Month: June 2012

My One Star Review Addiction

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I confess I am addicted. Whenever I venture into the Mac’s or iOS App Stores I have to select the Most Critical reviews option and read the bizarre one star reviews.  I have mentioned some, such as for Pixelmator, Panogaea and a MIDI controller, in the past.  It is a fascinating world where people plainly do not know how to use their computer, complain that an app lacks a specific feature although no one ever suggested that such a feature was included or are just plain stupid and are willing to publicly voice their own shortcomings and/or put the blame on the developers.

Apple’s [wikipop search=”Mac_OS_X_Lion”]OS X 10.7 (known as Lion)[/wikipop] has been around for almost a year. Every new Mac sold in that time uses it as do the countless older Macs which have been updated.  It is used every day by millions of people without any problem.  Yet we are still being treated to delights such as…

What can one say? Perhaps if the reviewer had persevered for more than an hour they may have eventually found the View menu (to clarify: this contains options on how you want to View things) and the option to Show Status Bar on the bottom of the window…

 

And what about Quick Look with the Space Bar?  What about it?  It is much improved with Lion…

Thanks for sharing.  My addiction is satiated for today.

 

After posting this this morning… a few hours later Serendipity kicks in.

The Olympic Torch Passes By

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An early rise on a grey drizzly Sunday morning to cycle down the road to catch the Olympic Torch as it passes through [wikipop search=”Chorlton-cum-Hardy”]Chorlton[/wikipop] on its way to [wikipop search=”2012_Summer_Olympics”]London[/wikipop] (the long way round). There was an impressive crowd given the hour and weather. The anticipation built…

…some succumbed to the freebies from the corporate sponsors…

…and then there it was…

The BBC’s excellent TorchCam dutifully captured the whole event…

 

….and my orange clad elbow…

Alas no one on the [wikipop search=”Greater_Manchester_bus_route_86″]86[/wikipop] was in the mood to wave back at the cheering crowd as they slowly followed the torch.

Scratched Pages

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I have had a “Coming Soon” page up on the Scratch sub domain for a year or two. I had not bothered much with it after learning that the update to the splendid Scratch was going to be using Flash which was so very wrong. Even Adobe seem to be nudging towards other more appealing options.

As there has been a noticeable increase in visitors looking for Scratch related pages lately I have started remaking them. Just why there should be such an increase is a mystery. Possibly related to the publicity surrounding the launch of the Raspberry Pi one of those “educational” curiosities where you push your computer to one side so you can use the Raspberry Pi, assuming you have a suitable power supply, keyboard, monitor etc. to work with it. Alternatively you could just use Python and Scratch etc. on your computer.

No doubt my humble contributions will be modified and scrapped several times but I will have fun making the videos and the music to accompany them wp-monalisa icon

[soundcloud url=”http://api.soundcloud.com/tracks/49859543″ params=”auto_play=false&show_artwork=true&color=557fc4″ width=”100%” height=”166″ iframe=”true” /]

Tune Totes and PlayTapes

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While rummaging around some back-up discs I came across the Tune Tote movie I made a couple of years ago. The audio comes from a show that [wikipop]Frank Zappa[/wikipop] did with Les Carter on [wikipop search=”KPPC (defunct)”]KPPC Radio[/wikipop] in 1968:

A longer audio extract from the show reveals Zappa’s part time job at [wikipop]Wallichs Music City[/wikipop] (around 1965) and his thoughts on the [wikipop]PlayTape[/wikipop] audio cartridge players: