1644: Contemplating My Now Not-So-New Phone

Avid readers (hah) will recall that a while back I jumped ship from iOS to Android when I upgraded my phone. My long-in-the-tooth (relatively speaking, anyway) iPhone 4S was replaced by an HTC One M8, a phone which had received some positive reviews from people I knew and trusted, so I decided to take a chance and give it a shot. It was a good time to do so, since I'd been becoming increasingly disillusioned with many of the apps available on smartphones generally, and as such I wasn't feeling particularly "invested" in the iOS ecosystem — in other words, there weren't very many apps that I felt particularly attached to.

So, a little down the line, how am I finding it now the inevitable "honeymoon period" is over?

Well, I'm still really liking it, and the one peeve I had with it — the fact it seemed somewhat prone to random restarts and reboots while I was in the middle of doing things — appears to have worked itself out, and hasn't happened for a long time now. (Watch it start doing it again now I've written this.)

As I noted in my earlier posts, I'm not a hugely adventurous smartphone user these days. There are relatively few things I actually want to do with my phone, but most of them are beyond what a simple feature phone offers — or, in the case of facilities that feature phones do offer, smartphones inevitably do them all somewhat better.

Here's the limit of what I use my phone for: Email. Texting. Phone calls (only when there is no other option). Calendar. Music and podcasts. Google Hangouts. Twitter. Web browsing. Very occasionally Facebook and Google+, though I don't use either network very much any more. And, if there is nothing else to do during an extended visit to the toilet, playing a simple, toilet-friendly game like Threes.

That's about it. There's probably more I could do with it but I don't really feel the need to right now, since the stock apps and the few additional ones I've installed cover most of the things that I want to do with it on a daily basis. I can communicate with it, I can browse the Web with it, I can take snapshots with the camera if necessary and I can read information on a screen that's noticeably bigger than that offered by Apple's iOS devices.

I've been particularly impressed by Google Play Music, which provides a number of helpful services, chief among which is something similar to Apple's iTunes Match service, only it actually, you know, works. For those unfamiliar, iTunes Match (and Google Play Music) is a facility whereby you can upload tracks from your personal music library or "match" existing songs with iTunes/Google's online libraries, then stream or download them to any compatible device. In effect, this allows you to take your entire music library with you wherever you go, rather than being limited by the storage space available on your phone — though the streaming side of things is, of course, dependent on you having a good wireless Internet connection either via the mobile phone networks or Wi-Fi.

Where Google Play Music differs from iTunes Match is that it's a lot clearer in presenting its information. With iTunes Match, it was almost impossible to tell which songs you had downloaded to your phone — and consequently available when no Internet connection was around — and which would require streaming. Attempting to download songs often resulted in failure for no apparent reason — and with Apple's phobia of error messages, there was no way of discovering what was causing the problem. Google Play Music, meanwhile, while having a somewhat clunky interface in a few places — it'd be great to have just a plain list of albums, playlists, songs and that sort of thing rather than the overly graphical, space-wasting interface it has — but at least presents this sort of information clearly. It's obvious when you've downloaded something or if you'd be streaming it when you clicked Play, and, importantly, it's easy to remove things from your phone once you've downloaded them — something which iTunes Match made seemingly impossible to do manually for some inexplicable reason.

So that's been great, and the other apps I've been using regularly all seem to work pretty well, too. All in all I'm sure I'm using this phone to a fraction of its full potential, but it's doing everything I want it to and it's doing it well, with my only real criticism of the device as a whole being that the volume control buttons are in a stupid place and are much too easy to press accidentally while simply holding it normally.

1582: My Phone's Not Called "Mate"

So, an update on how I'm doing with my new phone after several days of fiddling around with it. (Said new phone, if you missed my post from the other day, is an HTC One M8 — my first Android phone, though not my first Android device.)

I'm really liking it! Like, way more than I thought I would. There are flaws, certainly — the phone has frozen and rebooted itself while I was in the middle of doing something rather more times than I would have preferred it to in the last few days — but on the whole, it's been a great experience so far and I dare say that I am actually starting to prefer it to iOS.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not going to suddenly become an Android fanboy, largely because I find Android fanboys to be some of the most insufferable fanboys on the entire Internet. Nor do I feel that iOS is now "bad" because of the time I've spent with Android. But there are clear and discrete markets for both, and they both do their own thing extremely well.

iOS, like most of Apple's other products these days, is designed to be accessible, simple and straightforward. I hesitate to say "designed for stupid people" but it's certainly designed in such a manner that stupid people can't break it easily. It doesn't blind you with unnecessary information — if there's something it can do quietly in the background without telling you what's going on, it will. This is great for people who panic when they see technical messages they don't understand; however, on the flip side, it's less than ideal for computer-literate people who like to know what their device is up to — and if it's up to something it shouldn't be (or not up to something it should be).

