I have been to this place at least a couple of times, but always to get onto the South Downs. Time I had a look at the seafront – what you can find with the industrial buildings stopping you get close! As usual, pictures speak louder than words …
Angle Groynes
(And apologies for the truly terrible pun!)
Bridge Over The Adur
Crooked Church
Just A Weed
Towering Tower
Lemmy tells it better than me :-
The UK plug (for connecting to electrical outlets) is kind of big and awkward. Dating back to 1947, it may well be one of the safest standards for electrical outlets out there, but is beginning to look a little dated. With the increased use of electrical devices, it would be nice to see some improvement to the plug to make it a little more slimline. Indeed with portable electrical devices (such as laptops) the large size of the plug has become inconvenient – when I pack my backpack for work a little fuller than normal, I sometimes find myself leaving the plug outside (peaking out of the top!).
Of course with any new plug design, there is the problem of what to do with the existing sockets in the wall – rewiring a house for a new style of plug is a little unrealistic!
As it happens, someone has come up with a new design that looks pretty good. It is a foldable plug – itself not a new concept, but this one allows operation in either folded mode, or unfolded. So it can be used in a conventional outlet, or folded up and plugged into an adapter.
Unfortunately this product isn’t available as yet, but the rumour is that it should appear towards the end of 2010 … which we’re rapidly approaching! Keep an eye on the company’s website:- MadeInMind
I have not had the opportunity to fiddle with one, but if Apple wants to send me one to review I am more than willing to do that! But I do have a few thoughts on the new Macbook Air. Both the 11″ one and the 13″ one. If you want something closer to a review (although nobody has had one long enough to review it properly) you can do worse than have a look at this article.
It is amusing to see the reactions to various articles published on the new Air from the “Apple is Satan” crowd, and the “Apple can do no wrong” crowd. Both as it happens are wrong.
If you look at the raw specifications of the Air – especially the 11″ model, you will see something that looks more or less like a netbook. Which of course it cannot be because Steve Jobs thinks netbooks are snake oil and useless at that. In fact it is a little bit better than that – the CPU is a little quicker, the graphics are a little better supported with a faster chipset, and there is a touch less storage (unless you go for the really expensive 256Gbyte model!).
So it’s just a very expensive netbook then ? Well, more or less. It fills roughly the same need – most people are not going to use one of these as their main machines, but will carry them around as ultra-portables. That is the kind of mobile computer you can take anywhere but once you are at your desk it sits in the drawer whilst you use a “proper computer”.
Sure the CPU is a little light-weight, but a couple of years ago a Core2Duo CPU was fine enough to get Real Work Done, so it’s still perfectly adequate to do a bit of light word processing on the train, throw up a presentation on a screen, do a little light web browsing during a boring meeting (ps: I never do this), and of course perfectly adequate for running kermit to connect to a Cisco router whilst balanced on top of a boring blue box.
Most of the compromises made in the specification are to get the size and weight of the laptop down to increase portability – that’s what a laptop is for after all! If you want power, go back to your desktop.
There is a fair amount of criticism around the cost of the Air being as it is very much more expensive than most netbooks. So ? Apple is hardly known for tackling the low end of the market where margins are small, so it is hardly surprising that things have not changed here. And of course this machine has a better specification than any netbook, whilst retaining the characteristic that Apple thinks is important in a netbook – portability.
Of course Apple is hardly perfect. Why must the battery and the SSD be fixed ? And why is there no possibility of swapping out the memory ? Whilst making these devices swappable may well make the laptop just a bit bigger and a bit heavier, it won’t be enough to ruin the portability, and will be a lot greener.
There is of course the usual criticism of Apple that their UK prices are over inflated compared to their US prices. To do a fair comparison, lets take a look :-
| Cheapest Air on the US Apple Store | $999 |
| Cheapest Air on the UK Apple Store | £849 |
| US price in pounds where exchange rate is according to Wolfram Alpha | £636.89 |
| Plus UK “sales tax” (VAT) at 20% (to start in January 2011) | £764.27 |
| Penalty to UK purchasers for buying Apple | £85 |
So why are we paying that extra £85 ?
We all know that laptop batteries fade over time to eventually give such a short running time to make the laptop unusable as a portable device. And of course circumstances change so you may suddenly need more than 64Gbytes of storage to get your work done on the move – or you just have to run a virtual machine because work has come up with the Ultimate Application that only runs under Windows, so you need a touch more memory.
Or heck, perhaps you just want to give your laptop a midlife upgrade to make it a bit quicker.
Apple want us all to throw away our old products and buy new ones – very capitalistic, but not very green.
And for all those pro-Apple and anti-Apple people out there who get so wound up by product announcements by Apple, please grow up and get a life! It’s a laptop; not a revolutionary change in the way that humanity exists.
Today we had a long announcement about the spending cuts the Tories are eagerly making to government services. Nobody is doubting that some spending cuts were necessary but some of the Tories greeted the announcements with a tasteless lack of compassion for those effected.
The age at which the pension age is paid increases from 65 to 66.
And the Tories cheered.
They announced time limits on “incapacity benefit” in the belief that problems stopping people from working will magically go away after a year. Yes there are undoubtedly some on incapacity benefit who could well work, but there are many more who cannot and who are now worried that their income will be cut.
And the Tories cheered.
Overall there was a massive cut in welfare support for the poorest in our society. What a surprise – the Tories want to punish the poor.
And the Tories cheered.
It is estimated that the cuts will lead to something like 490,000 job cuts … perhaps up to 8% of the total jobs in the public sector. There are a lot of people working in the public sector worried about whether they will have a job in a year’s time.
And the Tories cheered.
On top of a public sector pay freeze lasting for four years, today it was announced that pension contributions would increase. Perhaps both are necessary, but it also means that the public sector workers who still have a job will be looking at getting poorer.
And the Tories cheered.
I have only touched on a small amount of what the cuts will effect – partially because the full details are not known yet. But the details do not matter. We all knew that cuts were coming, but what was not expected was the callous attitude of the Tory MPs to those who will suffer because of these cuts. Cheering when the government was announcing cuts that will cause hardship for millions of people is tasteless in the extreme.
Anyone would think the Tories enjoy causing pain to those who are not lucky enough to enjoy a well paid job, and to those who work in the public sector making society a better place rather than working to make fat cats richer.
When it comes to the next election, remember that the Tories cheered when they announced the measures that caused misery for millions.