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Technology

Galaxy Note With Ice Cream Sandwich

image

The latest version of Android is at last available for Samsung’s Galaxy Note!

Well, kind of. If you live in certain parts of Germany, and perhaps downwind. No one is sure when carriers will actually make it available in their location.

Tired of waiting I cracked, and installed Ice Cream Sandwich myself. A caveat then: As far as I know the version I am using is precisely the one that Samsung released to carriers in Ireland¹, but there may be more to be done with it before the networks roll it out. Particularly, while it appears to be the latest version of Android (4.0.3) complete with Samsung’s “TouchWiz” top layer, not all of the much-publicised Premium Suite seems to be present.

(The only obvious inclusion in fact is S Note, which seems to be a more capable replacement for the – already very useful – S Memo note-taking and sketching app.)

Anyway, that’s all beside the point. What’s it like!?! The initial impression might be a little disappointing – it hardly seems to have changed at all. But that’s because the front end is still Samsung’s TouchWiz customisation. Look closer and you begin to see quite the opposite – everything has changed. There hardly seems to be a single element of Android that hasn’t been either subtly or radically improved. This really is a new OS. It shows best perhaps in an improved tightness, in a great many more options and details, more fancy transitions. All in all, just a nicer overall experience.

For me of course, what matters most is the pen functions. And the good news is, my hopes are realised. That little dot appears on the screen to show it tracking the pen tip, so you know exactly where your line is going to appear when you draw. As odd as that might sound to those who haven’t tried it, this makes drawing far more spontaneous and intuitive. And the pen seems to have become even more responsive too. As you can see above, it gives you a natural, ink-like line. I can say unequivocally now that this must be the best pocket-sized electronic sketchpad you can acquire.

The wider public I think will be more impressed by something that doesn’t actually come with Ice Cream Sandwich, but requires it: The beta version of the new mobile Chrome browser. On a big screen like the Note’s you can set it to act like a desktop browser, and it can deal with complex, JavaScript-laden sites such as editing WordPress.  Clever pop-up magnifications help you choose small menu items, and it employs a metaphor that stretches back to PalmOS, the lost rival mobile system, and even all the way to the original WAP mobile browser – that of a “deck of cards”. Open tabs can be viewed almost as if they were a poker hand, and unwanted ones can be flicked away. It’s all very cute and fluidly animated, basically making other mobile browsers – even Apple’s – look crude and unfinished. And it’s still in beta.

This alone makes the upgrade something to look forward to. Hang on, it can’t be much longer now! And if you are thinking of buying a Samsung Galaxy Note, be assured that the bits that seemed rough on release are now smooth. The fabulous tablet-phone just got more fabulous.

As well as Vodafone, The Samsung Galaxy Note is now available in Ireland from 3 and O2.

 

  1. For the more technically inclined reader: The ROM I installed came from here; to flash it I used Odin, a simple process that doesn’t even require you to root.  Note that I am NOT recommending you try this yourself. It almost certainly voids your warranty, and there is a non-zero chance that it will irretrievably destroy your phone. 
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Cosmography

Mystery Picture No. 1

 

Shed next to stone circle, beneath truly enormous trees.

Possibly.

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Cosmography Humour Politics

The Frankfurt Mission 1 – Knock Out

What’s Obi Wan doing in there?

Only now can the story be told – because since I got back I’ve been too shagged. How did I become involved with the Ballyhea Burn The Bank Bondholders band? I have to be honest, I am not altogether sure. It sounded like a wild thing to do. It was a noble cause. It would mean spending time with one of my favouritest people. I had some time, flights were cheap, what the hell.

Our journey begins as it ends – in Knock. Knock is one of the world’s weirdest little airports. It has a runway long enough for 747s, but it is miles and miles away from anywhere almost anyone would want to go. The nearest cities are Galway, Limerick and Derry, but the closest of them is an hour away and they all have their own airports anyway.

Knock was the brainchild not of a planner or politician, but of a priest – who thought that the site of a minor and, it has to be said, suspect apparition could become a major destination for pilgrims, if there were only an airport to bring them. But the maxim “If you build it they will come” applies poorly to superfluous infrastructure. Knock had to wait for a new miracle and a new prophet – Michael O’Leary of Ryanair, who knew how to put unwanted airports to good use. So from Knock, an hour away from Galway, we can fly to Hahn, two hours away from Frankfurt. It’s a very useful service – and not only for us, as we were to find.

Knock though is well worth visiting for itself, if you enjoy mocking people’s beliefs. Perhaps I can find a better way to put that… It’s fascinating, because it displays religion at its most incredible. The town of Knock is more or less a religious strip mall, selling objects of veneration in boxes of a dozen beside charming isn’t-drunkenness-funny souvenirs. It’s hard to imagine how anyone’s faith could survive a pilgrimage here.