There are two features on iOS where this is painfully apparent, and as I count myself in the more "computer literate" camp they'd been becoming increasingly frustrating to me.

First up is Photo Stream, a feature whereby you take a photo with the phone's camera and it gets automatically backed up to your iCloud account and synced to any other devices you've also logged into iCloud with. This is, in theory at least, extremely useful for backing up images and just for transferring them from one device to another — from phone to computer, say — without having to faff around with long-winded sync processes or additional hardware. And, a good 90% of the time, it was great. The trouble was, for that remaining 10% of the time it would just not work, and it certainly wasn't going to tell you why. I eventually managed to figure out that if Photo Stream wasn't syncing it was generally for one of two reasons (the battery being below 20% or you not being connected to Wi-Fi) but the phone certainly didn't tell me that.

iTunes Match, the service that allows you "cloud" access to your full iTunes music library from any device, is the same way. A few weeks back, my iPhone simply started refusing to download certain iTunes tracks to itself, which made loading it up with tunes to take on a long trip to be troublesome at best, completely impossible at worst. Again, there was no means of getting feedback on what was going wrong and why some tracks would download but others wouldn't; it simply wouldn't do it. Infuriating. But I can sort of understand why Apple chose not to put frightening error messages in there — so as not to scare off the casual, less computer-literate people.

Android's big selling point is its customisability, and to be fair I haven't explored that a great deal with my new device just yet — I've been largely happy with the stock options so far. It comes preloaded with a standard app launcher and a special "car mode" with big buttons and quick access to music, navigation and other useful features you might need while driving, but I know the option is there for further customisation. I also like how you can have things installed on the device but not visible on the home screen.

What I've really liked so far is the notifications system. I can clear all my notifications with a simple tap on a button, or I can also take action on a lot of them right from the notifications feed — reply to a tweet, archive an email, all manner of other things. It took a little adjusting to the fact that the phone doesn't display messages on the home screen like the iPhone does, but having used it for a few days now, it's actually quite nice to have the peace and be able to review notifications at your leisure rather than when your phone thinks you should.

Plus there's the sound. I'm not normally a fan of playing music out of a mobile phone, but the M8 has some surprisingly competent speakers. They're never going to rival a proper setup, of course, but they're loud, reasonably beefy considering their size, and they make listening to music or podcasts without headphones while doing other things — housework, for example, or, more relevantly to now, packing — eminently practical. Combine with Google Music's much better, more stable implementation of "cloud music" than iTunes Match offers along with the ability to put an extra SD card in there for storage and you have a device that is a kick-ass media player as well as a solid communication device, too.

So I'm liking it a lot so far, and I'm certainly not missing my iPhone, which I gave to O2 for recycling in exchange for a little over a hundred quid — not to be sniffed at for minimum effort. Whether or not I'll stick with Android in the long term remains to be seen, but frankly it's looking quite positive right now.

1579: "Android?"

I took a bold step and did something very brave today. I… I…

I switched from iOS to Android.

Okay, "very brave" might be understatement of the century, but despite being curious about Google's mobile OS, I've resisted the temptation to ditch the iPhone series to date, largely because I felt that I was too invested in the iOS ecosystem to make breaking free practical.

I pondered this recently, though, and realised that I actually wasn't all that dependent on the iOS ecosystem at all. I run my mail, contacts and calendars through Google, I socialise through Facebook, Twitter and Google+, I take notes in Evernote and… well, that's about it, to be frank; I'm not an especially adventurous mobile user these days, largely because I feel that 95% of apps released these days are superfluous, pointless crap that no-one needs.

And so it is that I find myself with an HTC One "Don't Call Me Mate" M8 Android handset. It's a rather larger handset than the iPhone 4S I was using before, and it's larger than Andie's iPhone 5S, too. I once thought that large phones were worthy of mockery, but having been using the HTC for a day I'm already feeling the benefit of the larger screen size. It's not a huge amount bigger than an iPhone, but it's a significant enough difference that things don't feel nearly as cramped.

