Posts about Reviews

I care a lot about the things that I use everyday. I need them to be the nicest that I can buy, or at least afford. This means that I care a lot about my computer, phone and the sleeves I keep them safe in. I also care about the pen I write with and most recently about the mug I drink from every day.

When I arrived at Beyond Tellerrand in Berlin this week, conference organiser Marc had a nice surprise waiting for me, a new Joli Originals laptop sleeve for my Macbook Pro with Retina Display.

I’m not a one man QA department so I sometimes miss minor implementation issues, even on my own sites. Just this week, despite having looked at the Stuff and Nonsense redesign for countless hours, I still kept finding small alignment and padding problems, especially on my iPhone and iPad where those issues are magnified.

Summary: If you use OSX and write HTML, screw the trial version. Buy Hammer. You’ll earn back what you spent on it during the first hour you use it.

For about the last five years, my wallet’s been a big Lakeland travel wallet. It was designed to carry a passport and boarding cards, not for everyday use, but I used it everyday. It was big enough to hold all my stuff; credit cards, plenty of cash and the pile of train tickets and receipts that I collect when I’m out and about. When I say it was big, I mean big. I couldn’t mistake when I had it in my pocket and I could easily dig into my bag to find it in my bag without looking. I loved it and was very upset when it was lost.

There’s barely a day at home when I don’t have music playing. Either (mostly) through an old (but good) set of Creative Labs speakers I connected to my iMac or (sometimes) through my Sony separates and a pair of fabulous B&W speakers on stands. When I’m on a plane or a train it’s a pair of Klipsch s4i in-ear headphones.

But there are plenty of times when I’m traveling and staying in hotel rooms or rented apartments for a week or two at a time when I don’t want to listen through headphones. I don’t mean cranking it up for partying, just a little ambience. The speakers on my Macbook Air are acceptable, but I still carry my whole music collection on a fat old iPod Classic as my library’s bigger than my Air’s hard-drive and I don’t (yet) use iTunes Match.

(If I ran rented rooms, I’d make sure that every one came with an iPod/iPhone speaker dock. (Come on hotel owners, they’re not expensive.) That leaves me with using portable external speakers of some sort or another.)

For the last couple of years I’ve carried a little X-mini capsule speaker on longer trips. It’s small, light and OK, it’s never going to tick all the volume/quality boxes, but it makes a reasonable sound when my music doesn’t contain a lot of bass.

Funnily enough, I’ve noticed that if I plonk the X-mini on a large, flat surface like a table, the sound improves. I’m no audiophile, so I guess it has to do with vibrations or something. That’s why, just before leaving for Australia on this six week trip, staying in rented apartments, I was interested in an offer from mobilefun.co.uk to test a travel speaker designed to use vibrations in just that way — a Pocket Boom Portable Vibration Speaker.

There’s barely a day at home when I don’t have music playing. Either (mostly) through an old (but good) set of Creative Labs speakers I connected to my iMac or (sometimes) through my Sony separates and a pair of fabulous B&W speakers on stands. When I’m on a plane or a train it’s a pair of Klipsch s4i in-ear headphones.

But there are plenty of times when I’m traveling and staying in hotel rooms or rented apartments for a week or two at a time when I don’t want to listen through headphones. I don’t mean cranking it up for partying, just a little ambience. The speakers on my Macbook Air are acceptable, but I still carry my whole music collection on a fat old iPod Classic as my library’s bigger than my Air’s hard-drive and I don’t (yet) use iTunes Match.

(If I ran rented rooms, I’d make sure that every one came with an iPod/iPhone speaker dock. (Come on hotel owners, they’re not expensive.) That leaves me with using portable external speakers of some sort or another.)

For the last couple of years I’ve carried a little X-mini capsule speaker on longer trips. It’s small, light and OK, it’s never going to tick all the volume/quality boxes, but it makes a reasonable sound when my music doesn’t contain a lot of bass.

Funnily enough, I’ve noticed that if I plonk the X-mini on a large, flat surface like a table, the sound improves. I’m no audiophile, so I guess it has to do with vibrations or something. That’s why, just before leaving for Australia on this six week trip, staying in rented apartments, I was interested in an offer from mobilefun.co.uk to test a travel speaker designed to use vibrations in just that way — a Pocket Boom Portable Vibration Speaker.

“What have you bought this time?” she asked, handing me the heavy box that the courier had just handed her. I’m sure I looked surprised because, for once, I hadn’t ordered anything.

What did you think about …?

I’ve become a bit of a LESS junkie these last few months, so I was chuffed when I heard about CodeKit — a new, (free while in beta) toolkit — by LESS.app developer Bryan Jones. I’ve been trying CodeKit out this week.

One of the questions that I get asked quite frequently is until CSS3 moves forward, is there anything new we can say, or write, about CSS?. That's a good question. Not as good perhaps as Why does Gordon Brown do that funny thing with his mouth? or Would Eddie Izzard make a good Doctor Who?, but quite a good question none-the-less.