I would swear that religious art has just got more dumb-looking in recent decades. These figures seem actually to have concussion, the features weirdly cartoonish and toy-like. The 3D pictures of animals are… unexplained. Virgin Marys now come in Standard and Luminous. I resisted the desire to buy a luminous one.

I do not know what a Happy Death Cross is, or how it differs from the usual sad death type of crucifix. We speculate that if you look close, Jesus has a big smile.

So we tear ourselves away from the anthropology just in time to meet up with the Ballyhea folks at the airport, and board our flight. Though not before paying an extra €10, for Knock is a toll airport.

Aboard then, and of course the first thing that greets you is Ryanair’s extraordinary panoply of warnings, right in front of your face. They know that the usual safety cards are often damaged or taken as souvenirs (seriously, I have a friend who collects them), so to save a few cents every flight Ryanair plaster them to the back of the seat in front of you. You spend your entire journey being constantly reminded of the things that can go wrong with a plane.

And I ask you, if you didn’t know all the safety drills already, would you really be able to work them out from this? What the hell is that guy doing with the yellow vest – the hula? And look at the first panel of “Exit B Overwings”, the bottom row of the right side. The whole point of doing this in pictures is so you don’t need to read English to understand the drill. But without that caption, the picture seems to say “If you look out the window and see fire, stay in the plane”. That’s really only good advice if you’re flying through a fire.

Gotta say, plane wings are lovely things.

When we boarded though, someone noticed a thing that took us all by surprise. Among our fellow-passengers was one of the people we were hoping to meet in Frankfurt – Doctor Patrick Honohan, the governor of Ireland’s Central Bank, on his way to the very meeting we were going to picket. This, I admit, was troubling. Were we so broke that our Central Bank Governor had to fly Ryanair? It seems almost shameful. Of course to his credit, Honahan had recently turned down a pay rise in the hope, naive as it might seem, of business and public sector leaders following suit. So perhaps this was another example of economy.

Or perhaps he’d just wanted a quick pray.

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Politics

Back From The Brink – Our Adventure

Sorry for the lack of updates in the last couple of days. Frankfurt was exhausting – but fun, and very satisfying. For once I was actually doing something about the state of the nation instead of just talking about it.

Ringleader Diarmuid O’Flynn, and Filmmaker Donnacha Ó Briain who accompanied us

The story, in case you haven’t heard yet: Ballyhea is a townland in Cork once known for little except a decent GAA tradition; now it’s perhaps the most spoken-of place in the country. Because on Tuesday night, the Ballyhea Bank Bondholder Bailout Protest group – and some hangers-on like me – attached a petition of complaint to the front door of the European Central Bank, after the model of Martin Luther and before a meeting of the Eurozone’s Central Bank governors.

So was it an exercise in futility, to petition one of the most aloof and rarefied institutions on the planet? Of course it wasn’t going to change ECB policy. But it brought it to the attention of the wider world that Ireland is not obediently accepting the austerity process – even if that’s the image our government wants to project – and that we are not ready to bear the gambling losses of commercial banks.

We don’t like it, we don’t deserve it – the problem is we don’t think we can do anything about it. And that sense of helplessness becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Something like this is a way to break that cycle, and make people aware that they can stand up. I’m a fine example; it’s not like me to take direct action. I fret about it compromising my neutrality as a commentator, I want to avoid being identified with one particular issue, I… am a lazy, cynical bastard basically. But Ballyhea’s uncomplicated approach was an inspiration. We booked Ryanair flights to Frankfurt – €56 return including the bus from the Ryanairport – and stood in the street with some signs. For this, we got to talk with the Wall Street Journal, German newspaper Bild and several other international media outlets, plus appear on Irish TV (video) and radio. We got the message out there.

Anyone can do this. More will.

Publicity In Action:
We stand outside the European Central Bank in Frankfurt, intriguing the passers-by
The 40 theses, attached to the bank
Categories
Politics

European Central Brink

We’re here in Frankfurt to protest the fact that a truly vast amount of private bank debt had been foisted on the Irish public. We are asked to put up with this in order to keep the Euro from collapsing, but one has to ask if that is just, or feasible, or even worth it.

This says it all really. One of the stars on the euro sign outside the ECB, the actual big one you see on the TV news, held together with sticky plaster.

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Humour

Champing At The Bit

Passengers leaving Ryanair jet
“But… But this is where we left from!”

