strange_complex | Entries tagged with technology

I saw this with

lady_lugosi1313 at the Hyde Park Picture House shortly before Christmas. It's basically Glee in a British small town school with a zombie apocalypse and a keen awareness of Buffy the Vampire Slayer. Oh, and it's also a Christmas film, because that's when it is set. As you might imagine, this adds up to a great deal of fun, although it does also involve quite a lot of gore and a surprisingly-high death rate for well developed characters. It has something it wants to say about modern communications technology. On the whole, this is portrayed negatively, for example though a song about how the surviving characters are desperate for a human voice rather than something on a screen (full lyrics here), by drawing attention to the self-absorption and distorted priorities of selfie culture through people posting their zombie escape selfies to Instagram, and by having the zombies themselves easily distracted by TV screens. But then again, it's clearly a disaster for the human characters when they lose their mobile phone signals and internet connection, and we are invited to feel great sympathy for one character who, knowing he has been infected by the zombies, helps his daughter to escape and then lies gazing lovingly at her picture on his mobile phone screen as he dies. So it's a bit mixed. The songs were generally pretty good, with an absolute highlight being an upbeat dance number sung as a duet between Anna and her best friend John as they leave the house for school and work their way across town to meet one another, so wrapped up in their own determination and sunny outlooks that they don't notice that zombie-induced carnage has broken out all around them. That said, I personally found that my enjoyment of the songs qua songs dropped off rather as the film went on, partly because I'm not very keen on musical-style music anyway, and partly because they just began to sound a little samey. So I won't be buying the soundtrack, but I would recommend the film.

Well, that about wraps up my film reviews for 2018 - hoorah! I've just got to get started on the four films I've already seen in 2019 now...

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/631865.html

So I got a new phone. My last two have been Samsung Galaxies (first an S4, then an S7), but after I had owned each of them for about two years, the microphone on the first started to fail and the battery on the second went rapidly downhill, so that recently it hasn't been able to make it through a full day without needing a booster charge. Nonetheless, I was familiar with what Samsung had to offer, and liked in particular their high-quality built-in cameras. That meant I did look pretty hard at the S9, and especially the S9+, on which the various extras include a larger battery. But then when I actually logged into EE to check out their upgrade deals, they recommended a Huawei P20 Pro as the closest replacement for the S7 I had, so I looked into it to find out more.

The real clincher for me was the 4000 mAh battery (as compared to 3000 mAh for the Samsung Galaxy S9 or 3500mAh for the S9+). But then it also turned out to have twice as much storage capacity as the S9+, to be available in a very pretty ombre colour called Twilight shading from dark blue to rich purple, and to have one of the best cameras (or actually set of cameras) currently available in a mobile phone. So I have kissed goodbye to Samsung and made the move.

This in fact turned out to mean I was setting up the new Huawei on Thursday evening while listening to news stories about their chief financial officer being arrested for breaking US sanctions on Iran and fears about them using 5G kit they have supplied to spy on western countries. I do wish I had known about any of that before I bought the phone, but it's rather too late now - I already own it, and besides I don't think there is really any such thing as an ethical high-end smartphone.

I've been getting used to it, and setting everything up the way I want it, over the last couple of days. All my contacts and apps transferred over very smoothly via my gmail account, despite the move to different hard-ware, although a lot of the apps have taken the change as permission to switch back on all the annoying notifications which I'd spent ages hunting down and switching off on the old phone. So I had to redo a lot of that, and I'll need to put my music back on it and make a new set of lockscreen pictures for it at some point - all Dracula-related, of course, just like on the old phone, but they need to be different dimensions now.

