• Blast From The Past: Radi8 Digital Scavenger Hunt 2008 — Adam’s Team

    This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

  • Unanswered Questions

    Blogtober 11 catch-up, part IV

    Sometimes, just sometimes, I have many questions. Many, many questions, and too few answers.

    Sometimes, stupid little questions, like: why did that girl stare at me? Is my fly undone? Do I have something unpleasant coming out of my nose? Is there something wrong with my face? Did I say the right thing? Did I act the right way?

    These questions don’t really matter. I usually forget them after a few minutes, and then I move on to some of the more important stuff.

    More important stuff, like: what kind of message do I want to convey when writing? What do I want to write about? Should I hit publish on this piece, knowing that it might not be my best work yet? Or should I publish that piece anyway, and just throw caution to the wind?

    These questions matter a little more. They don’t really affect anyone apart from myself, and even then they’re usually forgotten the next day, or a few days later. There’s nothing wrong with these questions, per se, and sometimes they should definitely be asked, but the real, life changing questions are where it’s at.

    Questions like: what should I be doing with my life? Am I really happy doing this Uni degree? Why can’t I seem to get the right work done? Why does the reward always seem to dictate the amount of effort I put into things? Where is the light at the end of the tunnel? How am I supposed to feel about various things? What kind of an effect does that have on my life? Where do I want to be in 5 years? Where do I want to be in 10 years? What is the meaning of life, the universe, and everything?

    If only I could answer all these questions. I know no-one has all the answers to everything, but why are there so many unanswered questions anyway? Where do I get the answers from? How do I get out of this rut?

    And finally, the most important question of all: what graphics card should I get for Battlefield 3?

    This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

  • Android Addendum

    Blogtober 2011 catch-up, part III

    Because some of still couldn’t be convinced that my comparisons were good enough, this is very likely just a small response to a few points I’ve seen around the place.

    Your issues are due to hardware!
    Are you serious? The Nexus S is a newer phone than the iPhone 4, and if you’re actually insinuating that  the Gallery lag is attributed to hardware issues, you must be mistaken, because there’s no way. I mean, if Android doesn’t run on the phone that Google use for development, what hope is there for other phones?

    I don’t have those issues with my phone!
    Oh, this again? Look, I’m not made of money, I’m just an ordinary consumer trying different smartphones for kicks. I chose the Nexus S because it’s the flagship Android product — the product vetted by Google — which means that it should provide the best Android experience. TouchWiz or Sense might lead to a better experience for the end user, but that comes at the cost of other issues.

    Ice Cream Sandwich will fix most of your issues!
    Well, if we always waited for the next great thing to come along, then we’d probably be back in the dark ages, wouldn’t we?

    I think that’s about it.

    This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

  • Instapaper

    I love Instapaper. There, I said it.

    I do a fair bit of public transport, and that means lots of time to chill out with tunes and just read. Sometimes I even write, but it’s mostly about reading.

    I don’t know when it happened, but about a year or two ago I stopped reading things in the browser. Not just the long-form articles or editorials I occasionally come across, but pretty much everything — shorter news pieces, reviews, basically anything and everything longer than a paragraph or two. I use Google Reader a lot, and nothing there gets read either — only skimmed, and if found to be interesting, sent to Instapaper for later perusal.

    I don’t read books as often as I used to (which was sparse to begin with), but I do read my Instapaper list. I’m usually only a week or so behind my unread list — but there are some things in my “serious reading” folder (for long-form stuff) that is years old. With Instapaper, I’m never without anything to read. Now my only problem is running out of battery power when I’m out and about, but that’s a story for another time.

    Instapaper isn’t just for reading, though! I also use it as a bit of temporary link storage. Links come in — from Twitter, from interesting websites I don’t want to read right now, from things on the internet which I want to refer to later — and links go out, either when I read items, or get to my Mac and open up all the stuff I’ve Instapaper-ed from Twitter or wherever else.

    Remember how I was saying it’s all about the apps? Throughout my experiments with various smartphone platforms over the past month, I found that exactly none had decent Instapaper clients. IOS obviously has the official client, but there’s no such thing for Android or Windows Phone 7 — at least no client that matches the iOS one, anyway.

    All the niceties you’ve come to expect from the official client just don’t exist elsewhere. There are a lot of clients that sync with Instapaper, but none that do the job as well. I’m not even talking about things like jumping to the top and then returning to the bottom, I’m talking really basic things, like the reading interface itself. Typography, style, layout — all of these things matter. If you’re an app developer, it’s great that you’re making an Instapaper client for something other than iOS, but make sure your app is good for reading; if your app isn’t usable for reading, it probably isn’t suitable for Instapaper.

    This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

  • Stay hungry, stay foolish.

    Still hard to believe he’s gone.

    This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

  • Battlefield 3 Viking Robot

    This post part of Blogtober 2011, just a little thing of mine where I (attempt to) post something up on my blog every day in October 2011.

Benny Ling's Bling

Computers are like a bicycle for our minds.