A promising sandwich board headline for the Evening Standard on Friday, promising “Oyster cards on all trains“. If it’s true it would prove a well overdue development. Although Londoners regards national rail services within Greater London one of the many elements comprising the capital’s transport network, most of the lines have until now not allowed use of Oyster ‘Pay as you go’ cards. From the point of view of the average commuter or resident this makes travel less coherent and straight forward as it should be. Ideally the smart Oyster card should convey you from A to B within London, on whichever form of public transport is necessary without difficulty, however on many suburban lines a ticket is required for the rail ticket and an Oyster card used elsewhere. Read the rest of this entry »
‘The Spirit’ is a film that critics have not been very kind to. According to ‘Rotten Tomatoes’, only 15% of reviewers gave it a good review. This I feel has been an unfair response, as I have seen many films that are more worthy of this result than Spirit. Although it is by no means one of the greatest films ever made, it’s certainly not one of the most terrible. Although it did feel like the film was missing something, it’s hard to pinpoint what that was.
I was already composing a blog post of the clamping down on photographers by the authorities when I noticed a piece on this morning’s BBC breakfast news about a local, long-standing photographer arrested for photographing buildings in Elephant and Castle. Now I can understand the privately employed jobsworth security officer asserting his power over his little domain, be it a supermarket or so on but being arrested in a public place by the police seems to be venturing further into disturbing territory.
Having been unable to track the story down on the BBC News website, I eventually located it on the Independent website, where it highlights further examples of photographers being prevented from going about entirely law-abiding and proper activities, such as reporting a protest and snapping a passing steam train. These invariably result in apologies and inquiries from the authorities concerned, yet an increasingly prevalent precedent seems to becoming the norm.
Anyone who’s had any occasion to have to use the West Coast Main Line railway between London Euston and the North West and Scotland over the past decade or so will have as likely or not come across some difficulties at some point or other. Indeed any attempt at travelling on any weekend since as long as anyone can remember will have almost inevitably resulted in journey times hours longer than those of weekdays and may well have required excruitatingly slow bus substitution services for substantial stretches.
December saw what we all hoped would be the turning of a new leaf for the line. Years of engineering would be all but complete and a new timetable would come into effect offering a greatly enhanced number of services. Rejoice! If only it was so…
Standard Wikipedia entry view
One of the iPhone’s most outstanding features is the combination of unlimited data transfer through the mobile network combined with wifi to allow access to information almost anyway. It’s a logical step then to create an iPhone optimised interface for that greatest online oracle of information: Wikipedia. Although iPhone’s Safari browser does a superb job as ever of displaying the full Wikipedia website, there’s something to be said about the speed and ease of access that an app can offer. Thinking about it, a number of my favourite apps could easily be replaced by visiting a website, however having the information a single tap away in a format that’s clear and doesn’t require resizing and scrolling is naturally going to be more appealing.
So it is with Wikipanion. This application has proven a little gem when it comes to discovering the answer to all manner of questions, factual disputes and trivia ponderings when away from home. However as we’re rarely talking about matters of life and death, these are items of information that you want to find quickly. This is where Wikipanion really comes into its own compared to browsing the Wikipedia site. The search box is located in the top of the screen for immediate searching. Search results appear in a iPhone-screen sized page as you might expect with the various columns being displayed one at a time, which fits nicely and clearly enough.
-
- Standard Wikipedia entry view
-
- Wikipedia entry contents list
-
- Related entries
As you might expect though this does make for long pages from a site which is known for in-depth content. Fear not, however, as a couple of handy features make the longest of entries quick to access. The first lists the contents of the page, which allows you to jump to the various sections of the entry nice and quickly. The second button links to other, related entries. Combined these make for speedy navigation around and between Wikipedia entries. Highly recommended.
The online photo gallery service Fotopic has been offline since the 2nd January which immediately gave rise to speculation about Fotopic’s demise. Although nothing official has been forthcoming, e-mails forwarded to forums purported from Fotopic’s former owner and others indicate a technical issue with the site’s host Kingston Communications. Contradicting this line are a number of blog and forum posts from other sources claiming all is not well and that the plug has been pulled on the Fotopic website by KC.