I hadn't quite got round to the camera until this evening, but I realised when I began thinking about it that I had an excellent opportunity to test out its supposedly-excellent low light settings. Just over a month ago (in fact specifically on Halloween evening), there was a power-cut in Headingley, which hit around 7pm and last for about half an hour. It was fully dark outside by then, so I lit some candles to provide at least some light in my lounge, took a picture with my Samsung Galaxy G7 and tweeted it:

Actually, power-cuts have been a major feature of this week too, but only at work, so I didn't actually need to dig out the candles at home. But I realised that recreating the picture above, with the same conditions of five tea-lights and no other illumination, would be an excellent way to test out my new Huawei's capacities. So that's what I've just done and here is the result:

It did something quite different from the Samsung while taking the picture, announcing that it was 'processing' for about four seconds and taking what I think were actually a series of shots that allowed it to calibrate and perhaps even stitch together the best overall picture by using different lenses and settings on different parts of the scene. Anyway, whatever it did, the results clearly are in a different world from the Samsung equivalent. Much better colour balance between the candles themselves and their surroundings so that they don't just look like balls of white light, and then much better colour and detail on things like the round table-top, the carpet, the items on the mantelpiece, the chair and the cupboard behind.

Oh, and meanwhile the battery is currently sitting on 56%, whereas by this time on a similar day I would have expected my old S7 to be plugged in getting a second charge. So apart from accidentally supporting China's efforts to destabilise the west (whoops!), I guess I'm pretty happy. Definitely looking forward to seeing what else the camera can do at least.

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/626138.html

Last year, before I went to Australia, I bought a Kindle so that I could load it up with books for my trip and thus reduce the weight of my luggage. I've found it very amenable for leisure-type reading, but today for the first time I tried to use it for academic reading, and found the experience utterly frustrating and tedious.

Reading in a linear fashion is fine, but of course that is not the reality of much academic reading. Kindle books are well set-up to support footnotes - they pop up at the bottom of the screen, and you can also move back and forth between the 'page' you are on and the footnotes section with a single click each way.

The problems kick in when you want to flick back and forth between the text and the bibliography (e.g. to check the full title of an abbreviated reference in the notes) or between the index and the text (e.g. to see what the author has to say on a particular topic). I do understand that I can move back and forth between different parts of the book either by memorising a location number and using the 'go to' function, or by using that view where you can see nine pages at once and there's a slider at the bottom. But both are much slower and more cumbersome than the traditional method of having one finger in the bibliography / index and the other in the text.

For similar reasons, I also struggled to get an overall sense of the shape and trajectory of the book. I could see the table of contents, but without page numbers I couldn't see how long each chapter was, so it wasn't easy to see how much space the author had allocated to one or the other topic. Nor could I find the plates referred to at various points in the text. Plates aren't usually paginated, so wouldn't be listed in the table of contents or list of illustrations, but at least in a physical book you can see them, just by looking at the fore-edge.

Theoretically, the Kindle's capacity to highlight passages and annotate them should be super-useful for academic reading, but again in practice I found both processes so cumbersome that I stopped bothering, and just took notes on my computer, the same way as I would while reading a paper book. It did occur to me at the very end of the day that that particular problem might have been resolved by using the Kindle app on my tablet, rather than my actual Kindle, since the tablet has a much more responsive touch-screen (which would have made the highlighting easier) and the keyboard which pops up when required is larger (which would make the annotating easier). But even then, the other frustrations described above would still remain.

If you've used a Kindle for research-focused reading, what have your experiences been? Are there hints or tips which I'm missing, or is it just always like this?

Crossposts: https://strange-complex.livejournal.com/601425.html

A friend calls to set me up on a website for a Thing I'm doing. We agree on a temporary password which I can use.

"So where do I need to go to login?" I ask. He tells me the URL.

"Just go there and enter your username," he says. "It's [redacted]."

"OK, is that upper-case or lower-case?"

He checks. "It's lower-case."

There's a pregnant pause. Suddenly I realise what he's waiting for.

"I'm not in front of a computer now," I explain.

"Oh, right, of course!" he replies, embarrassed to have forgotten for a moment that sometimes, yes, that does still happen.

Click here if you would like view this entry in light text on a dark background.

