.
Conventionally the majority of people “pulled” their email from their ISPs email server. When you wanted to read your email, you would start an email client (or commonly these days visit a webmail page and login) and it would pull your email into your email client. When connecting to your email server over a slow connection, the process of pulling in all the email could be quite slow.
To combat this problem, a few proprietary solutions appeared which ensured that the messages were pushed down to the device (as it happens a mobile phone) so that they were always ready when you wanted to read them. Essentially it was a trick – a neat trick, but a trick none the less that made the phone appear to be much faster at reading emails than other phones relying on the “pull” method.
Of course there’s a cost to all this pushing. The phone has to wake up every so often to allow the server(s) to push any available messages, which might not take much power but given the frequency with which it happens can have a big effect on how long your battery lasts.
And do we need the immediacy of push email (or other kinds of messages) ? Personally I think it is better to read (and respond) to messages when it is convenient to us to do so. Responding when the messages become available means being constantly interrupted.
At work I have seen those who have their machines configured to popup little messages whenever they get a message. I am amazed that people can get work done with these constant interruptions. Perhaps those who insist on push email are somewhat shallow, and have little need to concentrate on a task.
My local supermarket which is part of one of those immense corporate empires, has started doing something immensely stupid. Not exceptionally inconvenient, but just one of those irritating examples where some bright spark has come up with an idea that has not been fully thought through (or even tested properly).
What they have started doing is printing in addition to your standard till receipt, a little note about some loyalty scheme. Which means you have two silly little bits of paper to collect.
Which is hardly very environmentally friendly and probably costs them a surprising amount. Just a small amount of stupidity really – a simple poster would be just as effective and far less wasteful.
However when you get to automated tills, the receipts are dispensed automatically. The printer has a mechanism by which it drops any uncollected receipts on the floor before it prints your receipt. Except when two receipts are printed you have a window of opportunity of about a second (whilst you are fumbling with bags, and change) to collect the first. And guess which one is your real receipt ?
Yes, it is the first one printed. So everyone ends up with a note about a loyalty scheme rather than their real receipt. Kind of useful if you need to return something, or prove that you’ve just bought something to the security guard on the door!
The conspiracy theorists would come up with something about collecting the receipts to discover your shopping patterns or something. Nothing of the sort. This is just corporate stupidity!