Icon Books (2013), Edition: Reprint, Paperback, 288 pages
[from: Librarything]

Hoxton Mini Press (2013), Hardcover, 96 pages
[from: Librarything]

Freedom Press (2014), Paperback, 48 pages
[from: Librarything]

Facebook Nearby Friends
I see Facebook is introducing some new location features that let you publish a rough location and to see rough locations for your friends, especially the ones within a small radius.
https://www.facebook.com/help/629537553762715/

And like Google Plus, it's iOS/iPhone and Android only. For some bizarre reason it's unavailable from laptops, Chromebooks, or other devices. There's no desktop browser or mobile browser interface. Why? I can understand a small company with limited resources only rolling out a new feature on certain platforms. But why do these big companies only do half the job?

Location does seem to be something that everyone assumes is only interesting from a smart phone. That just assumes:-
- Nobody travels with a laptop. And yet I still see people using laptops in cafes and out on the road
- Chromebooks aren't portable and used on the road. But they are.
- Nobody would ever want to get an overview on a real browser. But then why is the big browser version of Google Maps used so much.
- That people never want to add a location to a post when using the most convenient interface for long form posts; The Browser version.

I don't get it. Do the people making these decisions and setting the development plans never use a laptop?

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[from: Google+ Posts]

Apple's plan for Beats assuming the sale goes through. It's a 4 stage process.

1) Change the b to an a
2) Change the red to white
3) ???
4) Profit!

Now come on Apple, where's my 1TB iPod Classic by Beats by Dre ?
[from: Google+ Posts]

So Mr Bond, 
http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2014/04/the-prospects-of-the-space-and.html#comment-1953430

This one made my day.

My idea for an anti-bond story is along these lines: Bond discovers villain is setting up a tremendous under-ice colony in Antarctica. He's planning on global warming upending the world economy and ecology and the return of tropical conditions to the frozen continent. He's handpicked 50k bright, handsome youths to make the colony a success.

Bond is like "You're going to destroy the world to conquer it? You're mad!"

The villain is all like "What? No! I've sunk half my fortune into fighting global warming. But I don't think I'll make any headway against these jackass governments so Plan B is the Antactic colony. I'm not trying to destroy civilization, I'm just trying not to be crushed in the debris when it collapses. So, you look like a handsome gent of good stock. I think I could find a place for you here."

Bond considers. "How are you stocked for gin and olives?"

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[from: Google+ Posts]

DAW (2014), Edition: Reissue, Mass Market Paperback, 320 pages
[from: Librarything]

Penguin Press HC, The (2014), Hardcover, 352 pages
[from: Librarything]

Orbit (2014), Hardcover
[from: Librarything]

Tor Books (2013), Kindle Edition, 32 pages
[from: Librarything]

Vertigo (2010), Edition: First Edition, Paperback, 128 pages
[from: Librarything]

When the seasons change in the northern hemisphere, animals that like colder conditions migrate north and upwards.  Think summer reindeer or the Swifts that are just about to move to the UK. So one personal response to climate change is to migrate to where conditions are better suited to the kind of life you'd like. So instead of retiring to Spain where it's nice and warm, you might decide to retire to Norway or western Eire where it's not unbearably hot and there's some rainfall.

Now given that borders generally (even in the EU) are closing. And you currently live in SE England, where would you move to in the next 20 years to survive the following 20 in reasonable comfort? 

BTW, this is one of the scariest essays I've read recently. You'll probably want to give it a miss.
http://guymcpherson.com/2013/01/climate-change-summary-and-update/

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[from: Google+ Posts]

My old, much loved, much tweaked, improved and worked on Suzuki Burgman 400 has been stolen. Well, that sucks!

http://bikeweb.com/node/1426
http://bikeweb.com/image/tid/24

When it was stolen it had the Tucano Urbano lap cover fitted underneath the estate agent sign side panels.

That top box was 20 years old. The bike was 10 years old. It had a battery charger, soldering iron and kit, 10 year old bike boots, Frank Thomas jacket inner, wooly hat, cap, glove inners, assorted bungees, an old favourite pair of waterproof trouser outers, several bags of nuts and bolts and no doubt some other random stuff in it. The backrest came from a last millenium Helix. The Givi screen had been much modified. The more I think about it, the more emotional investment there was there. So there's a large slice of Buddhist detachment needed here.

How did that happen? Work on somebody else's bike all day. Right outside a ground floor flat in Tower Hamlets down near Mile End in dodgy East London. 6pm go and get pizzas from Tescos. Return to park on the pavement right outside the flat in the same place it's been parked all day. Cook and eat the pizzas. Look out the kitchen to see the bike has gone. WTF? The bike's worthless (in the sense of what you'd get as a stolen bike or as parts rather than what it would cost to replace) and a bitch to hot wire. There really is almost nothing on it that's worth anything. I guess it's just disappeared into the local estates and will end up in the canal. They literally just pushed it away. The Police[1] will do what they can but unless it gets dumped somewhere obvious, I don't expect to see it again. I kind of hope it doesn't come back because it's bound to be broken in all kinds of new and not so interesting ways.

So shall I buy another one? Think I'll have a drink while I ponder that.

[1]Incidentally, the Met have another scam going. If you agree, and they find it, they'll put it in the pound. You get to pay for their collection and then by the day till you collect it. The alternative is they just tell you where it is.

