Year: 2015

Dara Ó Briain’s Crowd Tickler

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dara6
Dara Ó Briain at the 2014 Festival of Curiosity, by Sandra on Flickr. CC-licensed.

Wednesday last week marked 30 months of marriage for Christine and I. Co-incidentally, the Irish comic Dara Ó Briain was performing his latest show Crowd Tickler in Halifax on the same day, and a handful of tickets were still available the week before, so we went to see him.

This was the second time we’d seen Dara in Halifax; we also saw his previous show, Craic Dealer, a few years ago. If I’m honest, I was a bit disappointed with Craic Dealer, having not found it as funny as some of Dara’s other material. We’d seen This is the Show (or ‘TITS’ for short) broadcast on TV, which is worth watching as and when it’s available, and we always make time to watch Mock the Week when it’s on.

Fortunately, Crowd Tickler is a great show. It’s part-improvised, based on interactions with the audience and some local factual knowledge that Dara has gleamed either through research or previous visits. If you get front row seats to one of Dara’s gigs, expect to be asked a number of questions throughout the show. Thankfully, Dara isn’t the sort of comedian to utterly ridicule you but there may be a few laughs at your expense.

My favourite routine was about TV dramas, particularly on streaming services like Netflix, and how there are so many and that they can sometimes tend towards the utterly ridiculous – ‘a Scandinavian crime drama about a detective who smells crime scenes!’. Which was funny in itself, until Dara pointed out that this is basically the plot of Marvel’s Daredevil.

And then he went about improvising our own crime drama, based on audience suggestions. So we ended up with a detective with Tourette’s who used to be a taxidermist, investigating a ping pong player who killed someone with a rollerskate.

Another of my favourite routines of his was about tunnel boring machines. Doesn’t sound like the most interesting subject but if you see people tweeting him ‘Poor Chuggy!’ after a gig, then you’ll know why.

Crowd Tickler is almost at the end of its run with only a few more shows left – Dara has been touring it for over a year now. There’s just a couple of UK dates, a few nights in Dublin, and then he’ll be off to tickle various European nations in the new year. Fortunately, a DVD of the show is due out in a little over a week (sponsored link), and based on what we saw, it should be a very good show to watch.

Brewing my own beer with Brew Barrel

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The Brew Barrel kit - a barrel and a box with ingredients

The folks at Brew Barrel approached me to review their eponymous home brewing kit. For £25, you can get everything you need to make 8 pints of beer, with a choice of different hops and flavouring to make different styles. It’s made by a German company, which, considering that Germany is famed for its beers, means it should be good.

The Brew Barrel kit includes a five litre barrel, and the ingredients – hops, yeast, flavourings and rather a lot of malt syrup. To make the beer, you combine all of these in the barrel, along with lots of water. Instructions are, of course, provided. It takes around 10 to 15 minutes of preparation initially, but after that it doesn’t require much attention – you have to turn the barrel after 24 hours, and then refrigerate it after five days. Two days later (so a total of seven days since starting), your beer is ready to serve from a small tap at the bottom of the barrel.

A photo of the Brew Barrel ingredients

I decided to brew an IPA, which is one of my favourite beer styles. Putting it together was quite easy – all the components are numbered so that you can be sure of the required order. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get the barrel in the fridge – our fridge is rather small, and full. As you have to keep the barrel upright, I would have needed to extensively re-arrange the fridge and get rid of the contents, which I doubt my wife would be best pleased about. Especially as she doesn’t like beer.

So when it came to trying the beer, it probably wasn’t at its best. Despite this, I liked it – it was rather sweet and very, very foamy, but drinkable and certainly nicer than some other homebrews that I have tried in the past. Once opened, the beer in the Brew Barrel should keep for around two weeks, if kept refrigerated.

Should you buy one? If you want to brew your own beer, but are completely new to it, then yes – the Brew Barrel keeps it simple for you and doesn’t require too much effort. Those with existing home brew experience may find it useful to have all of the necessary materials in one package, but could feel limited as it’s aimed more at novices. Financially it’s probably more expensive than just buying eight pints of beer to consume at home, but where’s the fun in that?

The trouble with relying on free things

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Screenshot of the announcement that Sunrise is no longer in development

For some years now, I’ve been a user of Sunrise. It started off as a daily email with your events from Google Calendar and Facebook, but over time it evolved into a series of mobile and desktop apps, and a web site, where you could combine all of your various calendars together in one, intuitive interface. This meant that you could have events from Google, iCloud, and any Exchange server, all combined together with your Evernote reminders, gigs from Songkick, Eventbrite bookings, TripIt itineraries and more besides.

It was great, but at no point did Sunrise ever ask for money. Surely it must have cost money to run, and funding from venture capital only goes so far. So I wasn’t all that surprised when, earlier this year, Sunrise announced its acquisition by Microsoft. At the time, they promised to keep everything running, and for free.

At first, there were promising developments. Integration with Wunderlist, another recent Microsoft acquisition, a new keyboard for iOS and Android designed to help you plan meetings whilst in another app, and support for the Apple Watch are all additions made following Microsoft’s takeover. But then the Sunrise team dropped a bombshell this week: development of all of Sunrise’s apps has ceased.

Sunrise’s development team have joined the team working on Outlook for mobile devices. Mobile Outlook was also the result of an outside purchase by Microsoft, this time of Acompli. As you’d expect, the aim of the integration of the Sunrise developers is to improve Outlook’s calendaring capabilities, and, sure enough, a new version of Outlook for iOS was released this week. There’s a bit more background on the Microsoft Office blog, and an update for Android is due soon too.

As it stands, Outlook isn’t yet capable of doing all of the things that Sunrise can do, and so the Sunrise apps will still be available to download for a little while longer. But once Outlook has fully absorbed Sunrise’s features, I expect the apps will be withdrawn.

For me, this is a bit of a bummer. I used both Sunrise and Outlook on my iPhone and iPad; Sunrise to manage all of my calendars, and Outlook for my work email. I deliberately keep my work and personal email separate, and, crucially, don’t have notifications turned on for work messages. My job doesn’t require me to be reachable out of hours; therefore, whilst it’s useful to be able to use my phone to access work email whilst at work or in an emergency, I want to be able to completely ignore it away from work. But I do like to be able to see my work calendars outside of work, and get a holistic view of my diary across both personal and work calendars.

I won’t be able to do this once Sunrise has gone. If I make Outlook my primary calendar app, then it’ll have all of my work emails in there, whether I want to see them or not. Outlook on iOS, as it stands, is still an email client first and foremost; opening the app takes you to your email inbox by default.

So, reluctantly, I decided to take the nuclear option and delete Sunrise from my devices. Sure, it’ll carry on working for a while – probably. But it’ll disappear eventually and I don’t want to be hanging on to a product during its deathrattle.

For now, I’ve gone back to the built-in iOS calendar, which is okay, I guess. Part of the reason why I switched to Sunrise was its superior interface when compared to the stock iOS calendar in iOS 6 and below. More recent versions have been less ugly, but it’s still not got a great user experience even in iOS 9.1, in my opinion. I’m open to suggestions of alternatives – I may give Fantastical a shot, which is £3.99 on iPhone and £7.99 on iPad, both sold separately.

I suppose I shouldn’t have put so much faith in a free service which has no obvious income from users or advertisers. And I think that’s a good lesson in general – if you can’t work out the business model for something, it’s probably best not to rely on it.

Taking a Thames Clipper

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This is the third in a series of posts about what we did on our recent trip to London.

After lunch, we decided to head back towards central London. We could have caught the DLR from Cutty Sark and gone back the way we came, but instead, we caught a Thames Clipper waterbus from Greenwich Pier. The Thames Clippers are a fleet of catamarans that run up and down the River Thames in central London, and are currently sponsored by MBNA. Recently, they have started accepting Oyster cards as payment, and so we thought we’d give them a try, seeing as none of us had been on one before.

Although they operate on water, as they are catamarans rather than regular boats, they’re actually very quick. Certainly quicker than catching a bus, and probably competitive with the Tube – worth knowing the next time there’s a strike or signalling problems. You can sit outside at the back, but there’s a large amount of indoor seating too, and the seats are very comfortable – far better than most other forms of public transport. There’s even on board bar serving coffee, snacks and alcohol. And whilst I’m not usually one for getting sea sick, the Thames Clippers are pretty smooth and so even if you normally get queasy on a ferry, you shouldn’t have issues with these.

Tower Bridge

As well as being quick, you can get a very different view of London’s landmarks. We travelled from Greenwich to London Bridge Pier, which took us under Tower Bridge and offered a square on view. It was worth it to take photos.

The two main downsides of the Thames Clippers are waiting times and cost. Although they are regular, we just missed one at Greenwich and it was around 15 minutes until the next one. Whilst that’s more frequent than many bus and rail services outside the capital, it doesn’t compare so favourably with buses or the Tube.

It’s also rather on the pricey side. I think we paid £8 for our journey on our Oyster cards, which is significantly more expensive than other forms of public transport. Whilst people can and do commute to work on the Thames Clippers services, they’re really aimed at tourists who are happier to pay a higher price. Still, you get a comfy seat, a fast journey, and get to see parts of London from new angles, so it’s worth the extra cost.