What the outage of one website has gone to show is that the blogosphere and online fora more widely are insatiable for news. We’re talking about a 24-hour, worldwide network of users and publishing outlets operating at an astonishing pace. Three days without news and furthermore access to thousands of users’ photo galleries has led to some considerable concern and consternation already. When official word is absent and everyone can hypothethise, the rumour-mill steps in and it becomes extremely fogged as to what is actually taking place.
Having spent the past few weeks tracking down the best apps to integrate it best into my life, I can now start recommending some of the must have iPhone apps. As a British iPhone user I’m specifically looking at iPhone apps from a UK perspective. A great many apps simply aren’t relevant for day-to-day use in the UK, however they’re still featured in the UK app store on the basis that should you travel to that part of the world it would come in handy. It would be nice at some stage for some form of regional filter to be added to iTunes to help separate the wheat from the chaff. However until that happens it’s down to iPhone users to recommend the best apps to each other for their own country or part of the world.
The British are renown for liking to debate their oft altering weather, so let’s have a look at the best app for UK and indeed European weather forecasts. Having read the reviews of a number of the weather apps available in the apps store it becomes clear that the majority are North America-centric and offer limited if any UK and European coverage. Fortunately, as we’ll be discovering throughout this review of apps, there are some absolute gems of apps available for those who seek them out.
Free apps are unsurprisingly the most popular downloads from the app store, however some apps are worth forking out for, which is just what I decided to do with our first app under review…
WeatherPro location weather overview
1. WeatherPro
Don’t get me wrong, the standard weather app that comes with the iPhone isn’t bad; it offers plenty of locations and provides an at-a-glance forecast for the days ahead. Grand. However for a weather-focused culture such of ours, do we not hanker after something more? Just that bit more detail. “Ooh, wind’s got up, hasn’t it… And with that wind-chill it must be -2C … Could do with setting the mercury … and know if the weather front will reach us later”. All these questions are more can be answered with WeatherPro (link to app on iTunes.) Currently at £2.39 it’s not the cheapest app, but as its no.1 in weather apps on the UK app store attests, this is an app worth having.
Where has Baz Luhrmann been since Moo Roo in 2001? If he’s been working on Australia all that time, then I’m sorely disappointed at his time management skills.
Haughty aristocratic woman goes to rough, barren landscape and comes to love a noble, but uncultured man’s man with variable facial hair and a nice hat. They acquire a small Aboriginal boy as their adopted son and overcome trials and evil cattle barons. Kipling Flynn of harmonica fame reminded me very, very strongly of the sozzled former WWI pilot in the Mummy. As plots go, then, it’s not the most original and you can predict with some confidence what the outcome will be. Having said that, Nicole Kidman manages just about to pull off a believable transition from said lordly Ladyship to human being and what’s not to like about Hugh Jackman? It must also be admitted that in parts the film is rather funny. I cite the underwear fight and the kangaroo as two fine examples. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch out for those.
The landscapes are beautiful, as one might expect. BL does a good job as Australia’s official PR guy. Having said that, I did think that semi-primitive Darwin was the most impressive of the backdrops in the same sort of way that Paris became part of the action in Moo Roo.
Re the Aborigines, there’s something of a political agenda going on here. Nullah, a half-Aborigine boy, whose mother works on the cattle station owned by NK’s husband at the beginning of the film, narrates the action (slightly irritating after a while). His greatest fear is that he’ll be taken away to a mission island by the Catholic church and his greatest wish is to be accepted by one community or another (the ‘white fellas’ or the ‘black fellas’). He’s constantly watched over by his magic-singing grandfather, who seems to enjoy building bonfires on incredibly steep hills and has a very good aim. Now, given that the Australian government only issued an official apology to those people of
Aboriginal origin who were affected by the missions in 2008, this could be hot stuff. Having said that, it doesn’t weigh down the film nearly as much as one might expect from reading the opening over-screen paragraphs. In fact, in the end, Nullah’s eventual capture by the dastardly priests seems merely a plot device to allow the family to reunite for the finish.
An enjoyable film, but not a particularly memorable one.
Following a break for family holidays the mule is back for 2009. Thanks for reading the blog so far; there’ll be much more to come in the weeks and months ahead.
Seeing in the New Year in the country