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[from: Google+ Posts]

Quite irritating that Orphan Black S2E1 was a week ago in the USA on BBC America but not till Wed in the UK on BBC3. Why, BBC, why?

Still at least it is being shown free to air. Unlike Justified that has no outlet, and Mad Men, Game of Thrones and so on that is Sky only since Virgin cable doesn't carry Sky Atlantic (even for money).

I guess they must actually want us to use quasi-legal streams and torrents then. And this might come in handy; https://immunicity.org/

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[from: Google+ Posts]

Science FTW, suckers!
http://apod.nasa.gov/apod/ap140418.html

Measuring the Earth Moon distance to under a millimetre by bouncing a laser beam off the Apollo 15 retroreflector. The laser is visible in the photo because the full moon's light is dimmed during the total eclipse.

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[from: Google+ Posts]

Time for EBR to go home. Being lapped is just embarrassing. But having both bikes blow up and the 2nd one causing a red flag screws it up for everyone else.
[from: Google+ Posts]

Nothing new to see here, move along. Just some wild speculation about lizard people and the short term future of energy supplies in the Guardian.

Pent up demand, rising extraction costs, reducing ROI and EROI, an economy built on unlimited $30/barrel oil/gas, all leads to increased volatility.

So what does the current UK gov do? Promote fracking and down play renewables. Yeah, that'll work. Well, it will work for the people selling fracking technology and their friends, perhaps not so much for the rest of us.

http://www.theguardian.com/environment/earth-insight/2014/mar/28/global-market-shock-oil-crash-2015-peak

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[from: Google+ Posts]

This is a fairly extraordinary thing. Heat map of 77,688,848 rides and 19,660,163 runs representing about 220 billion total data points.
http://labs.strava.com/heatmap/#13/-0.10957/51.50642/yellow/bike

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[from: Google+ Posts]

The Palmetto and (not)Master At Arms - Fri and Sat cocktails

Here's a pair of dark rum cocktails. The Palmetto is quite well known and is in the Savoy cocktail book. Savoy recommends St Croix rum but since they make several it's not clear which. They appear to be quite dark so Myers seems a good alternative. Curiously, although it's a classic French-Italian, Regan doesn't mention it, and neither does Degroff.

I've mentioned the Master At Arms before. It comes from Zetter Townhouse in London. They make it with a Port evaporation and home made Grenadine. Since I have no evaporator and a bottle of Monin Pomegranate syrup, that'll do.

They're both easy drinking and lush. However they do need care with the quantities as there's the danger of ending up with something that tastes like cough mixture. I'm going to try increasing the rum and reducing the other ingredients to try and get nearer what I remember from Zetters.

Palmetto
30ml Myers rum,
30ml Antica Carpano Red Vermouth
2 Dashes Orange Bitters
Stirred, Martini glass, Orange twist or Maraschino cherry

(not)Master At Arms
40ml Myers rum,
15ml Tawny port,
Barspoon(2.5ml) Pomegranate syrup
Stirred, small coupe or small tumbler with one ice cube.
[from: Google+ Posts]

Downing College-Cambridge, 1978. Special Consumers Association. Where are you now?  There was a white Cortina Mk1 automatic with Jamaica flag roundels round the headlights driven by a guy who worked in the record biz. It expired just short of Harston. There was a vague connection with Regents University and very temporary digs behind Bond St station. Later there was a flat in West Hampstead. There was also a couple who lived in a flat in a big block on Steel's Rd (??? and Carrie). Some of you came to a post-wedding party in 1984 in Downshire Hill. There's a possible connection with Nigel Sharpe. I also kind of think you knew people from Queens and Cranbrook, Kent

Then there's Alex the guitar player who had a flat above Trinity St and played God Save out the window in the style of the Hendrix Star-Spangled. Later had a Guzzi Le Mans, lived in Crouch End before moving into a self build in Docklands. Alex's mate (who played Bass) and was into BASE jumping.

Mentioning Cranbrook. What happened to Ant? And the guy we always thought got recruited by the security services due to his fluent German, frequent trips to "Switzerland" and slightly dodgy dad. The others in that house on Chaucer Road. And what about Sue from Birmingham who went to Goa.

The three Dumont brothers, Max Bell and one or two others from Trinity. Especially the guy who looked after a flat in the posh bit between Shepherd's Bush and Hammersmith and a penchant for Tootsie's burgers. There were a lot of people I kind of knew at that afternoon garden party in Trinity Gardens '78. Bring white wine and we'll empty it into a dustbin and add fruit, mixers and spirits.

Did you have a house in Manchester and came to Rivington Pyke in '78 in a VW camper van with a dodgy gearbox? They wouldn't let us up the hill, so we ended up in a field. There was a guy there well known for making hot air balloons. He walked round with one on the end of a string above his head. The student house had a circular "door" hole into the sitting room and was mostly painted in purple.

Did you run a record and buttons stall in Camden Market, lived in a basement flat in Camden and briefly had a record shop in Hampstead? What about the artist who had a flat in S Villas at the back and was in the ambulance to Rivington and later to LA.

Annie, Sue, Droid, John Mac, Peter Walsh, Pete, Tim Palmer, Nick Froome, Dave Harris, Kevin Metcalfe and Steve Angel in the cutting room, and all the others hanging round Utopia studios.

Does any of this ring a bell? Get in touch.
[from: Google+ Posts]