Well, it was one thing being up and out of the house by 9 last Saturday. This week I'm on my way a full half hour earlier! What happened??? Theoretically, I am going to help sort out a colleague's computer in Harrogate - but I think the limits of my technical competence on that front may lie closer than he believes! :-/

I believe I may have mentioned as much on this LJ before, but just to reiterate - my Dad is teh aces! When he arrived at 9pm last night, I only had one working telephone socket in my house - a bit inconvenient, since it was in my study, and I couldn't guarantee to hear it if I was downstairs and the study door was closed. Now, I have no less than four working telephone sockets - a little excessive for my needs, perhaps, but they were all part of an old system which was just there anyway, so he figured he might as well reactivate them all while he was at it. I am incredibly impressed at his cleverness.

He also brought a plastic outdoor table and chairs, which will be nice as

hollyione is coming to visit me tomorrow, so we can enjoy sitting out in the garden with drinks while her daughter plays around us. We decided to take them straight through to the garden from the car when he arrived, and of course being 9pm it was dark, and the automatic light I have above the patio doors switched itself on as I opened them. And what should I see in its beam, sitting in the middle of the lawn? A hedgehog! I wasn't terribly surprised, as I see foxes and squirrels all the time, but hedgehogs are a bit more secretive, and I obviously haven't been out at the right time to encounter one yet. He didn't even seem very scared or anything - he didn't roll up in a ball, but just sat there, and after a while decided that maybe he would shuffle off somewhere a bit quieter. It was very exciting, and I hope I shall see more of him.

Anyway, now Dad has headed off towards Dundee, where he will be picking my Mum up from a Medical History conference and then going to the Moray Firth area for a holiday. Apparently the main attraction is dolphins, which can be seen by the dozen in the bay.

Meanwhile, in completely unrelated news, a film of I, Claudius is apparently on the cards. Could be very exciting if it happens, although I may be forced to kill myself if Leonardo DiCaprio is cast as Claudius. As Caligula, though... I could go with that.

I'm feeling pretty chuffed with myself on the technology front today. I have:

Finally got my DVD-video and Sky-box to talk to one another. It turned out that I'd got it all set up right in the first place, but just needed to choose the A1 channel on the DVD-video machine instead of letting it sit on channel 1.
Convinced my BT Home Hub to supply full wireless coverage to my entire house, rather than just a 2m pool immediately around it. Those people who said that the key to doing this was changing the channel it was broadcasting on (dakegra first, I think, confirmed by kernowgirl's husband) were really right. Setting it to channel 6 completely transformed it from basically not really working at all to working absolutely perfectly everywhere I could want it to. Amazing.

However, I still have a technological question:

Having recently bought my laptop from Dell, I want to take advantage of their partnership with ReCOM to recycle my old desktop PC to charity. I've checked that it meets their requirements, and established what I need to do to get it collected, but obviously it's crucial to ensure that it is data-safe before it goes out of my house. So far I have:

Uninstalled pretty much every piece of software I ever installed on it, with the exception of harmless ones like Adobe Acrobat
Told both IE and Firefox to clear all my personal data (passwords, browser history, favourites etc.)
Manually deleted all internet cache files, cookies etc. just to be sure
Wiped all my old documents, pictures and music (after copying them to my new machine, natch) and all temp files
Emptied the Recycle bin
Defragmented the hard drive

For the record, I never used anything other than web-based email accounts from it, so there shouldn't be old emails stored anywhere on it.

Is there anything else I should be doing before I let someone else have it? Or is rendering what was my primary personal and work computer for a total of six years truly data-safe so difficult to do properly that I'd be better off smashing the hard-drive with a hammer and taking it to the tip?

...what manner of thing might be wrong with one's washing-machine if it performs the spin cycle in an apparently normal fashion, making all the usual judders and space-ship-about-to-take-off noises that washing-machines make, but the clothes still need wringing out by hand before you can hang them up to dry?

If it makes any difference, this is definitely A Change - it was fine a month ago, but has developed this problem over the last few weeks.

Edit: I've now cleaned the filter by opening a little panel at the front, which yielded quite a lot of water, a few bits of fluff, and one of those ivory-coloured plastic toothpicks which slots into the end of a Swiss Army knife. If anyone wants the latter, I'll gladly post it to them - I'm the kind of person who never lost mine, but I know a lot of people do.