This is weird. I’m going to sunny Germany tomorrow, but I’m sitting here with nothing to do. For once I packed well in advance. This is as unlike me as it is possible to imagine, and must basically have happened by accident.

So tomorrow we’re driving to Knock, which should take about an hour, flying with Ryanair to Frankfurt, which should take two hours, and then getting from there to where Frankfurt actually is, which will be the longest leg of the whole trip. You know the usual way.

English: Night view of the euro monument (euro...
Oh look, it’s breaking up!

Hahn airport – “Frankfurt-Hahn“, as Ryanair have the nads to call it – is actually nearer Luxembourg. The tickets were fantastically cheap though, it must be said. We are going to Frankfurt basically because we can afford to. Oh, there will be some research and meetings and stuff. This is the home of the European Central Bank, the institution that is handling our currency in such a profoundly wrong-headed way, so there is much to learn. Perhaps we will even have a little protest. I plan to stand opposite the ECB with my arms folded, frowning really hard.

I’ve been planning this trip for a few weeks though, you think I found time to refresh my German? Did I hell. But then, do I need to now? My phone can speak German for me. Even the free Google Translate is very good – though bear in mind that to use an online translation service you have to pay for data at roaming rates. Right now I’m just getting it to say things like “How many cars may I eat?”, “This shop sells millions of ducklings in a box”, and let’s not forget that old favourite, “My wombat is constipated”.

Categories
Politics

George Soros: Blame Merkel

DAVOS/SWITZERLAND, 27JAN10 - George Soros, Cha...

George Soros knows money. A student of the great philosopher Karl Popper, he has become one of the most vocal critics of modern economics and capitalism. But he doesn’t just talk about the failings of the financial markets. He uses his insight to make a quite seriously incredible amount of cash from them. Out of this, he gives billions to worthy causes. A guy with an opinion worth hearing then.

So when, speaking at the Economics Festival in Trento, he lays responsibility for the Eurozone crisis squarely at Chancellor Merkel‘s feet, you sit up and take notice.

In a nutshell:

The first step was taken by Germany when, after the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers, Angela Merkel declared that the virtual guarantee extended to other financial institutions should come from each country acting separately, not by Europe acting jointly. […] It took some time for the financial markets to discover that government bonds which had been considered riskless are subject to speculative attack and may actually default; but when they did, risk premiums rose dramatically. This rendered commercial banks whose balance sheets were loaded with those bonds potentially insolvent. And that constituted the two main components of the problem confronting us today: a sovereign debt crisis and a banking crisis which are closely interlinked.

In other words, people lent cheaply to Eurozone banks and governments because they believed that there was zero risk of a Eurozone country being allowed to default. But after Lehman, Merkel – unilaterally – declared that Eurozone countries would have to support their own banks. Markets eventually realised this implied that Eurozone countries might have to default, and so lending costs to them shot up – just when we needed to borrow in order to support our banks! It was a single, immensely short-sighted decision of Merkel’s administration that precipitated our current situation.

And their continuing failure to respond adequately is turning a crisis into a disaster for the EU:

Just as in the 1980’s [Third World debt crisis] all the blame and burden is falling on the “periphery” and the responsibility of the “center” has never been properly acknowledged.  Yet in the euro crisis the responsibility of the center is even greater than it was in 1982. The “center” is responsible for designing a flawed system, enacting flawed treaties, pursuing flawed policies and always doing too little too late. In the 1980’s Latin America suffered a lost decade; a similar fate now awaits Europe.

He does more than just lay blame of course. The power to save the situation, he argues, is also in the hands of the creditor nations. But it won’t be easy:

The German public cannot understand why a policy of structural reforms and fiscal austerity that worked for Germany a decade ago will not work Europe today. Germany then could enjoy an export led recovery but the eurozone today is caught in a deflationary debt trap. The German public does not see any deflation at home; on the contrary, wages are rising and there are vacancies for skilled jobs which are eagerly snapped up by immigrants from other European countries. Reluctance to invest abroad and the influx of flight capital are fueling a real estate boom. Exports may be slowing but employment is still rising. In these circumstances it would require an extraordinary effort by the German government to convince the German public to embrace the extraordinary measures that would be necessary to reverse the current trend. And they have only a three months’ window in which to do it.

We need to do whatever we can to convince Germany to show leadership and preserve the European Union as the fantastic object that it used to be. The future of Europe depends on it.

Three months, to get the EU back on the track of being a positive, voluntary association of nations. If we can’t do that, then the choice we’re faced with is basically between effective German control of an impoverished continent, or the sudden and messy disintegration of the Euro. So… We’d better find a solution to this thing. Stat.

