Posts from 2017

14 Nov 2017

Bobotie

Christmas pudding is my number one foodstuff. Alongside it, lasagne, haggis, flapjack and pies. Clearly I have a predilection for stodge. We even have a term for it in our family. “Mozz food” has to have a certain density (calorifically and, er, massively). I love to crunch a crisp, to consume a cracker, but when hungry I will bat away these lower density delights in favour of something with a bit of heft to it.

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14 Nov 2017

Beverage bias

The UK version of Amazon Prime Photos just added a seemingly magic set of features to bring it to parity with the US version. My digitised photos - or at least, a private cloud-based copy of them - have been lodged there for a while, since unlimited (photo) storage is an included benefit of the aforementioned subscription service. The new features could loosely be called “AI” - in that Amazon’s computing power has churned over my pixel collection and applied a bit of machine learning: face recognition, object recognition and geolocation deduction.

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21 Oct 2017

Alexa, tell me a joke

Following last week’s Siri shutout (football result was a double-zip deadlocker in A Field), more interactions with digital assistants today. We are trying out an Amazon Echo Dot, primarily because changing the station on the “radio” in the kitchen is such a hassle with Sonos. I know, First World problems. If others are interested, integration with Sonos is a new Alexa skill, and if you have existing Sonos devices, it’ll work, but it ain’t spectacular.

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13 Oct 2017

Siri shut-out

Spent an enjoyable few minutes watching a four year old barking questions at Siri yesterday evening. Iris is largely unimpressed with her reverse namesake. I guess because Siri has a name, and because of the way we mock-reverentially talk to Siri, Iris follows suit. She realises she’s not talking to a person, but she’s not quite got a sufficiently deep understanding to realise that some questions are just non-starters. So she quizzed Siri with:

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28 Sep 2017

Primal urge

I love this video from Numberphile about a prime number with 1,350 digits (and some other special visual properties). I can’t believe I studied at Trinity Hall for four years and didn’t know about this. A custom prime number with the college emblem “ASCII art”-ed inside it? What could appeal more to my geeky brain? I’m enjoying all the Numberphile videos. Within a very short time the number had been extracted from the video and other clever people had been inspired to post creative and original responses.

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20 Aug 2017

Trumpety Trump

I rushed (virtually) to the App Store to download a copy of this trumpet simulator app after seeing this story on the news: App iTrump wins trademark fight against Trump Organization I used to love blowing my own trumpet and now I can do it on my iPhone. I was pleased to pay £2.99 - and judging by the comments on the app, I wasn’t the first person to do so as a sort of a statement.

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07 Aug 2017

Horizontally Challenged

I like views. On our recent holiday we stayed on top of a hill and spent hours looking out at a particularly nice one. From the photographed bit of Tuscany, the furthest point that can be seen directly is about 27km away: a distant hilltop just visible past the shoulder of a closer slope. I pondered the distance because, just before going on holiday, I had discovered beyond horizons, a website dedicated to photography of very long distances.

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11 May 2017

Mixing It

Back in the days when iPods were still A Thing, I remember being super embarrassed by mine. Picture the scene. I’m driving, university mates in the car, ROAD TRIP! Tune-age essential. So my friend Mark picked up my iPod - easy to find at the end of an awkward cable coming out of the glovebox and put it on shuffle. Now my music collection has some well-known anthems, some music that lots of people would consider pretty weird, that was all fine.

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09 Apr 2017

Safety is a shared responsibility

From the instructions for a new toddler pillow - which, by the way is scientifically proven to reduce cranial pressure by up to 50% and reduce flat head syndrome. dangerous to use this product on elevated surfaces e.g… bed… Definitely one to keep for further reference.

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13 Feb 2017

How old is that gannet?

Yesterday I caught the last official day of “Tracking Animals” - an exhibition at The Hunterian in Glasgow curated by my good friend Nicky. Iris pressed her four-year-old nose to the glass of the display cabinet and peered at the taxidermied seabird inside. “How old is that gannet?” she asked, prompted by discussion between myself and her grandpa about its plumage. This preserved individual was, specifically, a teenager, in gannet terms; it’d been chosen to illustrate and augment the other articles on display about GPS tracking of this species’s wanderings between colonies.

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