Year: 2012

November 11, 2012
Haven’t posted anything for a good while about breadmaking, as I haven’t been doing anything exciting. I lost my sourdough starter, and although I know I can get some back from others I gave it to (or start a new sourdough), I haven’t been in a hurry to do so. Sourdough is fun to play with, but keeping it going all the time just for me is overkill.

For the last few months, I haven’t had time for hand-baking, so have been making good use of my breadmaker – which despite some naysayers, makes a very decent loaf of bread.

November 2, 2012
October 27, 2012
When Apple lost their UK court case against Samsung, the judge mandated that they should have to host a statement on their website to “correct the damaging impression” given by Apple that Samsung had copied their tablet.

Apple have now done this – their UK website has, in the smallest of print, a link labelled “Samsung/Apple UK judgement” leading to this page:

October 22, 2012
October 16, 2012
I have a pear tree in my garden, which is productive more years than not, with this year being no exception.

However, it is fairly rare that I get an edible crop of pears from it. I have been nicely surprised a couple of years, but usually I end up with a pile of nicely sized fruit that never ripen. I am not sure what the factor is that made things work on the good years, but it seems to be all or nothing.

October 16, 2012
October 15, 2012
Being a fan of Dave Cash in the old Capital Radio days, I grabbed a copy of this book at the same time as downloading a sample chapter of David Mitchell’s autobiography. When they both hit my Kindle I was surprised to see Cash’s book was about the same length as the David Mitchell sample. It is very, very short.

The book is obviously self published – the layout is poor, and the editing non-existant, typos galore. With all of this, it was very difficult to immerse myself in Cash’s tale, even though I wanted to enjoy it.

October 10, 2012
Suffering currently from conjunctivitis, I’ve found that watching TV irritates me, but I have been able to read my Kindle comfortably. Which is why I have managed to speed through Peter Hamilton’s latest mega-novel in faster than usual (for me) time.

Which is probably good, as it helped me keep the multiple narratives (and frequent flashbacks) straight in my mind – a number of the characters have similar names (for good reason, as will become evident if you read it), and even reading it continuously, I had moments of confusion.

October 6, 2012
Back in September, I asked if Hunt was “a safe pair of hands for the NHS”, having a record for supporting homeopathy and limits on abortion.

Now, according to the BBC, he has stated – once again, in a new interview in the Times – that he “favours a change in law that would halve the limit on abortions from 24 weeks into a pregnancy to 12”.

September 28, 2012
Although not a great user of twitter, I have used it as a way of conveniently getting messages from devices like my Kindle through to my blog. Yes, I was doing it to post to the blog, but twitter gained the traffic as well.

Except that has now stopped, with changes to twitter’s API policy. They want anything posted to twitter to stay with twitter, and not be exported or cross-posted to any other system. As a result the IFTTT website has had to remove all of its twitter triggers effective today.