Bringing mail, contacts and calendars across was straightforward and easy because I was using Google. The one thing I was a little concerned about was being able to manage my music — something that I have, to date, relied on iTunes for. It turns out that Google's Google Music service has seemingly been designed for this exact situation, allowing you the ability to upload up to 20,000 tracks directly from your iTunes library to then be available for streaming or caching from anywhere. You can listen to them via the Chrome-based web player, or on your Android phone. There's even an optional Spotify-like subscription service where you can stream music you don't own, so as of today I've cancelled my Spotify Premium account and gone with Google instead.

There are things to adjust with on the new phone. Not having notifications on the lock screen is very odd having had them for several generations of iOS hardware, but this is more than made up for by the fact you can dismiss all notifications at once from the notification centre. I haven't delved particularly into the customisation side of things yet, but I understand with a bit of fiddling and tweaking it's possible to rectify this behaviour if it really bothers me.

There are a few things I really like. The fact that if you download an app and discover it's shit, you can delete it and automatically receive a refund if you do so within 15 minutes of purchasing. The way apps work together, sharing information much more easily than on iOS. The way the on-screen keyboard does a fake "haptic feedback" thing where it vibrates very slightly every time you press a key. The camera on this particular device is supposed to be very good, too, but I haven't really tried it as yet.

So far I'm very happy with the new device so far, particularly as the tariff I've moved to post-upgrade is, for once, actually a better deal than the one I was on previously. I'm paying the same and getting more cellular data allowance plus "4G" speeds where they're available, so the overall experience should be superior. I'm looking forward to exploring what it's capable of further; it's a pleasant and fun change, and wasn't riddled with nearly as many difficulties as I was expecting.

But don't worry. I'm not going to become one of those douchebags who comments on every article about a new iOS app/game and just says "Android?" like a brainwashed parrot. iOS is still great at what it does, and if you claim to be a lover of tech, you should be interested and curious in all the alternatives out there rather than swearing blind corporate allegiance to one company purely because they make the handset you currently own.

But that's probably a discussion for another day. I'm going to go and lie in bed and fiddle with my phone for a bit now. Or possibly just play Nanaca Crash on it.

1542: Terebi Desu

Our new TV arrived today at some ungodly hour in the morning — which felt all the more ungodly for the fact that excellent Vita dungeon crawler Demon Gaze had kept me enraptured until 3am — and I've been having a bit of a play with it. (For the curious, it's a Samsung Series 6 55-inch LED TV; it has a catchy three thousand-digit model number but I have no idea what it is.)

When Andie suggested we grab a new TV, I was a little concerned that it might not be a significant upgrade over what we already had — a 40-inch Samsung, albeit one that is now about four or five years old. After all, despite the fact that my previous TV was an end-of-line model when I bought it — making it much cheaper — it was pretty good. Three HDMI ports, built-in Freeview tuner, full 1080p support — it had pretty much everything I needed, though it would have been nice to have an optical output port. Everything I connected to it worked just fine, though, ranging from the PlayStation 2 through the SCART port (yummy, blurry standard-def picture) to the various games consoles and PC through the HDMI ports.

With the previous TV working just fine, why buy a new one, you might ask? Well, having spent this evening playing some Final Fantasy XIV on it and having watched some anime and TV on it earlier… yes, it was a good investment. The increase in size is extremely noticeable — it's big enough to have a touch of "peripheral vision" now, giving a much more immersive feel to both video and games — and the LED screen is lovely, bright and clear. I have no idea if I've optimized its settings appropriately — I've put the PC input into Game mode, because prior to that there was noticeable input lag, but haven't really fiddled with much else — but it certainly seems to look very nice, although as Andie pointed out, the bigger the screen you get, the more of a dog's dinner standard-definition footage and TV broadcasts look. Oh well.

It's a Smart TV, too, which means it has two remotes, one of which has a trackpad rather than, you know, just being normal, plus "apps" for doing shit old, dumb TVs don't do. There's stuff like BBC iPlayer and Netflix built into it, for example, and even apps for things like Spotify and the like. (There are also games to download, but somehow I don't see them being particularly worthwhile, and as such I will be giving them a wide berth.) I'm not entirely convinced how much I will use the "smart" features over time, but it's nice to have them there, I guess — not to mention the fact it is seemingly now impossible to buy a new TV that isn't 1) "smart" and 2) 3D.

The 3D thing surprises me somewhat, I must confess. I thought 3D TV and gaming had been a colossal failure, and yet all the televisions we looked at over the weekend were 3D in one form or another. The TV we ended up getting is "active 3D", which is supposedly better because you have to turn the glasses on before they work properly (and for some other reasons, too) and sure, it's quite fun — we watched a couple of trailers in 3D earlier and it was quite cool — but it's not something I can see myself using a lot of, and certainly not for protracted periods of time. It will almost certainly be something to show off to people who come and visit, but little else.