The Old Brewery, Greenwich

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Lunch at the old brewery

This is the second in a series of posts about what we did on our recent trip to London.

After visiting the Cutty Sark, we took the short walk to The Old Brewery. Originally, this was the brewery of the Old Royal Naval College, opened in 1836 in Greenwich. In 2010, the Meantime Brewing Company moved in; at first, this was their main brewery but nowadays most of their beers are brewed elsewhere. Some brewing equipment remains, but the rest of the brewery is now a bar and café, owned by Meantime.

Meantime is one of my favourite brewers, and I’ve sampled most of their range of beers before. So I was pleased to have the opportunity to visit, even if it was just to have lunch in the café. As you’d expect, the full range of Meantime’s beers are available, either on tap or in bottles, and we had a happy couple of hours getting merry on good beer.

A northerner like me would find the food and drink a little pricey, but then it is in London, and slap bang in the middle of a UNESCO World Heritage Site to boot. Meantime’s beers are on the expensive end of the spectrum anyway.

The Meantime Brewing Company had humble beginnings, back in 2005, and was one of the first ‘craft beer’ breweries in the UK. However, this year it was taken over by SABMiller, the world’s second largest brewing conglomerate. This has seen some of its production moved to the Netherlands, where its beers are produced alongside Grolsch. SABMiller is itself in the process of being acquired by its largest rival, Anheuser-Busch InBev.

Whilst Meantime may no longer have its hipster credentials, they still produce good beer, and The Old Brewery is worth popping in to if you’re in Greenwich. You may struggle to get a seat at lunchtime, although there is plenty of outdoor seating if it’s a nice day.

Going back in time

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Hebden Bridge Millennium Clock

Yesterday, clocks in Britain went back an hour, marking the end of British Summer Time. We’re now following Greenwich Mean Time, through the winter until the 27th March 2016.

It used to be that people would have to change every clock manually, when daylight savings time started or ended. But as computers and devices got smarter, they could be pre-programmed to change the time automatically.

My parents’ first PC originally didn’t change the time by itself, as it wasn’t supported in Windows 3.11. But we later upgraded to Windows 95, and I was pleasantly surprised to see a message one morning on the screen, telling me that Windows had automagically changed the clock for us. Later versions of Windows just did the time change on the quiet, and most other operating systems do the same nowadays.

We’re now in that stage of technological innovation where some of our devices can change the time automatically, but not all. Our phones, computers and tablets are all capable of it. Our Freesat satellite TV set-top box just needed turning off and on again to update the time. Even my Fitbit Charge changed automatically too, which was nice.

I still had to manually change the central heating controls, though. We’re planning to get a new central heating system sometime in the next couple of years and I expect we’ll get a smart thermostat which will have daylight savings capability, so changing the time for heating won’t be an issue in future.

The only other device that I had to change was our basic analogue clock in the kitchen. Short of wiring up some kind of Arduino device to it, I doubt I’d ever be able to make it change automatically.

Still, it’s nice not having to spend all morning re-programming things like we did in the past.

The Cutty Sark

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A photo of the Cutty Sark in Greenwich, London

Slightly later than planned, here is the second in my series of blog posts about our recent trip to London.

On the Saturday, we went to visit the Cutty Sark, a ship in a dry dock in Greenwich, east London. The ship was built in the late 19th century, initially to deliver tea from Asia to Britain. In 1954, the ship was moved to a dry dock in Greenwich, and became a tourist attraction. I first visited it with my parents in the 1990s.

In 2006, the Cutty Sark was closed to visitors to allow it to be restored; forty years of standing on its keel meant that the ship began to sag. Despite a major fire, the ship re-opened as a museum in 2012, now raised on a series of supports. The dry dock has been glassed in, to make it an all-weather attraction, and to mimic the effect of the ship on water. This also means that visitors can walk under the ship for the first time, and there’s now a café at the bottom of the dry dock.

The tour starts inside the ship’s hold, with various displays telling the history of the ship and the cargo it carried. Some of these are interactive, and I particularly enjoyed the bench seats which simulate the swaying of the boat on rough sees. You then climb up to the top deck, which has been extensively restored, and you can pop into the captain’s quarters.

At £13.50 per head for adults, it is a little pricey for somewhere that most people will spend a couple of hours at, but discounts are available. We used a 2-for-1 voucher from Days Out Guide as we’d travelled to London by train. Cutty Sark DLR station is just around the corner so it’s easy to reach by public transport.

It was nice to see the Cutty Sark again, having been as a child. The restoration has been done very well, and the glass enclosure is a nice touch.

