The northlondonhippy

Archive for May, 2010

I just want to share a few obser­va­tions about the iPad, now that I’ve had a cou­ple of days to fon­dle mine. Believe the hype.

I’m not going to give you a full review of it, there’s already been count­less detailed run-throughs of the iPad from peo­ple who’ve had them for ages. I got mine on Fri­day, UK launch day, so I know I’m late to the iPad party.

The first thing I really noticed was how ridicu­lously thin it is, its easy to hold but a lit­tle heav­ier than you might expect. Its also easy to sit in a com­fort­able nor­mal posi­tion on the sofa with it propped in your lap, bal­anced with a light one handed grip.

What I fore­see is a mar­ket for lap-pillow like stands, that keep it at a com­fort­able view­ing angle, while let­ting it rest securely with­out using your hands. For watch­ing films and videos, some­thing sim­ple like that would be ideal.

The screen is bright and extra­or­di­nar­ily sharp, hi-res colour pho­tographs look unbe­liev­ably crisp and clear with vivid, deep colours. Video also looks good, though its all been in stan­dard def for me so far.

Web­sites fill the screen smoothly, there’s no need to pinch and zoom to see or read any­thing. Like the iPhone, the inter­face is respon­sive and smooth.

It is a fin­ger­print mag­net, more so than my iPhone 3GS, which shares the same oleo­pho­bic coat­ing, but doesn’t seem to be as notice­able because of its smaller size. Keep a microfi­bre cloth nearby, or a lens cloth from any cam­era shop.

Apple’s case (or some­thing sim­i­lar) is absolutely an essen­tial acces­sory. The Apple Case for iPad is very well designed, its sim­ple to secure the iPad inside it. It is very thin and doesn’t add much addi­tional weight, but pro­vides extra pro­tec­tion and flex­i­bil­ity, allow­ing you to posi­tion the iPad for upright, wide screen view­ing, or angling it on a desk for more com­fort­able typ­ing. Its folio-style, with a flap that cov­ers the screen while dou­bling as a sort of reen­forced kick-stand. Its very good.

There are already a lot of iPad opti­mised apps out there, I’ll men­tion a few quickly that have grabbed my attention:

- Wun­der Radio — an inter­net radio sta­tion aggre­ga­tor that seems to offer just about every inter­net sta­tion in the world. It also uses GPS to gen­er­ate a list of local sta­tions and it did very well find­ing them around me. The audio streams are high qual­ity, there’s iTunes tag­ging for sta­tions that sup­port it and the inter­face is clean and easy to use.

- Air Video — I know this one is on the top of many people’s lists and for good rea­son, it works very well. Air Video let’s you stream just about any video file from a Mac on the same net­work, con­vert­ing the video on the fly as you watch. I’ve streamed .avi’s, MP4’s and hi-def MKV’s from my Mac Mini to the iPad already with­out any lag or drop out. You do need to install a small piece of soft­ware on the host Mac to act as server and point it to your video direc­tory in the Finder, but once you do that the iPad finds the server auto­mat­i­cally. From there you nav­i­gate to your film or tv show, and after a very quick buffer time of 5–10 sec­onds, the video is deliv­ered to your iPad. I already had this one for the iPhone and a recent update made it iPad friendly too.

- News­Rack — has been my RSS reader of choice for a while on my iPhone, with its sim­ple inter­face and abil­ity to sync with my Google Feed Reader account, it works very well. Now opti­mised for the iPad, the same app is serv­ing dou­ble duty for me, at no extra cost. News­Rack uses the extra screen real estate to good effect, giv­ing you a left col­umn for your feeds and a large read­ing win­dow on the right side. You can also open links within the app.

- Pin­BallHD — bought this one yes­ter­day on the strength of the reviews and sales in the iTunes app store, glad I did. The graph­ics and game­play blew me away and am find­ing it very addic­tive. Haven’t really played or bought many games for my iPhone, but I can see how much bet­ter the iPad is for play­ing any­thing because of its larger size.

The iPad is prob­a­bly more dis­rup­tive than any­one has realised yet, its an entirely new class of device. Other man­u­fac­tures will be try­ing to catch up, this form of com­put­ing is going to explode in pop­u­lar­ity. It can replace so many dif­fer­ent devices, not just lap­tops or net­books, but portable radios, portable TVs and DVD play­ers, MP3 play­ers, portable game con­soles, e-readers and prob­a­bly a mil­lion other things I haven’t even thought of yet. It is so thin, so light, so easy to carry along with you, the temp­ta­tion to never put it down is immense.