Anyway, I'm very pleased with it. It fits nicely on our TV stand and doesn't look too big or too small, and it's a noticeable upgrade over what we had before — plus the almost bezel-free design, with the picture going right the way to the edges of the front of the unit, looks absolutely smashing.

I'm sure I'll be taking it for granted before long — and I'm not looking forward to moving it when our new house is sorted — but yes; I'm glad we got it. And now I'm off to bed because I've been staring at it all evening and I think my eyes could probably do with a rest!

1518: New Media

I've been contemplating the ways that people "consume" (ugh, I hate that word, but it seems to be the one in use most frequently these days) content online, and trying to determine a way it could be applied to our currently-stalled podcast over at The Squadron of Shame.

The Squadron of Shame SquadCast certainly worked extremely well for the episodes we did it for, but it did often end up being a little more demanding on the editing time than I would have liked, particularly as we're all amateurs making use of not-brilliant equipment that often results in things like background hum, echo and other annoying flaws that are difficult to edit out. Much of my editing time was often spent manually trimming out echoes and funny noises, and in the case of a 2-3 hour episode — which most of our episodes tended to be — it would take the majority of the day to do this.

One of the things I'm wondering right now is how relevant the podcast format still is. Obviously I know that there's enough of a market for sites like Giant Bomb to keep making one every week, and for established podcasting personalities like Garnett Lee to be able to start a new show and have people follow him to see what he's up to. But I'm also conscious of the rise of alternative means of "consuming" (blech) content in the last couple of years, with YouTube being one particularly disruptive influence, and live broadcasts such as Twitch streaming and Google Hangouts being another.

Awareness of these alternative forms of media has made me ponder whether the standard podcast format is absolutely the best possible thing for the SquadCast going forward, or whether it's worth contemplating an alternative means of presentation (with an accompanying means of archiving/downloading where necessary.)

The SquadCast has always been a "book group" style of discussion surrounding a game or gaming-related topic, and it's worked well for us in the past. But gaming is also an inherently visual medium, which makes me wonder whether some form of video presentation might be worth experimenting with, perhaps combined with live broadcasting.

Another reason I bring this up is that Skype, which we have previously used to talk to one another and record the discussions we have, has become a largely unworkable mess ever since Microsoft bought it, making it impossible for me to "archive" the complete conversation just in case someone's individual recording fails to work properly. I haven't needed this facility on many occasions, but on the couple where someone's recording was destroyed by Audacity's frequent crashes, having that backup facility was a godsend. With the way Skype works now, though — you can't run it in more than one user account on a Mac at once, which is what I used to do — working this way is impossible without an unnecessarily convoluted setup involving more than one computer.

What I've been pondering is making use of something like Google Hangouts, which allows for a number of features that would seem ideal for a discussion about games. It allows participants to converse via either audio or video chat, and it also allows for the footage of the participants to be intercut with other things such as videos from YouTube and the like. For example, while discussing a particularly interesting scene in a game, making use of Google Hangouts would allow you to find that scene on YouTube and then broadcast it to the people watching the Hangout, which strikes me as an eminently good idea. Presumably it would also allow for playing footage while the conversation continues over the top, which is a little more interesting than just gazing at a bunch of talking heads for a few hours.

Google Hangouts can also be easily archived to YouTube, and then one of the many YouTube-to-MP3 converters out there can be used to archive an offline version of the discussion's audio, which can subsequently be released as a standard podcast for those who wish to continue listening in that way. It'll be rawer due to the lack of editing and its inherently live nature, but I've often felt when I edit a show that I was making the job a lot more difficult and time-consuming than it really needed to be.

Anyway. I'm just thinking out loud here. Interested to know your thoughts, though, particularly if you've been either a listener or a participant in the SquadCast at any point in the past. (Those who are neither, you can educate yourself thanks to our archives here.)

1182: Fixed That For You

I've had a week of not having a lot of luck with technology. Firstly, I was reminded that my electric piano was suffering a sticky key issue on the B above middle C (which is quite a commonly-used note) and proving rather difficult to play effectively. This was annoying, because as I noted yesterday, I'd just come into possession of the official piano arrangements for the Nier and Final Fantasy X-2 soundtracks along with some fan-arranged printouts of a variety of anime and game pieces.

