Its not the end of the world, but today was the end of my popcorn popper that I use for roasting coffee. This one lasted pretty well, almost 3 years to the day and it performed 310 roasts, which equates to about 40kg of coffee beans.
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I had a problem today with smart playlists in iTunes with multiple rules not syncing properly with my iPhone 5. Thanks to a tip in an Apple forum I found that the problem was fixed by adding the rule “Playlist–Is–Music” to the smart playlist rules. Bizarre and makes no sense, but it fixed the problem.
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A poetical work liberated from the darker recesses of my brain earlier today …
Acrostic poems are hard to write
Burns up all my mental might
Can’t you see I’m working on it?
Don’t you diss my puny sonnet
Every effort expended, makes me a wreck
Forward I go on my acrostic trek
Gallantly going where no one has gone
Hoping I have the strength to go on
I implore you to consider the worth of my work
Judge carefully whether I be genius or jerk
Knowing not the terminus of my literary stand
Long will I labour in this lettered land
My mind meanders, my strength now wanes
Now waxes and rises, gathers and gains
Oft in this ode, as the lines I count up
Perils and problems just seem to mount up
Quite likely some quicksand will cause me to quit
Really I wonder why I’m attempting it
Sometimes I shrink at the size of my task
Twenty six letters is a mighty big ask
Undaunted I strive to alphabetic renown
Vying for victory and a poetic crown
Wait! Is woe ahead? Will my way meet ill fate?
X words are extraordinarily hard to locate!
Yet here I now am on the penultimate line
Zero to go after this one last rhyme!
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It’s approaching the end of the school year and its report card time.
I’m giving Heaton Public School at Jesmond an “F” in the subject area of social responsibility. For the second year in a row, in an end of year fundraiser, not content with one level of gambling (a raffle) they’ve nested it to two levels of gambling, by having a raffle whose prize is a tree of instant lottery tickets – a product that cannot legally be sold to minors.
The school should seriously consider changing its motto from “Only the Best” to “Only the Bets”.
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Thanks to a tip from my son, I now know how to return iTunes 11 to more of the iTunes 10 look by showing the sidebar again.
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Apple has released iTunes 11 and are loudly proclaiming it as “simpler”, “easier” and “more intuitive. Is it?
No. Just one example in the screenshot below. In iTunes 10 there was one place (the left panel) where you could find everything you wanted (iTunes store, podcast lists, device sync screen, playlists etc.)
In iTunes 11 there are three different spots you have to go to depending on what you want, and then after navigating to that spot there may be additional clicks to get to the view that you want.
[This content was originally posted to Google+]
I noticed today that some of the problems with Apple Maps that I reported to Apple have been corrected. Unfortunately, in some cases they’ve just replaced one error with a different error. e.g. In Canara Place, they’ve correctly added in the connection to University Drive that was missing, but added an extra connection to Sunset Boulevarde that doesn’t exist in the real world.
Update 8 Feb 2015: Two years on and they still haven’t fixed this error, even though I’ve reported it twice.
[This content was originally posted to Google+]
So Nokia has released their “HERE Maps” iPhone app to the world. How does it compare with Apple Maps and Google maps? Somewhere in the middle. Of the 6 problems I described in Apple Maps in recent posts, HERE Maps gets 4 of them right, one of them wrong (they show a non-existent river crossing at the Branch), and one half right – They don’t show “Hunter Stadium”, but at least show “International Sports Centre”
I’m still looking forward to getting a Google Maps app back on my iPhone…
[This content was originally posted to Google+]