Makes you realise just how fragile this Earth is.
Earth | Time Lapse View from Space, Fly Over | NASA, ISS from Michael König on Vimeo.
Plane Finder AR
Just installed Plane Finder AR onto the phone. Point your camera at a plane and it’ll tell you
absolutely brilliant. I love it. Just right for an aircraft geek.
Night time picture of screen! That’s what time it is here!
Mobile Phones
I have owned a number of mobile phones and most of them were rubbish. Going to give you a rundown of them from the earliest.
Phone number 1 – sometime in 1999 or so:
The Ericsson A1018
The order of the next few phones is not remembered easily. But here goes:
The next was:
then:
And then the nifty fold-out keyboard:
Then we get to the first smart phone:
Then the brilliant and pretty usable N95, it was the last Nokia I owned that worked well:
Then the big memory but pretty useless N97:
Finally, a phone that works. The iPhone 4. Until then the iPhone specification was pretty rubbish. It took a lot of soul searching to convince myself that selling out to the walled garden of Apple was worth it. However, I have to say that the iPhone is brilliant. It works!
The holiday will be a failure
I had mentioned to WW that I really wanted some time playing GT5 this holiday with the steering wheel. I may have said:
If I don’t get to play GT5 this holiday it will have been a failure!
This means no kids or anyone for about 2 hours. The time was set. Monday afternoon. Number one son would be in nursery and WW and son #2 would be seeing friends so I had about 4 hours when I could play uninterrupted!
I needed to complete around 10 online races to get the money and just because they are there to complete. The four hours would be pushing it but I reckoned that without lunch I could have done it.
So I set up the PS3 with steering wheel and pressed play.
GT server down for routine maintenance 12 to 4pm
Arrgggghhh. The only races I could do offline was a World Championship and I didn’t want to spend the time and effort and have to save mid-championship.
I shut down GT5 and played Rock Band. The original save file is copy protected and so I had to start from scratch. Definitely didn’t do the easy or medium – straight to hard.
So far the holiday has been a failure. Going to try tonight.
Talk Talk Part 3
This will probably come as a bit of a surprise but I have been really impressed with Talk Talk. I know that they have most complaints out of the media providers bt I haven’t had any issues.
Download speeds in the evening used to be crippling. It just wasn’t worth trying to download any large files and almost not worth browsing the internet. However, since moving to Talk Talk our evening download speeds have really improved. What I do not know is whether that is down to Talk Talk or some other changes that have been made with the infrastructure in our area. The thing is I can’t be bothered to see which it is.
Now I’m looking forward to downloading iOS5 this evening and getting my iPhone up to date.
Looking in the mirror
Here’s a tip for some of you drivers out there. It stems from my experiences as a motorcyclist and now as a driver, although now I’m not travelling quite as fast. The bike was an 1100cc machine and my car is a diesel estate!
I noticed in the past that whenever I was coming up behind a car on a motorway and that car was indicating to pull out into my lane that the driver would (I assume) check the rear view mirror or door mirror. Now, if the driver looks once and gets a snapshot of the road they would see me in the outside lane. What would be interesting is that the driver would have no idea of how fast I was travelling unless he/she spent a long time staring in the mirror. To get an impression of speed the driver would have to look again in the mirror to see how my position relative to him/her had changed in the time that had passed.
I believe it is for this reason I had cars pull out in front of me causing me to brake many times. It is quite simple that to judge a speed you need two reference times to see position change. Hence drivers need to look in their mirrors twice before pulling out in front of traffic in the next lane. Most drivers are ignorant of this fact of physics given that cars still pull out in front of me and I’m now in a car.
Perhaps drivers don’t care about other road users and I’m in the minority. Gosh, I think I’m better than most.
Latest Tech
Here’s the latest tech I’ve bought. I’m a bit of a Logitech fan so this was always going to be something of theirs.
Really nice sound and rechargeable batteries to carry it around.
Facebook and me
So Mr Facebook! Our relationship is almost non-existent. The only influence I maintain on Facebook is from my wife’s account and my friends who find out about me from her.
There’s a history. I started a website in 1994 for the student union that employed me. I was in a sabbatical post in charge of clubs and societies so when we got some web space I wrote the union’s web pages. The latest which are absolutely nothing to do with me are at www.su.ic.ac.uk
I didn’t do any more web stuff until about 1999 when I bought some web space and had my own web pages designed using MS Frontpage. These were at www.iparish.org.uk
Other sites I’ve had are www.ianparish.me.uk and then www.iparish.plus.com and now finally this site.
The point is that when social networks really took off with myspace I had my own site. I didn’t need another website to write stuff or advertise my own presence to the world. So I pretty much ignored all social networking while I had a website. Facebook didn’t bother me, if people want to stay in touch with me or vice versa then we could talk or email or text.
Over the last few years I have recognised that it would be easier to keep in touch with friends if I was on Facebook but it’s too late. I refused for so long that I just can’t do it now. There are principles at stake. Not going to take the plunge now.
My wife finds this amusing and slightly annoying as I sometimes ask her to send messages to people for me, not that often though. Also I am on twitter, mainly to follow F1 and NFL. I keep in touch with one friend through twitter but basically I don’t do social networking. Just don’t see the need if you have your own website, which I do.
I have noticed that whenever I edit an old post I get tweets sent saying such. Although not really annoying it does mean that minor adjustments get tweeted.
So I have adjusted my automatic Twitter settings so that when I edit old posts they will not be tweeted. Just did an edit of tags (or at least added some) and now have lots of tweets about these. Should have studied the WordTwit settings a little more closely when I installed it. Issue should now be sorted.
Mind you, virtually no-one follows me and pretty much no-one reads this website!
Exciting life
How exciting is my life? This exciting: I love my new washing line cover!
Now you see it.
Now you don’t!
