Potato Bread
via flickr.com
Made with the Hairy Bikers' recipe.
Made with the Hairy Bikers' recipe.
Very much a rough mix of intro, 1st Verse & part-Chorus.
Any singers in who want to have a go?
Updated version — now 2 complete verses & choruses and better transition into the chorus. Just got the middle 8 & quiet verse to sort.
Oh, and which eejit thought that a 1/2 bar extension in the chorus would be A Good Idea..?
In looking for industries or categories ripe for disruption, Jobs always asked who was making products more complicated than they should be. In 2001 portable music players and ways to acquire songs online fit that description, leading to the iPod and the iTunes Store.
Mobile phones were next. Jobs would grab a phone at a meeting and rant (correctly) that nobody could possibly figure out how to navigate half the features, including the address book. At the end of his career he was setting his sights on the television industry, which had made it almost impossible for people to click on a simple device to watch what they wanted when they wanted.
During the design of the iPod interface, Jobs tried at every meeting to find ways to cut clutter. He insisted on being able to get to whatever he wanted in three clicks. One navigation screen, for example, asked users whether they wanted to search by song, album, or artist. “Why do we need that screen?” Jobs demanded. The designers realized they didn’t.
At one point Jobs made the simplest of all suggestions: Let’s get rid of the on/off button. At first the team members were taken aback, but then they realized the button was unnecessary. The device would gradually power down if it wasn’t being used and would spring to life when reengaged.
Likewise, when Jobs was shown a cluttered set of proposed navigation screens for iDVD, which allowed users to burn video onto a disk, he jumped up and drew a simple rectangle on a whiteboard. “Here’s the new application,” he said. “It’s got one window. You drag your video into the window. Then you click the button that says ‘Burn.’ That’s it. That’s what we’re going to make.”
If you're in a consumer technology business that's complicated for the user, you're on borrowed time. The Steve may not be around any more, but there's plenty of people he's been teaching for a decade and more to find the complicated market and successfully simplify the shit out of it.
Hey, who wants 24hrs with a luxury car?
That was the jist of the tweet I saw the other week from @DriveLexusUK.
Who doesn't?
Quite apart from the sheer fun of taking something ridiculously flash out on my own for a while, it's not just a jolly. My current company wagon — a Toyota Prius T Spirit — is heading for its end of lease, and I'm starting to think about what to replace it with, so there's some serious research to be done.
So the question is: Do I just go for the easy option of "Dear Toyota: another one of those, ta" or do I look for a wee step up?
So, Siri works in French and German as well as English. And in 2012, will also support Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Italian, and Spanish.
Apple claims that it's doing quality contextual and semantic analysis, which is hard — systems that do it properly run into hundreds of thousands of pounds, and work best with a high degree of tuning. Not to mention needing some serious computing grunt to work in real time.
But let's play along for a bit, and assume that it is doing this, and is exposing all of this to a developer API.
Can you imagine what the Michel Thomas people could do with it? How it could start understanding what you meant to say, and correct you?
But surely the killer app for this has to be a Babelfish...
If I get time, I'll see if I can edit together a few clips, but believe me, this is Building 2, New Square, Bedfont Lakes.
why do I have to pretend ironically that it’s, ooooh, wonderful and great? people assume if you are into music that you should like it but it’s not a music show, it’s a celebrity show, it’s selling the Cheryl ‘tears as fake as her tan ‘ Cole brand, it’s selling the Simon Cowell brand and no-one is allowed to stand in their way.
Weekend TV is pretty much unwatchable because of this crap and its clones.
The only competition show I can stand these days is The Great British Bake-Off because it doesn't aim to turn its winners into celebrities.
That, and cake, obviously.
If you needed any more proof that the age of dead-tree books is over take a look at these alarming style changes at Ikea: the furniture manufacturer’s iconic BILLY bookcase – the bookcase that everyone put together when they got their first apartment and, inevitably, pounded the nails wrong into – is becoming deeper and more of a curio cabinet. Why? Because Ikea is noticing that customers no longer buy them for books.
It would seem that the bookshelf is on the way out. And I'm part of the reason; not because I don't read — I do and copiously — but because I'm increasingly reading electronic texts, online and on Kindle.
That's as may be, but I still have more books than I have shelves for, and more shelves (yes, mostly Ikea Billys) than I have house room for. And I form early opinions on people by how much (and how widely) they read, as to my thinking, a voracious reading habit indicates the kind of interesting mind that's curious about the world and isn't satisfied with simplistic answers.
In my dream house, there's still a library where one may pluck a volume randomly from a shelf and be lost in discovering that book's world. I want to be like Umberto Eco, who was regularly asked by visitors if he'd read all the 30,000 books in his home (or the 20,000 in his Rimini holiday home). "No" the great man would (self-admittedly contemptuously) reply "Why would I keep all those books at home if I'd read them?"
I'm just hoping that by that point, physical books will still be generally accessible enough to stock the room affordably. Because I'm damned if I'm resorting to non-functional books by the yard.
