nemof.org lost in the forest, dwelling with the badgers

WordPress on the move

I've just downloaded the wordpress for android, and after promptly loosing my first post by coming out of the app this is my second go.

Also, today two young men were both given 4 years each for inciting a riot which never happened using facebook. I thought the whole point of law and due process is that it doesn't pay attention to populist opinion, dealing only in criminal acts and appropriate sentencing; Nothing about this is appropriate or fair, as yes, even people convicted of criminal offences still retain their rights, and need I point out again, these two young men didn't even manage to do anything.

As ever, a picture of a telegraph pole.

title goes here!

I love telegraph poles, I have a surprising number of pictures like this

In an act of boredom and desperation I'm blogging; I feel dirty and ashamed, but I'd rather blog than kick my heels.

Of Phones

As you can see, there are some rather fetching telegraph poles and clouds to the right. This was taken with my HTC Desire HD phone on the amble home this evening. After having owned my first Android phone for several months I've come to a few conclusions that will definitely influence my next phone purchase, and further points at the underpinnings which I think are essential in digital technology.

In one simple word, batteries, batteries, batteries. I don't know about you, but I've always felt tethered by any device that sucks up battery like it's quaffing at the fountain of eternal youth. Unfortunately the DHD is positively Viking in its energy quaffs, and with anything more than moderate use, on a day-to-day basis I know that I'll have 30% or less charge left, meaning it's essential that I charge the phone for the next day, otherwise I'd have an expensive paperweight by 11am.

There are lots of reasons why the DHD, and indeed almost all smartphones are energy bastards, and they all stem from the fact that, what you actually have in your pocket is more like PC than it is the old Nokia brick you had ten years ago.

Is this OK? No. Could I go without twitter, facebook and G+ and have great battery life again? Hell NO! So, we find ourselves in an uncomfortable era wherein in one respect at least, we seem to have taken a step backward in time, making our tech less useful due to our battery technology not being able to keep up with everything else.

I haven't really looked into this subject too closely, so perhaps there's some wonderful fix-all just around the corner, but at the moment at least we're still waiting.

It's long been a personal prediction of mine (or more accurately a wistful desire) that a company will come along soon with a killer battery tech that will up the game considerably, which will in turn make mobile computing significantly more exciting. We can dream.

Of Photos

I somewhat meandered in the last section. What I meant to say was, I love being able to pull out my phone and take extremely good quality photos, what I said was "batteries, batteries, batteries."

Indeed I'm more than sure now that the four things I'll look for in my next android phone are the following:

1. A High Quality Camera - The joy of being to quickly snap something that catches your eye is wonderful. I just wish I could stop taking pictures of brooding clouds and telegraph poles.
2. Long Lasting Batteries -  This might be a bit of a pipe dream, but I do think that along with optimizations in software and hardware, batteries will get better. Hell, a phone that lasted a comfortable 2 days on one charge would be a pleasure.
3. Lightness, Strength - One of the things I loved about my old Nokia bricks was the way you could thump someone in-between muscle groups to inspire great pain and sadness in them. My DHD is (admittedly by design) a monster with a 4.3" screen. I need something a little lighter.
4. A Brilliant Music Player - I really want to be able to leave my iPod Touch behind entirely, but after my experience of listening to music on the DHD, I just don't think it measures up to my old iPod. The biggest advantage that an android phone does have in this respect though is that any developer can make a third party music application, where as Apple is extremely iffy about developers reproducing core functionality in their devices. I currently have 3 or 4 different music players on my phone, and it's hard to argue that choice is a good thing.

Of Geekery

I have been keeping up in my geekery. You know that old saying, necessity, invention, yada yada? Well, I am literally as poor as a church mouse, so I can't afford to splash out on finery like i7 processors, GPUs and SSD storage. That being said, I sure do have a lot of junk computers lying around, including an old (old) PPC mac mini. After a little tinkering and a minimum of effort, it's now acting as my home server in the lounge. Honestly, having my own home server is a revelation. I'd recommend to any geek worth their salt that one of the best and most fun projects they can have is to create their own linux-box which they can then access over the Internet.

I really want to talk more about my homeserver, but I've totally lost the thread as I stopped writing this post hours ago. I'll have to take it up again in a separate post.