Secondly, my PS2 Slim mutilated my Ar Tonelico 2 disc right in the middle of one of the endings I hadn't seen, causing it to freeze up completely and not be able to go any further. (I have since replaced the PS2 Slim with a PS2 Fat — which hasn't arrived yet — and acquired a new copy of Ar Tonelico 2, but that's some money I didn't really need to spend.)

Fortunately, one of these problems has been rectified thanks to Andie's willingness to get her hands dirty and tinker around inside things. (Get your mind out of the gutter.) Loosely following some instructions online, we took the casing off my Yamaha P80 and had a look inside. It wasn't immediately obvious what was causing the key in question to stick, but as it happened, the process of popping it out (which we didn't even manage to do completely, just sort of half-out) and popping it back in again completely fixed the problem. This was, as I'm sure you can imagine, extremely pleasing as it means 1) I don't have to attempt to fit my piano into the back of a Peugeot 207; 2) I don't have to drive it 25 miles to the nearest Yamaha engineer; and 3) I don't have to pay aforementioned Yamaha engineer £100+ to get it fixed. Don't get me wrong, I would have happily paid Captain Piano-Fix his fee in order to get things sorted, but given that the fix was apparently that simple — I guess the key must have got knocked out of its normal place somehow, perhaps while we were moving house — I'm glad that I don't have to do any of the above three things.

This isn't the first time I've seen something get "fixed" by peculiar means. Back in university, I came into possession of a Sega Saturn, which I still own to this day (though I no longer have any games for it). The controller that came with the Saturn didn't work very well, so, having nothing better to do that evening — my housemate was out and no-one fancied going down to the Union to get obliterated on Juicy Lucies — I took it apart and decided to see what I could do, despite not having any clue whatsoever about how it worked. Eventually, I ended up cleaning the contacts on the circuit board using a piece of kitchen towel dipped in vodka — I honestly have no idea why this particular combination of things seemed like the right thing to do at the time; I was possibly a bit drunk — and putting it back together again. Astonishingly, it worked after this. To date, I have no idea if my ridiculous efforts to "fix" the thing actually had any effect or whether it was just the simple process of taking it apart and putting it together again.

I guess the moral of this story is that if something is broken (and out of warranty) then there are worse things you can do than pull out all the screws, pull everything out and then put it back together again. Obviously don't try and do this on a human body, however, because 1) human bodies don't have any screws and 2) they're a lot harder to put back together once you've disassembled them, which is why degrees in Medicine take so long to complete.

1155: The Tablet Revolution

I've come to the conclusion that I'm a dusty old bastard who is set in his ways like an old man. That or everyone else is just plain wrong. Or perhaps a combination of the two.

I'm specifically referring to the "tablet revolution" — that futuristic gubbins that supposes everyone is going to replace their computer/console/handheld/everything with a tablet such as an iPad or whateverthefuck the bajillion Android tablets are called these days. I even read an article earlier where someone from Zynga said that tablets are "becoming the ultimate game platform".

I must respectfully disagree — at least for my needs and wants, anyway.

Our house has three tablets — an iPad 2, a Motorola Xoom and a Nexus 7. The Nexus 7 is currently in for repair, but got a fair amount of use by Andie, largely for free-to-play mobile games and Kairosoft titles. The iPad 2 also gets a fair amount of use by Andie for the same reasons. My Xoom gets barely any use, though the fact I have SNES, Mega Drive and various other emulators on there ready to go at a moment's notice is pretty cool.

But yeah. The fact stands: I hardly use these devices at all. Why? Because for my purposes, they don't offer a superior experience to other bits of kit. For gaming, I have consoles, dedicated handhelds, a laptop PC and a desktop PC. For work, I have my Mac, the aforementioned laptop PC and the desktop PC at a pinch. For browsing the Internet, I have… you know how this goes by now. For me, all of these devices offer a considerably superior experience to all of the tablets we have in this house.

Oh, sure, tablets can ably perform several of these functions, but they don't do any of them as well as the pre-existing devices. About all they do offer, really, is the fact that they're incredibly quick to turn on (assuming they have some charge left in them, which my Xoom in particular rarely does) and are a lot more portable and lightweight than many other devices.

But personally speaking, the fact that, say, the iPad is thin and lightweight isn't enough to make up for the fact that it's a lot more difficult to type on than an actual physical keyboard. And yes, I know, you can pay through the nose and get an iPad-compatible wireless keyboard (or a generic one for Android) but not only does that remove one of the main benefits of a tablet — its all-in-one portability — there's other issues too: the pain in the arse it is to access the file system (on iOS, anyway; this is one area where Android is marginally better), the fact that proprietary iOS and Android apps rarely play nicely with established formats (just try getting a Microsoft Word file with any formatting or layout whatsoever to look even a little bit right in Pages for iOS), the fact that some of the work I do requires the precision of a mouse rather than the cack-handedness of a touchscreen, the fact that some websites I want to use are designed for use on a computer with a keyboard and mouse rather than a touchscreen and a virtual keyboard.

