FREE Tablets and FREE Smartphones
Before you click through, the ones you want aren't on the list of "free" tablets and smartphones. You'll have to settle for gadgets from BlackBerry, HTC, Samsung, Archos or Hannspad (who?) but if that works for you, please fill your boots.
I guess Carphone Warehouse don't need to give away Apple products in order to shift inventory.
In advance, yes -- you're right, it's impossible.
I can't really evaluate the claims in this article but if they're true then we're on the cusp of another wave of exciting change in computing and communication. Cool.
Meraki install Wi-Fi networks in places like Starbucks and Burger King. This chart shows proportions of each device connecting to their networks. in 2011, Apple's operating systems accounted for more than 60% of the connections, which is staggering.
Well, I think it is staggering; you might disagree.
The Church of England is expected to confirm that openly gay clergy can be made bishops, if they are celibate.
There is still opposition, of course, even to this half-hearted compromise; some of the Church of England's clergy just can't stop discriminating against their homosexual colleagues. The UK's equality legislation applies to the Church as it does to every other employer in the UK and the fact that they still plan to interfere in the sex lives of their senior managers shows just how far they have yet to go.
Saw this in a shop in Kensington yesterday. In case you can't quite
see the price label, it says £38,050 (not a typo). The shops wasn't
called "Pimp My Oven".
Hash key: alt-3
Consumption exceeds production so stocks are falling. When the stocks
run out, someone will run short of oil. Could be grim.
The border on the Golan Heights at the town of Majdal Shams lies in a valley between two hill tops, one in Israel and one in Syria.
At noon, dozens of Syrian protesters began to edge down the slope in the blazing sunshine towards the newly-dug trenches and freshly-laid coils of razor wire that mark the frontier.
The demonstrators quickly found themselves pinned down by live gunfire from Israeli army units who said they began shooting at the protesters' legs only after issuing warnings in Arabic and firing shots in the air to disperse the crowd.
It's interesting that this report doesn't mention the protesters firing on the Israeli soldiers. It seems that the worst they were doing was throwing stones and being Palistinian, which is apparently not allowed. Can you imagine any army in Europe (or, in fact, anywhere other than Israel?) firing across an international border at unarmed protesters?
"Legendary" might be over-egging the pudding somewhat. "Unknown" is more accurate. Even so, I keep meaning to write more 500 word reviews and as the post below on writing tools was, coincidentally, 500 words long, I've posted it here as well. More to follow, probably.
I quite enjoy writing. At work I write emails, workflow descriptions, user guides, reports, technical texts, marketing brochures and a variety of other documents. At home I mostly write dreadfully boring blog entries while imagining that my prose is insightful, witty, entertaining and respected.
The tools I use to capture my thoughts and present them to my audience are amongst the most sophisticated ever constructed. The laptop computer, or any computer for that matter, is an exquisite piece of precision-engineered equipment that most people take for granted or curse as some aspect of its delicate interior (usually the installed software) performs less than perfectly.
The computer upon which I am drafting this article has been teased into existence through a bewilderingly complicated sequence of manufacturing processes. It has arrived in my home as an object of desire and beauty and will doubtless leave in several years having finally exhausted my patience and been replaced by a younger, faster, lighter, more beautiful alternative. Computers, like superheroes, die young or live to become the villain, hunted down and replaced by their more virile descendants.
And the software? It is easy to be rude about software or to underestimate the challenges facing programmers. Many people, myself included, are frustrated by faults, bugs, inconsistencies, poor design decisions or missing features that hinder their work or reduce their productivity. Building software is difficult; building great software that delights the user is particularly tricky.
I have been wondering this week about user-delighting, distraction-free writing software. Modern operating systems present a variety of distractions for the struggling writer. Email, Twitter, Facebook, BBC News and Google Reader compete for your attention. Instant messaging applications, alarms and task managers try to pull you from your task. Even the operating system tries to get in the way, updating, restarting or simply deciding that whatever you are doing must wait while it completes its own activities.
The idea of the distraction-free writing tool is that everything, including the controls of the application you are using, is hidden from view while you capture your prose. This leaves you looking at a page full of text, a word count and a page indicator. If you have a quiet environment in which to work, distractions should now be minimal.
My plan was to buy a dedicated application to facilitate distraction-free writing and, as ever, Google suggested several possibles. Byword (bywordapp.com) seemed to offer the right combination of features and price (£5.99, Mac App Store) but just before I bought I saw a recommendation for Pages (Apple’s word processor, £11.99, Mac App Store) in Full Screen mode and, as Pages already lives on my MacBook, experimentation was simple.
In conclusion, for distraction-free writing on the Mac I recommend Pages in Full Screen mode. Byword’s features are more specialised (paragraph focus, for example) but Pages offers a full suite of general-purpose word processing tools that you will need as soon as your text is ready for formatting.