No, Bradford is not the worst place to live in the UK

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Bradford Town Hall

Yesterday’s newspapers covered the results of a ‘quality of life’ survey that stated that Edinburgh is the best place to live in the UK, and Bradford is the worst. Whilst I’ll agree that Edinburgh is a wonderful (if expensive) city, there is no way that Bradford is the worst place in the UK. And I’m speaking as a former Bradford resident who still works there and travels to the city at least five days a week.

The survey came from a press release put out by uSwitch.com. uSwitch is not a thinktank, local authority or university, or indeed any kind of organisation involved in research. It’s actually a price comparison web site, designed to help you find cheaper deals on phone, internet and energy contracts. So clearly, this ‘survey’ is about getting publicity and press coverage, rather than a serious piece of research.

Bradford is apparently “let down by low disposable income, low employment, high rent and crowded schools”, according to the press release. There are issues with schools in Bradford – as someone who works in education, I’m very much aware of this. But I dispute the high rent claims. uSwitch claims that average rents are £92.60 per week, but a few minutes on Rightmove showed a wide range of properties for less than half of this.

Whilst disposable incomes may be low, so is the cost of living – food is cheap, as is public transport.

Next month sees the long-awaited opening of Westfield’s Broadway shopping centre, which will bring hundreds of new jobs to the city. So hopefully the unemployment rate in the area will continue to fall as it has been doing recently.

In 2007, Bradford was named Britain’s greenest city and is home to several large public parks, including the award-winning Lister Park, Horton Park, Peel Park and the new City Park in the city centre. You can get out into the countryside quite quickly, unlike in many other cities. And my employer, the University of Bradford, recently won a Green Flag award for its campus.

Just this week, Bradford was named Curry Capital of Britain for a record fifth year in a row.

Hull also did poorly in the ‘survey’, coming second from bottom. This is despite it being named City of Culture 2017.

In essence though, is there really anything to be gained from highlighting the ‘worst’ cities in the UK? Sure, it gets a bit of publicity for the company releasing the survey. But it then leaves those cities and its employers and representatives with the job of mopping up the damage to their reputation. It’s rather mean of companies like uSwitch to publish these ‘surveys’, especially when they don’t seem to understand the implications for the cities named.

In any case, the ‘best’ or ‘worst’ city to live in depends on a lot of factors, some of which will be unique to each person. Given the choice between Bradford, and, say Bracknell in Berkshire, I’d happily choose Bradford. But there are also places like Sowerby Bridge, where I now live, that now meet my needs better than Bradford does. A survey based on a few generalised measurements isn’t actually all that helpful.

New post on Medium: Bluetooth on iOS

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I’ve written another post on Medium. It’s just a short two-minute read, but covers an issue I’ve been experiencing in iOS as I’ve amassed more Bluetooth devices: how on earth do you work out which one is which when they’re all called things like ‘SE50’ and ‘MM256’?

I’ve chosen to post it on Medium in the hope that it might get exposed to a slightly larger audience than usual. I think my previous piece on Medium got a little more exposure than it would have done normally – it didn’t exactly ‘go viral’ but I get the impression that more people saw it than if I had just posted it here on my blog.

If you enjoy my Medium pieces, then please ‘recommend’ them.

Losing the language of love

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Given with love

I’m working through the article that I’ve saved to Pocket over the past few weeks and came across a poignant piece called Losing the Language of Love (Web Archive Link). It’s about how you develop a special dialect when you’re close to someone for a long time, whether it’s a partner, friend or family member, and how it feels when that person is no longer a part of your life anymore.

It reminded me of the almost three and a half years that I spent with Hari, my first girlfriend. Over the years we developed our own dialect between us, much of it derived from gamer speak – we’d call each other ‘noob’ if we did something wrong, or use ‘zomg!’ as an expression of surprise. And, like in most relationships, we had pet names for each other that made no sense to anyone else.

We split up in March 2009. As well as losing a partner, I also lost a reason to use those words – they didn’t really mean anything to anyone else. And I’d feel uncomfortable using them with Christine – after all, I see them as relics from an old relationship that didn’t work out.

But then Christine and I also have our own words. Like most couples, we have our pet names for each other, which in both cases is ‘Squishy‘, because we’re just that sick-inducingly cute. And, by extension, our pet name for our unborn child is ‘the Squishlet’, even though we’ve basically settled upon a name for it based on its presumed gender. Plus, there are other words and phrases that we use that are probably meaningless to others.

When a relationship with someone close to you ends, it isn’t just the physical things that disappear. It’s also the less tangible things like words and phrases, that meant so much to you and your significant other. To others, they are just that – words and phrases with no context.