Stop This Madness
Some presumably otherwise lovely people, including Douglas Adams’ widow, Jane Belson, have decided that what’s really needed in this world is a sixth Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy book.
There’s not enough “why” in the world to appropriately respond to this. Douglas Adams is quoted as saying
“I suspect at some point in the future I will write a sixth Hitchhiker book… I would love to finish Hitchhiker on a slightly more upbeat note. Five seems to be a wrong kind of number, six is a better kind of number.”
Which would completely justify a new book by Douglas Adams. Unfortunately, he remains irritatingly dead, and so now Eoin Colfer is going to write one, because clearly, what everyone really wants, and what Mr Adams would have wanted, is a new Hitchhiker’s book written by someone who isn’t him.1 No, seriously, who are these people? Where are their brains?
I guess I should count my blessings that Kevin J Anderson isn’t somehow involved.
- I’ve been reading the New York Times a bit and I love their super-polite “Mr” in front of names. ↩
“Ok, time out. I can not take the sarcasm in this family anymore!”
I’m one step closer to a blog about the top 5 comedy news shows. Positions one and two are taken by The Daily Show and The Colbert Report obviously, but now I’ve found number three. Infomania is a show on cable in the US. It’s not quite as good as The Daily Show but it does some very funny segments, particularly Sarah Haskins in Target Women, and Internet Porn and You
And now, five things better than a car
With rising petrol prices, many people are looking towards smaller cars, hybrid cars or electric cars to cut costs and ease the burden on the environment. I say it’s too late. These are the vehicles you’ll need for the future:
When the ice caps have melted, your neighbourhood might be permanently flooded, so you’re going to need an amphibious car. This car can do 160km/h on land and 50km/h on water. It’s currently available for about $200,000. Also check out this amphibious quad bike for your semi-submerged country estate.
Should we be looking at a Waterworld scenario then unless you can grow gills, you’ll need one of these. The only downside is that it will be quite difficult to repopulate the planet in the back seat of this vehicle.
I wanted to recommend a flying car in this list but unfortunately none currently exist in any commercial form. The closest is Moller’s M400. It’s a sad indictment on the state of modern society that we don’t yet have flying cars.
On the other hand, if you’re living in the mountains, you’ll need something nimble to evade the hordes of refugees. While only a concept at the moment, I like the look of the Yamaha Tesseract. Just be careful though, because it might be a Decepticon in disguise.
And finally, if the apocalypse does come, you’ll need one of these. This multipurpose truck can safely carry survivors/fuel/food/cure past the zombies/bikers/mutants/apemen. A must for every home.
Incidentally, if anyone’s noticed that all the old articles have gone wacky again — though I can’t see why they would have — it’s because I’ve just switched to WordPress. It’s possible that this has something to do with it. Normal service will gradually be resumed.
You and Your iPhone
Oh alright. One more iPhone post, but only so as to try to collect all the tips I’ve seen around the web in one handy place. Let’s get right to it. A lot of them are typing tips, but there’s some others.
There’s some basic things about the keyboard that everyone should know, but I’ll say them just in case. Inside “Settings” > “General” > “Keyboard”, you’ll probably want to enable the “.” shortcut, so that you can get a full stop and a space just by pressing double-space at the end of a sentence. You’ll also want to enable caps lock, which I avoided for a while until I realised that it just enables double-tapping the shift key to move into caps lock. Generally speaking, if you’re using punctuation at the end of a sentence, pressing space will automatically return you to the letter keyboard, so don’t waste time switching back.
Speaking of punctuation: don’t bother typing your own apostrophes unless you really have to. By which I mean, the most common apostrophed words get auto-corrected. Type “dont” for “don’t”, “theyre” for “they’re”, etc, and the words will be automatically corrected for you. If you come up against a stinky word like “we’re”, whose apostrophe-less form also happens to be a perfectly sensible word in its own right, just repeat the last letter and type “weree” to get the phone to correct it appropriately.
If you hold down a letter for a bit, a pop-up will arrive with options for special versions of that letter, i.e. with accents and the like. This hasn’t come in handy yet, but its time will come…
It doesn’t come up much, but if you’re browsing a page which has a separate scrollable area within it, use two-fingered scrolling to scroll that area.
If you’re using your iPhone to play music, you can double-tap the home button while the screen’s locked to bring up mini iPhone controls. And if you’re NOT listening to music, but you were, then you can do the same and press play to start from wherever you left off. Presumably if you haven’t at all, it just shuffles your songs or something.
At time of writing, searching Google by actually going to google.com will give you nicely mobile-screen filling text, rather than the big spread out normal results. For some reason, using Google’s own actual searching app for the iPhone does not do this, and nor does searching through the Safari search bar. Makes me grumpy.
If I think of or find some more, I’ll add them here.