To celebrate having a free day on Saturday, I first enjoyed a big fat lie-in, then took a leisurely breakfast, watched some TV, noodled on the 'net, and finally headed into town to complete a few shopping missions I hadn't had time to attend to for the past week or so. I needed to stock up on things like shampoo and so on from Boots, but it had also become urgent that I buy a new pair of actual boots. So urgent, in fact, that I'd got to the point of being faced each morning with the choice of wearing either a) a pair of boots with one missing sole, a broken shank¹ and a rapidly disintegrating interior or b) a pair of boots with the bottom of one heel missing. Usually, pair b) won out - but it was clear that this state of affairs could not go on.

I wasn't really looking forward to the boot shopping very much, as I have terrible trouble finding boots I like which are appropriate for work. I've railed in this journal before about those stupid heels which are placed right at the back of the boots, I don't like wedges, and I don't want to wear anything more than about 2.5 inches high for the sake of comfort. So there's not much on the contemporary high street which I really want to wear.

However, yesterday the Shoe Gods were clearly with me, as I walked into Clarks, saw a pair of boots I liked straight away, tried them on and found that they fitted beautifully. I can't find a picture of them online that I can link to, but they're Victorian-looking black leather ankle-boots, with cosmetic laces up the front, a practical zip up the side and a nice-looking heel about 2" high. Plus, they were in the sale. Yay!

Thanks to Clarks, I'd got everything done I needed to do within an hour of leaving the house, so I used the time I'd expected to spend trudging gloomily around boot-shops checking out mobile phone deals instead, with an eye to the upcoming end of my current contract with Vodafone on 27th February. This is what I found, in the sort of price-range I'm willing to pay and with the sort of features I want:

Network	Vodafone	O2	3	T-mobile	Orange
Plan	150 Anytime	Online 25	X-Series Silver	Flext	Dolphin
Monthly charge	£25	£25	£22.50 for 8 months, then £40	£27.50	£35
Insurance	£6.95	£7.50	£5.99	£5.99	£6
Minutes	150	200	300	c. 85	250
Texts	500	500	1000	c. 170	250
Internet allowance	Really unclear	1Mb then £3 per Mb	1Gb	1Gb	£1 per Mb
Handset	Sony V630i	Any	Nokia N73	Nokia 6253	Most
Contract	18 months	18 months	18 months	18 months	12 months

Given that I'm currently paying £30 per month for a mere 25 minutes, 250 texts and no internet allowance, those all look pretty tempting. In fact, I think I'm most tempted by the T-mobile Flext deal. Although the numbers of minutes and texts are a bit lower on that deal than some of the others, you can actually use up an overall 'allowance' on whichever you like, which is rather nice, and I very much doubt on current usage levels that I'd feel restricted by it. And that lovely, ripe 1Gb of internet usage is very tempting! Although my current phone can theoretically access the internet, I never use it, because I have no idea how much it will cost me, and suspect it might be rather a lot. A 1Gb allowance basically means being free to surf as much as I like, in practical terms, and the web browser the guy in the shop showed me looked pretty decent, too. Although I probably won't make as much use of it now as I might have done a year ago (when I was spending at least nine hours on trains a week), I can still see how it could be really handy for things like house moves (which I know needs to happen again fairly soon), trips away and so on.

If anyone has any thoughts on that deal, or any of the others, or any general experiences with any companies other than Vodafone (the only company I've ever used so far) which you think I should know about, speak up!
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1. The steel 'backbone' of most heeled boots. You know it's broken when the heel no longer stays solid in relation to the boot, will move about if pushed by a hand and feels like it's slipping out behind you when you walk.

I've just been out to see the above with

nigelmouse, at a fabulous cinema called the Hyde Park. Leeds City Council inform me that it was originally built as a hotel in 1908, but became a cinema in 1914, and has been one ever since. It's a real treasure, and I could quite understand why

nigelmouse said he often goes there as much for the cinema as for the films.

The film was very much worth it in itself this time, though. It uses a new animation technique, which involved filming the action with live actors, and then tracing over some, but not all, of the frames with animation, and using a kind of 3D equivalent of tweening to fill in the rest. The effect was really quite trippy - movements were realistic enough to make you expect full realism, but still unnervingly not-quite-real, while in some shots it was entirely clear that you were watching an animation, and in others (especially long shots), the line between animation and live action became very thin.

