Every few months I come back here, it seems, and most of what's going on recently involves Android phones, so here's a guide so easy even I could follow it to getting your Samsung Galaxy Tab running Cyanogenmod. Why did I feel this was necessary? Because my phone randomly bricked itself. I don't know how ( Read more... )

In seeing yet more reports of NATO bombs going astray, I've come to think that military technology needs to be subjected to the same rigour that civilian technology does ( Read more... )

This is why I can't take nutrition seriously: today I had McDonalds for brunch (already had breakfast, I'll have a late lunch later on), and I saw the little nutrition info things on the boxes. For the record, I had a spicy chicken burger, medium fries, a coke, and two pineapple pies (they have pineapple pies over here, so awesome!). Here are the ( Read more... )

So it turns out I've made a rather big mistake. I thought I was stronger than it seems I am -- or I thought I was weaker than I turned out to be. The result is the same. I think I thought myself clever, or I just assumed too much. The result is the same ( Read more... )

Jianmeicao (健美操) is a kind of dance aerobics, and in the past four days I looked at some videos and choreographed a routine for it. Now I have to teach all my workmates the routine - it's easy enough, it should be possible to learn in under a week. Because that's all we have, the show's on Monday. Lovely people these, know how to plan ahead, all ( Read more... )

I found lemon balm! In China ( Read more... )

The cable (the ever-so-nifty Apple® cable that only Apple manufacture (and because they're the only ones, do it at a rather steep price) because their computers are the only ones with this absolutely brilliant video out port while all the other laptops are stuck in the dark ages with a so-standard-it-hurts VGA out port that almost any monitor can ( Read more... )

Single feature, actually. I stumbled across Daily Science Fiction recently, and have been reading it on a regular basis since. You might want to have a look too, if you enjoy quality science fiction short stories.

Is the "literary" genre simply a catch-all for work that doesn't fit into a genre that already exists? I do try hard not to think of literary fiction as the stuck-up snobs of the fiction world, but they make it so hard.

Since he's been writing, and winning awards, for ten years now, I must have been living under a rock to not have heard of Ted Chiang. More surprisingly, given the awards he's received (the Nebula award among them), many of his stories are available on-line. I just read The Lifecycle of Software Objects, and it's a brilliant piece of fiction. It ( Read more... )