Is it an essen­tial? No, not if you already have some sort of com­puter, but as lux­u­ries go, it pretty damn use­ful. If you’re think­ing about tak­ing the plunge, all you need to do is spend 5 min­utes using one and you will be ready to dive in deep.

SKY ONE on Mon­day 24th May 2010 at 5am Lon­don time, its being broad­cast at the same time view­ers on the West Coast of Amer­ica will be watch­ing. How cool is that?

I will be awake and watch­ing, what about you?

You might not have heard, but there’s a gen­eral elec­tion here in the UK on Thursday.

That is, you might not have heard if you’ve been in a coma, but even if you’ve been semi-conscious, it would be dif­fi­cult to have missed it with the blan­ket cov­er­age avail­able on every media platform.

This has been one of the most inter­est­ing cam­paigns in decades and one of the most enter­tain­ing. With just a few days ago, there is no cer­tain out­come and pre­dic­tions vary widely on what sort of gov­ern­ment we might be wak­ing up to come Fri­day morning.

Cool by me, I enjoy uncer­tainty and I like the up-in-the-air-ness of the whole thing. I watch the daily polls rise and fall with amuse­ment, because any sen­si­ble per­son knows the only poll that mat­ters is the offi­cial one on Thurs­day. All the rest are just idle spec­u­la­tion and spin.

The truth is, you can’t really trust most of the polls, because the data is weighted and manip­u­lated before it is released, usu­ally to reflect the bias and opin­ion of the media out­let who com­mis­sioned it. Yes, I’m look­ing at you News Inter­na­tional, your stilted cov­er­age and unbri­dled analin­gus per­formed on the Tories has been shame­ful. Ol’ Rupert Mur­doch anointed David Cameron as the cho­sen one and all of his news­pa­pers and his TV news chan­nel went about craft­ing a nar­ra­tive that tried to assure an out­right Con­ser­v­a­tive victory.

How’s that work­ing out?

Pos­si­bly not as well as they had hoped, as the polls sug­gest the Tories are only slightly ahead, with strong pos­si­bil­ity of no out­right major­ity. Ooops.

I think one of the biggest sur­prises for me in the cam­paign is how dis­ap­point­ing Cameron’s per­for­mances have been, espe­cially at the leader’s debates. I really expected Dia­mond Dave to walk this elec­tion, but he is not nearly as charis­matic or mag­netic a speaker as I would have expected. Part of their poor show­ing in the polling is down to this.

This elec­tion isn’t about pol­icy, though of course it should be, but it is about per­son­al­ity. Cameron has revealed him­self as lack­ing in that department.

And speak­ing of some­one com­pletely void of per­son­al­ity, have you caught Gor­don Brown lately? Just look at his forced, fake, uncom­fort­able smile; I have a the­ory (that I’d be happy never prov­ing) that he has the same expres­sion on his face when he smiles as he does when he is tak­ing a dump.

I have never been a fan of Gor­don Brown.

OK, that’s an under­state­ment, I detest him and have him a vocal and vit­ri­olic critic of him since he assumed power. I can never for­give him for pub­licly labelling cannabis a “deadly drug”, prop­a­gat­ing other false claims about it and ignor­ing all the advice, sci­en­tific and oth­er­wise by re-classifying cannabis to Class B.

Gor­don con­tin­ues to go on and on about the “global finan­cial melt­down” which he claims can only be fixed if he remains in office. Well, there’s some logic to that, because as he was Chan­cel­lor for so many years, he must feel very respon­si­ble for the mess he cre­ated and he would like to mop it up. No thanks.

Brown really showed how deeply nasty he is to the core, with his shame­ful treat­ment of Gillian Duffy, who by all accounts seems to be the sort of salt-of-the-earth Labour Party sup­porter that has kept them in the game for a very long time. If he treats his base with this much con­tempt and scorn, imag­ine what he must think of the undecided.

I feel sorry for the poor saps who have to media-manage Brown on a daily basis. What­ever you’re get­ting paid, its prob­a­bly not enough by half. Wran­gling that sour­puss from appear­ance to appear­ance would destroy the soul of the strongest PR flack.

The one good thing about Brown’s piss-poor per­for­mance dur­ing this cam­paign has been my absolute vin­di­ca­tion that he would drag the Labour Party into the polit­i­cal wilder­ness for generations.

They had sev­eral chances to replace him and they lacked the courage and balls to do it. Now they will suf­fer and get what they deserve, a com­plete dec­i­ma­tion at the polls on Thurs­day. It will be the worst show­ing by Labour in his­tory, any other MP from the party wouldn’t have done as badly as Gor­don. They really only have them­selves to blame.

I like being right and I love say­ing “I told ya so”.