And don't get me started on the games. "The ultimate gaming platform"? Don't make me laugh, Zynga. While mobile and tablet games have been enormously successful in getting more and more new people into video games, and that's a good thing for the industry as a whole, there is no way you can say with any good conscience that tablets are an adequate replacement for more established systems — and better-designed control schemes in particular. Have you ever tried to play a first-person shooter on a touchscreen tablet with no buttons? It is one of the most bewildering experiences you'll ever encounter: why would anyone want to put themselves through that? There are certain genres that work well, of course: strategy games, board game adaptations, word games and adventure games are all good uses of a touchscreen interface… as are the never-ending throng of isometric-perspective building/farming/dragon-raising games that are little more than vehicles for monetisation. There are very few tablet-based games that hold my attention for more than a couple of minutes, in short — the last was Ghost Trick, which doesn't really count as it was a conversion of a Nintendo DS game.

I guess that's sort of the point, though. The main benefit of tablet devices (and smartphones, for that matter) is their immediacy — you turn them on, you tap a button and you're (almost) straight into a game, and you can be out of it again within a matter of minutes if you just needed to fill an awkward silence or wait for someone to come back from the toilet. And that's good, in a way; it just doesn't really fit with how I play games. As I noted in a reply to Anne on yesterday's post, I play games as my main form of entertainment. I don't watch much TV, I don't watch movies, listening to music is something I tend to do while engaged in some other activity, and so games are my main "relaxing time" activity. I want to sit and play something for an hour or two (or more) at a time, and between freemium energy please-insert-credit-card-to-continue bullshit and the "bite-size", disposable, forgettable nature of most mobile/tablet games, I just don't get a satisfying experience from them.

Meanwhile, the laptop I bought a short while back is easily my favourite piece of kit in this house. It's powerful enough to play pretty-looking games like TrackMania, yet portable enough to carry around in a bag. Its battery life is decent (though not a patch on a tablet) and it has a nice screen. It's a good means of playing visual novels without having to tie up the TV, and it copes well with anything I might want to throw at it while working on the go. In short, it's an all-in-one device that does absolutely everything I want it to without making any compromises or dumbing the experience down at all. Sure, it takes a bit longer to turn on than the iPad, but it's also infinitely more useful and fun to me.

Fuck the tablet revolution, basically. Long live the laptop. And the games console. And the desktop PC. And the dedicated handheld. And, you know, sometimes, just a piece of paper.

1089: Ding, Dong, Ding, Dong

(Buffy's Swearing Keyboard. You're welcome. NSFW, obviously.)

Andie and I bought a doorbell the other day. This is not something I have ever had to purchase before, but it was something of a necessity — we live on the second floor (third if you're American) and there were doorbells for flat 1 and 2 in our block, but not ours. This meant a distinct chance of missing out on deliveries of orders from Amazon and Chinese takeaway due to a lack of any means for someone at the block's front door of letting us know we were there. And that will never do. A man needs his Chinese takeaway and AMAZOO.nep deliveries.

Actually, the statement that said I've never had to purchase a doorbell before isn't quite accurate — in my second year at university, I lived in a first (second) floor flat which didn't have a doorbell. The front door was at ground level and opened straight on to some stairs up into the main part of our flat, so if my housemate and I were in our rooms or the living room, chances are we wouldn't hear anyone knocking. (We sure as hell heard the fight outside our door one night, though, and got a bit scared when we heard shattering glass. Luckily the aggressor in the incident had punched through our neighbours' door, not ours. I say "luckily" — obviously not for our neighbours, who then had to spend the next few months with their front door boarded up because the landlord of the building was too lazy to do anything, ever. But these brackets have gone on for too long so I'd better close them before I lose the point of what I was saying.)

Anyway, yes. I popped down to our local massive hardware store, which was but a short walk from our flat, and investigated doorbells. At the time, wireless doorbells, which would have been the ideal solution, were rather expensive. As a student, spending forty quid on a doorbell was out of the question, and I didn't really feel like drilling holes in the doorframe and poking wires through, largely because I didn't have a drill. So on that occasion we survived without a doorbell.

