I recently made the decision to leave the iPhone for something a little more open.

I’m a fan of Apple and have been for quite some time and consider my Macbook to be my main machine, albeit I have a Windows machine which is more powerful. It’s a great little device that does almost everything I need and isn’t held back by restrictions any more than it is by the lack of development in certain areas.

I bought into the iPhone just after it was released in the UK and fell in love with it the way Apple expected everyone to fall in love it and I have bought two difference instances of the device.

Recently the restrictions on the phone have been getting to me that bit more. Silly things like Squarespace’s app being pulled/rejected due to problems that Apple had with the application’s UI, lack of support for open formats such as Ogg Vorbis and in reference to the above – the lack of proper reasoning and consistency within the app approval process. Who could forget what happened to Wobble iBoobs and the like!

So in light of the above, and  going right back to the beginning, I’ve purchased the HTC Desire. It’s fast,  has a decent camera, good looking, just about the same weight as the iPhone, has a bigger screen and the most important thing I’ve been looking for – it’s open. There is the Android store which you can go to for a list of available apps, but you also have the ability to install applications straight from a file on your desktop or from a website. Openness like this unfortunately brings security risks, so by default, the Desire doesn’t allow for un-approved applications to be installed, but this can be enabled from the options if you’re willing to take the risk.

Overall so far, I’ve been really impressed with what the phone offers and I’ll updating on my experience with the phone in the following days/weeks.

Kittens!

In another week or so, we’ll be getting two kittens to savage the flat – and wow is it going to be fun.

The above photo is the male, but if you click on the image, it’ll take you to a page where there are a few photos of the brother and sister along with the Kitten War video. It’s short but cute none-the-less.

Yeah yeah. I know that anyone can have a kitten and we’ve seen it all, but I like to document and share things to those who might enjoy.

Page will be updated regularly once we get the cats.

The dinosaur-like creature, Asilisaurus kongwe, was about the size of a Labrador retriever and had teeth and jawbones ideally shaped for eating plants, indicating it ate a mostly vegetarian diet.

“This shows that the lineage leading to dinosaurs goes a lot further back in time than we thought. The second thing is that it shows that there’s this real ecological diversity,” said paleontologist Randy Irmis, co-author of the study appearing Mar. 3 in Nature. “No one thought that the closest relatives to dinosaurs were these four-legged, herbivorous animals. We thought they were small carnivores.”

The oldest proof of human life goes back 3 to 3.6 million years. We’re all just specs of dust in this planets history!

[Dinosaurs Arose at Least 10 Million Years Earlier Than Thought via Wired]

It’s been over eight years since the events of 9/11 affected the lives of so many. Looking back,  some of the things that were implemented to try and ease the pain are fascinating. This is one of them.

The 2001 Clear Channel memorandum is a controversial document distributed by Clear Channel Communications to the over 1,200 radio stations they owned, shortly after the September 11, 2001 attacks, containing a list of a large number of what the memo termed “lyrically questionable” songs.

Music has the great ability to evoke strong emotions in humans whether it be good, bad, based around the first time you heard the song or a reminder of a time so disastrous as 9/11. I’m all for free speech and against silencing in most circumstances, but I’d find it hard to disagree with this one.

A short but interesting read.

[2001 Clear Chanel memorandum via wikipedia]

After realising that I plugged the USB cable in to my phone, but not my laptop, I woke up to find that my battery was dead.

This made things a little bit easier.

Edit: Manohmanohman! I’ve been reading through the comic archives throughout the day. I can’t safely say that I have LOL’d well.

[via loldwell]

“He doesn’t like you” is the feeling you’d get from the look the fish is giving, but this is a look of love. Love and hunger.

Some things really urk me. Most people who know me well would be able to tell you that Johnny Quest is one of those things, but that’s a story for another time.

I noticed the above ad while on my commute to work a couple of weeks ago, it catches my eye, which I guess is what it’s designed to do, but it doesn’t catch my attention for a good reason necessarily.

It talks about “The new more efficient Audis”, but to me, there is nothing efficient about the ad, which I feel destroys the message that they’re trying to send out. Granted, I’m not trained in and I don’t have any qualifications in graphic design and the methods behind it, but if I was trying to send out a message saying that “We’re now more efficient”, I’d make the ad in simple bold letters. It’d get the point out there and as a plus, it wouldn’t enrage me in the mornings on route to work.

But as they say, I guess there is no such thing as bad press. They got my attention and I’m writing about it. Nice work!

I’m no longer in the countryside and I miss it dearly, and because of that I feel I’ll be going out a lot at the weekends with the camera which means more updates on the blog. The lack of posts has had me thinking, however. I’m going to experiment over the next few weeks with the site and see if posting other content to the site is worth a go. More on that to come soon.

Hardest part about moving out? No internet connection. Should be up by Thursday and that’s when things will kick off.

Posted via email from Sandy’s posterous