Hey Labour.… I told you if you stuck with Gor­don, you’d be fucked. Yep, I TOLD YA SO!

Oh that felt good!

I’ve always been a big fan of the Lib­Dems, if not an out­right sup­porter. Their poli­cies seem to be anchored in real­ity, with a healthy dose of com­mon sense. We could use both of those qual­i­ties in government.

The best exam­ple I can site is their drug pol­icy, which in their man­i­festo, loosely says that they would take a sci­en­tific and evi­dence based approach. In prac­tise that would mean they would fol­low closely the advice of their advi­sors, in this case the ACMD.

Tak­ing it fur­ther, in pre­vi­ous state­ments, the Lib­Dems have sup­ported decrim­i­nal­is­ing or legal­is­ing cannabis, though with all the bull­shit media non­sense over the dis­cred­ited research into the (very much unproven) link between weed and psy­chosis, they haven’t men­tioned it recently. I don’t blame them as it would only be used against them as a sign of weakness.

The Lib­eral Democ­rats are not a weak party, they are actu­ally the strongest on sen­si­ble poli­cies that work towards the com­mon good and ben­e­fit the most peo­ple. It takes strength to fly in the face of con­ven­tional (media) wis­dom and openly declare that the “war on drugs” is an absolute fail­ure that does more harm than the drugs them­selves. The Lib­Dem party is the one party that’s not afraid of speak­ing the truth.

They’re also not aligned with big media or big cor­po­ra­tions, they seem to be more inde­pen­dent of the estab­lish­ment and there­fore more able to do good for the coun­try, rather than serv­ing spe­cial interests.

Nick Clegg has impressed every­one and made them sit up and take notice of his party. Its about time they get taken seri­ously. Clegg has also fright­ened the two “old par­ties”, which has been fun to watch as they both mount attacks him.

The leader’s debates have truly changed the face of pol­i­tics in this coun­try, see­ing Clegg go toe-to-toe with the other two showed the nation in a very tan­gi­ble way that there is an alter­na­tive to old-style pol­i­tics. After thir­teen years of Labour gov­ern­ments, this coun­try is in des­per­ate need of a change.

The Lib­Dems are the only party that really offers that change.

The Tories won’t change any­thing so much as bring back a same­ness. They don’t have any new ideas or energy or per­son­al­ity. Don’t vote for them.

Gor­don Brown is a mega­lo­ma­niac dic­ta­to­r­ial buf­foon and embar­rass­ment to the nation, but the rea­son not to vote Labour is sim­ple, one word: Iraq. This is the party that dragged this nation into an ille­gal and point­less war, for absolutely no good rea­son. And they lied to us about it, repeat­edly and they still do. They deserve to come in third or worse.

A vote for the Lib­Dems is a vote for change and a vote for a brighter future.

Peo­ple say they can’t win with an out­right major­ity, but they could if every­one voted their heart. If you think the Lib­Dems are the best choice, and I believe a lot of you out there do, then vote for them. You are NOT throw­ing your vote away on a minor party, real change comes from peo­ple hav­ing the strength of will and con­vic­tion to not fear change. If every­one who sup­ports them fol­lows through on elec­tion day, then Nick Clegg could be the next Prime Minister.

More likely, if you believe the polls, is that we are headed for a hung par­lia­ment and the pos­si­bil­ity of a coali­tion gov­ern­ment. There are worse things that could happen.

Many other coun­tries have coali­tion gov­ern­ments, formed by oppos­ing par­ties. Guess what hap­pens? They learn to work with each other and com­pro­mise and things get done. You have noth­ing to fear from this out­come and maybe we all might even ben­e­fit from the mix of the strongest ideas from both par­ties involved.

But which par­ties? That’s the real question.

If I was going to gam­ble on the out­come, I would say a Tory-LibDem coali­tion, with Cameron in charge and a healthy mix of both par­ties in the cab­i­net. I could live with that.

Less likely and cer­tainly less appeal­ing would be a Labour-LibDem gov­ern­ment with some­one other than Brown as PM.

And at the very out­side and many would say implau­si­ble, a Tory-Labour gov­ern­ment. I have this weird the­ory that these two polar oppo­sites (who really aren’t that dif­fer­ent) could do a deal with each other to lock the Lib­Dems out. Maybe its not as impos­si­ble as it sounds and if it does hap­pen, won’t I look like the poly-sci genius?

What­ever hap­pens, of one thing I’m cer­tain, come Fri­day, Gor­don Brown will no longer be Prime Min­is­ter and will go down as one of the most unpop­u­lar, unsuc­cess­ful, worst PM’s in history.