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Usually stuff I’ve written personally, stuff I think is pretty good.

Truly, a first world problem.

Neutral leech means one thing: downloads. Lots and lots of downloads. The rest of my quota this month has been dedicated to downloads.

Neutral leech is different to freeleech because neutral means uploads aren’t counted either (for ratio purposes). It also allows people to build up their seeding library for the future. It’s great!

Problem is, I’ve acquired heaps of stuff already.

I’ve considered the re-aquisition of stuff I already own, but there’s two problems: firstly, only about a sixth of my music library is actually in 160 or lower, and secondly, because I have a large number of smart playlists which depend on play count metadata (to tell me what I’ve listened to, how often [relatively] I listen to it), those will get messed up.

I know there’s a way to replace content within iTunes, but that relies on the fact that the metadata is exactly the same. As this won’t be the case for 99% of the stuff I get (it’ll either be tagged the same or better), this really isn’t a solution.

Welcome, ladies and gentlemen, to a first world problem.

A (mostly subjective) review of Essay, the rich text editor for iOS

Essay is more fancy. Essay isn’t perfect either, but first, here’s what it does do. Firstly, it’s a text editor. Off to a great start there. There’s no accompanying web-app for easy access to my writings away from the iPhone, but it does sync the HTML-formatted files to Dropbox which is fine. For a writing app, it has some pretty advanced features. Things like rich-text, combined with pretty standard HTML stuff like lists (ordered, unordered), sections, paragraphs, and so on like in the screenshot above. You can create hyperlinks to other files within Essay, or to actual web locations. Bold, italic, underline, strikethrough — all present, all easily accessible through the custom keyboard add-on (which works brilliantly, by the way. Fluid, simple, all-round excellent implementation that could have been very convoluted indeed). The iPhone app is very new (just released today, in fact), so there’s no word count (that I can find, although I assume it is in the iPad version), and it even has a full blown web browser in-app to allow you to browse links.

The number one issue I have with Essays is that it isn’t fully native. Not that it’s a web app or anything like that, it isn’t, but that the main editor view is basically some glorified HTML interpreter. Let me tell you what I mean. While the editor tries its very hardest to appear native (at least it includes the standard text selection tools), it’s unlike any other editable text section I’ve ever seen. This is evidenced by a couple of factors:

  1. The marquee tool that appears when you tap and hold to finely place the cursor makes text look pixellated. I’ve never seen that before, on any app. Example: Essay, Simplenote. It’s not just the iPhone version that does this, it looks just as bad on the iPad too.
  2. The cursor blinks at a different rate, in a slightly different way to any other cursor I’ve seen.
  3. Selecting text is sloooow. There’s a lag associated with everything.

Points one and three lead me to the conclusion that it must be some sort of emulated HTML interpreter, not the native iOS text view that I know and love. I’m guessing it’s this non-native text view that allows such advanced features as text styling, lists, highlighting, and so on, but it’s also this non-native text view that has some serious drawbacks:

  • Selecting a part of text, hitting “select all” frequently results in the standard “cut copy paste” popup not popping up. Selecting a few words works, however.
  • Tapping the time doesn’t take you to the top of the current scroll view, like it does pretty much everywhere else.
  • Points one and three above — sure, pixellation is just a cosmetic issue, but having slow text selection is a functional one. It’s also terrible UX, that’s how much the cursor-placing lags.

It’s these small things that make Essay not what I’m looking for at the moment. Sure, it’s fancy — but when fancy comes at the cost of serious drawbacks I’ll have to turn down that particular offer.

via iOS Reviews.

Written by yours truly, of course.

Windows Phone 7 Update Insanity

In a perfect world, all our phone updates would be released when the phone manufacturer said so, not at the whims of hardware manufacturers and certainly not at the discretion of telecommunications companies. Yet that’s exactly what’s happening with the (somewhat minor) Windows Phone 7 update, with delays globally as carriers and hardware manufacturers stumble over numerous “testing and verification” stages. And even when Microsoft finally approve the update, it “might take several weeks” before users even see the update? Well, there’s a joke if I’ve ever heard one.

New Shiny! Welcome, Hermione!

This is is somewhat of a follow-on to my previous post about the farewell of my old MacBook. Read that too, if you want.

Yeah, that Hermione. As in Hermione Granger? As in Hermoine Jean Granger, one of the very best witches in the Harry Potter series? Who is played by the stunning Emma Watson in real life? Yeah, the one and the same.

I’ve blogged about this before, but any geek worth their salt has changed the hostname for the computers. Those geeks that really know what they’re doing even have themes for their names, and it just so happens that I have Harry Potter-related names for all my computers (I don’t think you can change the hostname on an Xbox 360, otherwise I totally would). Say what you want about the Harry Potter theme, just don’t go downplaying the impact it has had on my generation; so much so that (my potentially very naive self thinks) it’s really quite comparable to even Pokemon in terms of global impact and how much money has been spent on associated merchandise…

Anyway, sectumsempra was the old name of my old white MacBook, named after the seemingly-harmless spell in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince that turned out to be not-so-harmless. In the most tangential of ways the real sectumsempra has a similar story to my old white MacBook, but that’s for another time. Severus (yes, that Severus, as in Severus Snape) is the name of my ultra-powerful gaming rig. i7 930, EVGA X58, GTX 480, Vertex 2 SSD, 6TB of internal storage. Like I said, pretty powerful stuff. It’s hooked up to a Dell U2711 for the most part, except when it needs to pull LAN duty when it gets the pixels of a tiny 20″ to push.

Previous computers me or my family have owned have taken on such names as Fawkes (after the phoenix), Protego (the spell), and Sonorous (also the spell). They all have stories behind their names, but that’s definitely for another time.

Which brings us to Hermione.

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Farewell ye olde MacBook, you shall be missed.

old white macbook

Oh, sectumsempra. That is the name I gave to you on that fateful day, right after pondering something that would be appropriate for such a machine of your… nature. I remember how we met — you were there, dressed all in white, and I was there, dressed in blue and black. I remember how badly I wanted one just like you, perhaps even one of your slightly younger sisters…

I remember tossing and turning late at night over the decision that I would come to realise as completely trivial in the grand scheme of things. You were slightly slower, but that didn’t matter. If anything, I would describe you as having matured well. The only thing your sisters really had going for them was a higher upkeep and that youthfulness that so many strive to achieve but few actually do.

The rest, as they say, is history.

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