Rick's b.log - entry 2014/01/01

HAPPY NEW YEAR

Firstly, I revisited the entry on building RISC OS from sources to correct a few things and provide more up to date information.

Not content with that, I decided to see to a number of issues on the blog itself that had been bugging me for a while.

• There was an obscure bugette with the watermarking that was causing problems with the GIF images. So I fixed this, and now the RSS logo reappears where it ought to be.
• The damaged "etc" icon in the right column has been replaced with a good copy.
• Speaking of icons, the "Navi:" text in mobile mode no longer carries with it its black (!) background. Now it is correctly transparent.
• I have reverted to an older style of table code (tr/td instead of caption) for the calendar title - now it renders correctly on the RISC OS version of NetSurf.
• The problem where trying to search when in mobile mode thought you were trying to add a comment... fixed.

Bye bye 2013!

• People in my profession had to ditch their own private healthcare top-up and take one part-funded by the company. Obligatory. To say this has been horribly corrupted would be quite the understatement. I'll write about this soon.
• I bundled my telephone/internet/mobile into a single package. It is still horribly expensive at €60/month but that's cheaper than separates. I also got myself an Xperia U phone which is a bit of a love-hate relationship. Namely, nice hardware, impressive capabilities for a bargain phone, but why saddle it with the burden of only having an unexpandable 4GB onboard? Surely in this day and age it wouldn't break the bank to offer 8GB or 16GB?
• I finally got MIDI working via USB on modern RISC OS. It isn't perfect (far from it) but it works. I have asked about the possibility of open-sourcing MelIDI (since it is no longer officially available) but after a brief discussion, no further communication. Fingers crossed!
• I discovered a KFC within a not entirely insane distance from me. Well, come on, one gets tired of McBurgers...
• I discovered Google Navigation happily directing people down an on ramp, and then backwards into oncoming traffic likely to be doing 90-110km/h. Thankfully this has since been corrected, but via a somewhat tortuous route involving volunteer map editors. Really Google ought to provide an "urgent response team" to deal with issues like these before some poor bastard actually tries following the instructions...
• I wrote a number of articles on music theory, but I still suck at composing. Pffffft!
• The EU introduced a new five euro note, and nobody noticed until they were holding it and asking "is this real?".
• Third time lucky with the Livebox. ;-)
• I won an iPad.
• Chūnibyō! YES!
  Madoka Magica! HELL YES!
• I finally cleared a nice corner of my room. Only ten years late...
• Speaking of which, I finally got around to building RISC OS from scratch. It wasn't as hard as I thought it would be. It just took forever.
• I made four Christmas stop-motion animations in varying degrees of suckiness.
• There might be a Yuki animation coming (YES!).
• Doctor Who messed epically with established canon. And this is a lot in a series where it is just accepted that "canon" is a squishy pliable timey-wimey thing.
• Thanks to Windows' connection sharing, I'm looking at stuff in NetSurf on the Pi. I just wish my patch cable was longer than 50cm, though!

And elsewhere in the world:

• Some Muslims still hate us. Nothing new there, then.
• The Arab Spring has not finished yet; Egypt still in chaos.
• It really sucks to be Syrian. Especially when everybody is ready to step up and invade and, oh wait, we have a dentist appointment. Some other time then...
• The RaspberryPi went big-scale production and sold loads, just proving you can make something useful for less than fifty quid.
• Google Glass. A technical solution in search of a problem. Wear this, you'll be known as a Glasshole. Anybody remember the Sinclair C5?
• A race driver survived years on the track, only to mess up on the piste.
• Pussies Rioted in Russia. Or something.
• Microsoft finally got rid of Ballmer, but not before pushing the WTF-UI? version of Windows 8 out the door. Please, take it back, make it look like a desktop OS. If we want something that looks like computing for kiddies, we'd run Unity (and feel smug about not having paid €€€s for the privilege of not being able to find the command line...).
• Talking of which, all hail Stephen Elop, who all but killed Nokia before selling the rotting carcass to Microsoft.
• The NSA has already read this article. Even before I've finished writing it.
• Typhoons are nasty. Really really nasty. Just ask Haiyan.
• Obamacare, otherwise known as The World's Most Powerful Country Attempting To Do Healthcare Like Most Europeans Take For Granted.
• A new Pope arrives, the old one most likely had his eyes opened a little too wide.
• America runs out of money, overreacts, then finds some spare change down the back of the sofa.
• ...and the rest of us got to find out what the world "furlough" means. It isn't a way of ploughing a field, it is actually a clever way of using more federal employees to keep parks and attractions shut than would have been there keeping them open.
• Twitter goes public, Facebook goes to the dogs.
• Google tries harder than ever to get people to accept Google+. So don't expect to see comments from me on YouTube any more, neither will I enable commenting on new videos.
• If you invested in bitcoin, you probably have millions now. Or hundreds. Or billions. Or... hell, pick a number.
• Nelson Mandela died. Maggie died. Nelson Mandela died. Hugo Chavez died. Nelson Mandela died. Peter O'Toole died. Nelson Mandela died. Ray Dolby died. Nelson Mandela died. Tom Clancy died. Nelson Mandela died. That bloke from Glee died. Nelson Mandela died. Tony Soprano died. Nelson Mandela died.
• The Oxford Dictionary's word of the year is "selfie". Dumbasses with cameras have been taking stupid photos of themselves for years, only recently has anybody come up with an equally dumb word to describe it.
• Yahoo! made its logo italicised, like Yahoo! and messed up its webmail, twice. This would have been a horrible thing, save for the fact that everybody is being a sheep and following iOS7 into embracing big areas of white space and removing most of the visual cues that people take for granted in a UI. Brilliant.
• It isn't enough to have Android in phones and tablets. You aren't hip unless you have a smart watch. Strange, my criteria for a smart watch is one that can accurately tell the time and runs for years on a battery the size of a piece of gravel.
• #you #will #never #see #idiotic #hashtags #on #my #blog. As you might have noticed, I find writing coherent thoughts in 140 characters to be a bit of a challenge. Twitter just isn't for me.
  In a discussion on ZFC, it was said that there are really interesting, knowledgeable, and useful people to follow on Twitter; but nobody had a satisfactory answer of how to find such people in a sea of dirge. It's like trying to find an interesting programme on satellite TV by looking at the EPG listing ten channels at a time in two-hour chunks. Life is just too damn short.
• The Internet is full of paedophiles. Oh, wait, that's just The Daily Fail. Carry on then...
• Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. Samsung. Apple. It's like watching tennis.
• Epic apocalyptic films. From the comical The World's End to the serious Oblivion and the overblown (missed opportunity) Elysium and the awesome-in-so-many-ways-it-hurts Ender's Game.
• Meanwhile, a zombie actioner is still a big sell in TV programming. Zombies. They're like the new vampires. Well, vampires used to be cool. Then Stephenie Meyer came along...
• Hollande, the French President, bereft of ideas and having failed to make much of an impact, is planning to go ahead with taxing rich people some ridiculous percentage. I can see some people following Depardieu out the door...
• Japan will be hosting the Olympics soon. Possibly a bit too soon for me to read any useful Kanji, but at least there is hope that this will bring an increased range of programming on the country, and hopefully of a better calibre than "oh look, a sex hotel!" stuff. Hey - NHK, BBC, I'll go do a programme with you. I find it fascinating that a country that prides itself on being technologically advanced still depends upon the fax machine. That schools and homes barely have heating, and how you're more likely to find an early Pentium running a DOS session in Windows95 than something...you know...modern. It is a real clash of modern and antiquated, sitting side by side. Tell me that's not interesting. Oh yeah, cute girls are an added asset. (^_^)
• Being a pensioner in England is like being a pensioner in an Aphex Twin video.
• HMV? Blockbuster? Jessops? All failed to notice the 'net revolution in time.
• RBS. Fail. Fail. Fail. Oh so much Fail.
• The BBC just keeps on shooting itself in the foot. We might have thought this was the worst thing this year, and then we saw the English team's delusions of winning The Ashes and what may well go down in history as the worst cricket ever played by so-called professional players.

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