I urge everyone to read the speech in its entirety, though if you’re in a rush The Journal.ie has a good summary.

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Humour

The Sinking Guinness Bubble – Explained!

Guinness drinkers are puzzled about something. OK, after a few they’re puzzled about many things, but the one that gets you even before you start drinking the black stuff is that the bubbles in it appear to rise… downwards. This is not the standard behaviour of bubbles.

You might think that this has something to do with the unusual, possibly supernatural, properties of the famous Irish beer. But no. Scientists have finally torn their attention away from trivialities to explain exactly what is going on here, and it has less to do with the liquid itself than with the glass. Not the special Guinness “tulip” either, but any beer glass just so long as it has the typical tapering shape.

You can read the actual scientific paper here (PDF) if you don’t mind looking at maths, or MIT’s excellent non-technical account. But if you want a loose and more inaccurate explanation which has the merit of being simple enough to tell someone in the pub while they wait for their pint to settle, read on!

GuinnessPint
Other Irish stouts are also available

Like other beers or fizzy drinks, bubbles form in stout as gas forced in under pressure escapes after the pressure is released. They’re significantly less dense than the liquid of course, and therefore float to the surface – exerting a little drag on the liquid as they do. Now that drag would have no effect in a straight-sided container. All the liquid would feel an equal upward pull, so it would be in balance and none of it could move. But in the slope-sided glass things are different.

This is the crucial bit: There are always fewer bubbles directly above the sloped sides than there are directly above the flat bottom. Therefore there is less upward pull near the sides, more in the centre. This creates an imbalance – the centre goes up, and the liquid at the sides is pulled downwards to take its place at the bottom of the glass. Similar to the convection that occurs when you heat fluids, a “rolling” motion is set up.

Bubbles still want to go up at the sides of course, but the liquid is being pulled down faster than they can rise through it. The net result therefore is that they are visibly dragged downwards. And as we know Guinness is pretty opaque stuff, so though there are actually far more upward-moving bubbles at the centre, we only see the downward-moving ones just inside the wall.

The solution is simple and convincing then: The bubbles at the outside sink because of a circulating motion caused by the bubbles on the inside rising. Next perhaps mathematicians can explain why people drink the stuff when it tastes like wet cardboard.

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Cosmography

Eggs At Eleven

Praise me, for I labour to advance the breakfast!

Of all things today, a recipe.

Eggs At Eleven

– An ideal breakfast for a day off –

Ingredients: Butter, milk, mushrooms, eggs, ham, bread for toast.
Time: About 15 minutes.
Serves: One to two.

  • Take a small saucepan and gently melt a largish knob of butter.
  • Add milk to cover bottom to about 1cm (½”) and, stirring all the while, bring to a slow simmer.
  • Throw in a little pepper and salt if you want.
  • Break up and drop in about five or six mushrooms.
  • Simmer mushrooms in the milk for a few minutes, being sure not to let it boil.
  • Chop four or five slices of ham up small and stir in.
  • Gently break in two or three eggs, without bursting the yolks if you can.
  • Now would be a good time to put your toast on.
  • When the white has mostly turned white, turn the heat down very low and stir in the egg yolks.
  • Continue to cook, stirring very frequently, until the egg looks almost done.
  • Take off heat and stir some more, eggs will continue to set.
  • Butter toast and cut into bite-size pieces. Put on plate.
  • Dump the good stuff on top.
  • Pour some water in the pan. You won’t regret that later.
  • Serve, preferably in bed, preferably to someone you like.
Categories
Humour Politics

Fruit Fabrics And The Austerity Agenda

You’ll regret it!

Well I hope not of course. I hope I was wrong, and the greater cuts we’re now committed to don’t further hurt the poor and stall the economy. But… It’s hard to see how they won’t.

Too late I know, but it’s worth listening to Paul Krugman‘s argument that austerity is being cheered on by people with an agenda. Said agenda being, to free the rich from the burden of the poor. Some of you will have seen him nail the point on Jeremy Paxman’s BBC show last Wednesday. Though clearly, not enough of you.

Somehow, the mayhem wreaked by unfettered capitalism in the last decade or so gets turned into an excuse to destroy the welfare state. What is the logical justification for that? Because they can, apparently.

All right, enough of the sad. Today started dull but became amazingly hot. I found myself without suitable attire, so I bought some shorts in TK Maxx. I usually try to just buy from charity shops, but there were none nearby and this seemed the next best thing.

I love the label. Whoever wrote this is bored with their job and spends the day trying to sneak in fruit and veg references. Look:

  • “Dries faster due to the higher proportion of polyester yams.”
  • “Is fabric washed and peached for extra softness and comfort.”

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