2014 — 29 August: Friday
I hate to admit it1 but my first conscious thought this morning (even before a cuppa!) was "I hope my little toy shows up today". It's still shown as sitting in the hub waiting to go out on a delivery van. And has now been scanned three times. I hate being kept dangling on the hook for a delivery that needs my signature.
Bach helps :-)
I haven't...
... looked at the equivalent figures for lethal weapons, but nonlethal weapons in the US are a $1,600,000,000 business. It's enough to bring tears to your eyes. (Link.)
There's a TV programme...
... I've never actually seen, though I've been aware of it since it began in 1964. I'm also a fan of the work of its director (Michael Apted) who returns every seven years to update us on the progress through Life of various members of this cohort:
So I decided it might just be time for me to catch up. The DVDs are the final part of Wednesday's non-delivery. [Pause] My pre-breakfast NPR was briefly knocked off the air by a heavy downpour. The signal struggles in on the smaller of my two satellite dishes and doesn't always manage the trip.
When I read this...
... on page 11 of a new report from IBM into "Attitudes to Core Banking Transformation in Europe"...
... not only did I decide I need a new hobby, but it also occurred to me that I entered the IT industry a little over 40 years ago. [Pause] Meanwhile, my new toy has been bouncing around in the back of its delivery van for 4 hours so far this morning. I suppose that's a Good Thing. I shall prepare a celebratory "lemonses" cuppa.
Further pause
The rapacious little toy is now demanding its first dollop (632MB) of system Upgrade 1 some 10 minutes into my first little play with it. Battery is at 73% and charging. I'm not sure I'll also opt for Beta updates. This is primarily going to be a "media" consumer (ebooks, audio and video) device, with added email and web browsing. Not a games tablet.
No change there, then. Except it's neater, thinner, faster, smaller, lighter, and altogether a lot oomphier than my now quite venerable Asus 'Transformer'. Three years further along the Android Tablet road, I now have a lot clearer idea of what I personally want from such devices. Oddly, a keyboard hasn't turned out to be one of them. Right; time for a spot of lunch, methinks.
I've been feeding it from my online videos database. It's very sweet of my ISP to ping me with the news that I've now gobbled my way through 51.09% of my monthly download allowance. But since we've only got about 60 hours left in the month, I don't think there's much cause for alarm. If, by the way, I stuff too much data into it and it explodes, this is presumably what it will look like:
It's packed with some quite serious graphics computing power. [Pause] And, to my pleasant surprise, the viewing area of the display feels hardly any smaller than that of the Asus. It's finished feeding, the battery is also full, and it's time to go and investigate a refreshed biscuit barrel with anniversary couple Roger & Eileen. TTFN
[Refreshing Pause]
Getting down to a more detailed examination of the little toy, I've taught it how to access my LAN files, but have yet to put the VLC media player on it. So it can't currently cope with audio2 from .mkv files, nor can it manage 192KHz 24-bit FLAC audio files, but I'm not likely to want to listen to those on such tiny speakers, am I? An unexpected side effect is that, when I resume reading text on one of my 27" display screens, it looks relaxingly huge after a stint with the 8" screen. It's now slurping up the Upgrade 1.1 (another 80MB or so) that came out just yesterday.
Early days, heh? The VLC Beta seems to work fine, and retrieves audio from the previously silent .mkv files. Excellent. Crikey, it's getting quite dark out there. When did that happen? Oh well, nearly time for my last trick: Kindle. Then I can have a look at what Mr Postie dropped off earlier. Or, just maybe, eat something first. My word, it's all 'go' some days.