Not so this time, though. Both Andie and I are in gainful employment, and as such we were more than able to afford a doorbell for our new place, particularly as wireless doorbells appear to have come down in price considerably over the course of the last ten years. Wired ones didn't appear to be an option, even. I am fine with this.

The doorbell we chose was a bog-standard model with a single sound that thankfully isn't too horrendous — it just makes a nice, normal (if obviously electronic) doorbell sound. It doesn't play a horrible monophonic ringtone-type tune and it doesn't go on for longer than it needs to, which were the things I was worried about. There's nothing more embarrassing than a doorbell that outstays its welcome. (Well, there is. Lots of things are. But you know what I mean.)

What I was particularly surprised about as we were browsing the fine selection in B&Q (which I maintain is one of the most tedious stores in the world despite the presence of chainsaws) is the ridiculous features the more expensive doorbells offered. The most expensive one they had there — which was about the same price as the basic wireless ones from ten years ago, as I recall — not only had a wide selection of built-in chimes for you to pick from at your leisure, it also had the ability to play MP3s.

Think about that for a moment. A doorbell. That plays MP3s. Truly we are living in the future. An incredibly pointless future where instead of flying cars and cures for cancer we have doorbells that play fucking MP3s.

I express mock outrage at this but I guess it's sort of amusing. You could, with that doorbell, essentially have anything as your chime. If you wanted Brian Blessed shouting "GIMME THAT FUCKING BADGE BACK!" (possibly the best video on all of YouTube, that) every time someone was at the door, you could. Or perhaps the chiptune ALF theme from the dancing chicken man video I used to love so much. (Used to? I just put it on and fell in love all over again. CAN'T STOP WATCHING) Or, if you really wanted to drive yourself absolutely insane, this. Or this. Or perhaps the song that gave us Epic Sax Man. Or… well, yeah. You get the idea.

Damn. Now I sort of wish I'd splurged on the stupid MP3-playing doorbell. Much better for trolling Andie with than getting Siri to call her "Bumface".

#oneaday Day 932: Take Control

I'm generally a pretty disciplined sort of person. I'm good at prioritising, and if I have something that I have to do I'll make sure that I complete it before I do things that I want to do.

It's when it comes to prioritising the things that I want to do that things go a bit pear-shaped.

It's easy to stumble through your days as normal and just let things happen. But if you do that it's easy to fall into routines and patterns and then wonder where the minutes, hours, days go. Those things that you want to do sometimes get forgotten amid your default activities, your comfort zone, the things that you do without thinking.

In order to fit in all the things that you want to do, sometimes you have to take drastic steps. Steps like scheduling your time.

This approach doesn't work for everyone. Some people are terrible at sticking to schedules, others simply don't like the lack of flexibility. But I've discovered (and rediscovered) several times over the years that I actually seem to work better and be rather more efficient if I plan out my time carefully rather than simply taking things as they come. It's a hangover from quite enjoying the sense of "structure" from school and university (even if — ssshhhh… I didn't always show up to my university lectures and seminars) and it's something that I should really start doing more of in my daily life if I want to fit everything in. Because even with scheduling, it's sometimes tricky to squeeze all your desired activities in, and that's when you have to decide how to make compromises and sacrifices. Thankfully, with the things that I want to do at the moment, I haven't had to make too many of the latter.

The ironic thing about people not wanting to organise themselves these days is it's so easy to do so now thanks to technology. You can make your phone remind you to do things, set email-based nags to pop up in your inbox, create task lists that synchronise between devices, take snapshots of things and store them "in the cloud" (urgh) for future reference. You can even get social and be public about the things that you want to do, making use of your friends as a means of browbeating… sorry, "encouraging" you to actually get on and do stuff.

I use a few simple tools to sort myself out. Firstly and most simply is Google Calendar. I use this in favour of iCal on my Mac because it's easier to sync between devices, is stored online rather than tied to a single device and works with iCal and iOS anyway. Google Calendar is a decent tool with enough features for what I need to do — multiple colour-coded calendars, email reminders, the ability to invite people, time zone support — and it proves valuable when I have taken on lots of things and only have a limited time in which to do them. It was especially valuable this time last year when I was going to Gamescom in Germany and every developer and publisher in the world suddenly wanted a bit of my time. (Apart from EA. They ballsed up my appointment — their fault, not mine — and wouldn't let me in to their stupid high-security compound. Fuck them. I went to go and see Larian Studios instead, which was much more fun.)

Alongside Google Calendar, I've tried several other tools over the years. Evernote is pretty neat, for example. Epic Win was a cool idea that gamified your own productivity, but development seemed to stop quite a while back and it's still lacking a few features that many other task manager apps offer. Most recently, I've been playing with Springpad, which I like a lot, despite a few rough edges.