And all of this fitted in very well with the subject-matter of the film - a world of drugs paranoia and double-identities. Much of the story, in fact, is seen through the eyes of a character who is suffering increasingly impaired mental faculties through drug-use, and is hallucinating and confused. Whilst the viewer is allowed to work out what's actually going on by the end of the film, for much of it we're as confused about the nature of reality as he is, and the animation style adds a lot to that.

Definitely worth seeing once: probably even better a second time when you can benefit from being clearer about what's going on than the main character is.

Many thanks for all the printer-related advice yesterday, all those who commented. I am now the proud owner of an HP Photosmart 2575 All-in-One!

It is very cool and shiny, and does lots of lovely things. It scans, it copies, it reads and prints digital photos, and, most importantly, it prints out nice neat pages at super-fast speed, without hideous streaks across them.

*is satisfied with her purchase*

I really need to buy a printer. Quite urgently, actually. Please convey your printer-related advice to me via the poll below:

[Poll #757065]

I am also interested in views on the relative merits of straightforward inkjets, straightforward laser printers and 'all-in-ones' which copy and scan as well as printing. Do comment if you have thoughts on any of them!

My final Christmas present arrived today. It is a Canon PowerShot A620 Digital Camera.

When my Dad asked me what I wanted this year, I said that I wanted a digital camera, but that I wanted to get quite an upmarket one, so wasn't expecting him to pay for the whole thing. I can handle the money side of these things myself nowadays. No, what I wanted from him was his technical expertise. I told him what I wanted from my camera, and charged him with the task of identifying a suitable model.

He did some online research before I went up to Brum for Xmas, and then we spent a few hours browsing together and talking about what I wanted. The A620 is the result.

I've yet to actually put batteries in it, or anything like that, but depending on progress with the lecture I'm currently writing, I might have a little play later on tonight. I think it's safe to say that you can expect my first stumbling experiments with it to be appearing on this LJ some time soon.

The other day while taking money out at a cash-point, I noticed that there was rather more money in my bank account than I'd been expecting. The next time I had a spare moment, I went online to find out why, and saw that a payment of £477.34 had been made into my account by Queen's University Belfast.

This worried me for a few days. I've finished working there, and my last pay-cheque came in at the end of September. So why were they suddenly sending me more money? Was it a mistake? Or some kind of tax rebate based on the erroneous assumption that I was now unemployed?

Either way, my future looked likely to involve hassle and having to pay it back.

Until, that is, I actually got a pay-slip from them yesterday, where the money was described as a redundancy payment. Now, to be fair, I did get a letter from the Personnel department shortly before I left saying that staff who'd been employed by the University for a year or less were due a week's worth of their salary as a redundancy payment if their contract was terminated. But I got a lot of other rather nonsensical letters that were obviously being generated automatically by some sort of 'system' around the same time, and assumed that it didn't really apply to me, since I'd been on a fixed-term contract and had always known it was going to end when it did.

It seems, though, that this particular letter really was true. So, to celebrate, I popped round to Richer Sounds this afternoon, and bought something I've been meaning to buy for some time, and especially since I was in there the other day buying a coaxial cable and saw it there, winking at me on the shelf: a combination VCR / DVD player / recorder. This one, to be precise.

Is this machine teh sechs? Oh gods, yes! These are some of the benefits it has brought into my life:( Combi lust )Suffice it to say that I am feeling more than satisfied with my purchase. And kinda warm and gooey towards Queen's, of course.

Meanwhile, in a somewhat-related vein, I also feel that the world should know about the bill I got the other day from BT:

( What do you mean, not worth the paper it's written on? )

Now I'm going out. I look forward immensely to my DVD recording of this evening's episode of A Bit of Fry & Laurie when I return. Let's just hope I managed to set the timer correctly...

On Friday night, thanks to my brand new working DVD player, I was finally able to watch the DVD of Jinnah which I bought almost four months ago.

( My review of Jinnah )