Springpad is quite a bit like Evernote, but with a few interesting twists. It's based around the concept of "notebooks", which are ways of grouping related content together. Within a notebook, you can create a wide variety of different notes, ranging from simple text notes to checklists (mini to-do lists, essentially) via tasks, recipes, books, product information (scannable via the RedLaser barcode-scanning interface on the mobile apps) and all manner of other stuff. A webclipper bookmark allows you to easily clip things into your notebooks, and the interface generally does a pretty good job of figuring out what kind of content you're trying to store — I tried it with a recipe from BBC Good Food earlier and it successfully recognised it as a recipe, though failed to import the ingredients list correctly.

Springpad also features a "social" component which allows its users to make its notebooks public, too. While I'm not entirely sure that this has been particularly well thought out, it does provide an interesting alternative use for the service, effectively turning it into a kind of blogging platform. Notes can be used as entries, the more specific types of notes used to provide specific information, and the site's in-built commenting facility allows users to build up a community. It's a neat idea. I'm not entirely sure how useful it is, of course, but it's a nice idea.

So anyway. Armed with these simple (and free) tools, I'm attempting to organise myself a bit better. After two days, I've already managed to do a bit more than I would have done otherwise, which is pleasing. I shall continue with this system for a little while and see if it's something that I want to make stick. It will be an interesting experiment if nothing else, and it might actually spur me on to get some things done that I've been meaning to get done for a while.

Further updates on exactly what when I have something to share.

#oneaday Day 882: Microsoft Mysteries

As I type this, Microsoft's mysterious event at which something may or may not be revealed is about to start. The usual rumours and speculation have been flying around and are just as infuriating as ever, but there's been something a little different about this event: unlike, say, Apple events, for which we tend to know the vast majority of the content well before it's announced, there's been nary a whiff of what this might be all about.

A lot of people seem convinced that the company are going to launch a tablet device, and that would make a good degree of sense what with the impending launch of Windows 8. But then there's a new Xbox on the cards. And Windows Phone is surely due for a kick up the arse. And then there's things like Surface, and all the things that Microsoft Research are up to — though let's not forget that they unleashed the monstrosity that is Songsmith on the world. (And now it's stuck in my head again. "You sing into a microphone while the drummer plays along…")

But the truth is that no-one knows. At all. No-one has any idea whatsoever what is going on, and this means that the event has the potential to be exciting. (It also has the potential to be a crushing disappointment, but that's part of what makes it exciting.)

This is something that to a large extent we have lost in the modern age of PR, leaks and the reporting of every little rumour that sneaks out. Think about it. If you reveal everything about your product months before it actually comes out, you walk a fine line between building anticipation and pissing people off with oversaturated marketing. I feel it all the time with modern high-profile video games, and I'm pretty certain tech enthusiasts feel the same way about new gadgets. I don't know to what degree it happens in other sectors, but given the way a lot of modern PR seems to work regardless of industry, I can imagine it is the same across a lot of different areas.

I can't be the only one who prefers to be surprised now and again by something. For all the mindless speculation that goes on around Apple product launches, the company itself is pretty good at keeping things under wraps until the last minute (though they let the cat out of the bag with iOS 6 somewhat). Microsoft has gone one better with this one by not letting even the slightest hint out to the press or the public. It's had a far greater effect on the public's anticipation than carefully-orchestrated "leaks" (most of which I doubt are really "leaks" at all) and "official" teasers — and as a result, everyone is on tenterhooks, watching the currently-running announcement (which still hasn't announced anything as I type this paragraph).

Basically, the lesson to be learned here, I think, is that sometimes it's okay to shut up and not tell anyone what you're doing. Because when you tease something and then respond to all questions with "we're not ready to talk about that yet" or "we do not comment on rumours or speculation" you just come across as a bit of an arse, really.

Ah, and there we go. The big announcement is the Microsoft Surface, though it's changed a bit since the table-sized device we last saw. The new gizmo is an iPad-like device with an interesting twist: its Smart Cover-like kickstand has a full multitouch keyboard secreted within it. There's also an optional other case with actual proper, tactile keys.

The fact the Surface is running Windows 8 means that it can run things like Office and the like. There'll apparently be a scaled-back version for Windows RT, and one with Intel chips for the full Windows PC experience. The latter will also incorporate stylus and "digital ink" input as well as multitouch, and apparently has the power of a full desktop PC — though whether or not it will run Crysis is yet to be seen as I type this…