Pete Hindle

Newcastle blogger Alex Bettylou wrote this review of her favourite coffee shop, after I asked her to do something along those lines. I was a little surprised at her choice of venue, but like my girlfriend says, I’m a snobby snob snob snob, so I’ve got some exacting opinions about coffee shops.

1. It shall serve bastard hot coffee that could double as rocket fuel
2. It shall have comfy seats
3. It must be playing background music or radio 4. Certainly not popular music from Radio 1, or Century.
4. It shall have a range of fancy cakes. And sandwiches.
5. If it has wifi, it should be free.

So, with those five rules, where do I give the ’snobby snob snob snob’ seal of approval?

First prize has to go to the cafe at the end of Saville Row. It’s run by a french guy, the coffee is super-strong, and the cakes are amazing tartlets and other things. Sadly, the sandwiches are lacking, but the coffee makes up for it. Do have: the latte. Avoid: the cheaper baguettes. Never had the cooked food there, so

A second seal of approval goes to the new coffee shop round the back of Grainger market. It’s really new, and has a large deli counter, but has the advantage of great coffee and amazing sandwiches. Also great for people-watching, as the hoi polloi emerging from the Black Garter and other pubs in that area are just… staggering. Literally.

Moving out of the town centre, and into Heaton/Byker, there are a trio of coffee shops worth mentioning. And I can actually remember their name, which is unusual for me (see above). Heaton Perk, on Heaton Park road, actually has good, dependable free wifi. Around the corner, you’ll find Belle and Herbs and the vegetarian Sky Apple Cafe. Belle and Herbs does crap coffee but the food (have the waffles!) is great. Sky Apple Cafe does good coffee, and occasionally some blisteringly nice cakes.

I’ve avoided the usual Costa/Starbucks cafe’s in this list, but there are some that are better than others. Independant retailers are usually a lot more interesting though, and ones I’ve not mentioned could include the Scrumpy Willow & the Singing Kettle (run by hippies, all organic) the Lit and Phil counter (free biscuits, and in a library) and the Oven Door (pictures of Norman Wisdom). I’m sure I’ve forgotten some great places, but just think of this a list of hints. For fellow snobby snob snob snobs.

If you’ve been given a router from your internet provider, I’d recommend throwing it away and replacing it with something else. Anything else. A forty quid ADSL router and modem is going to be as good as the free turd-with-ethernet-port you get in the post. Got that?

Most of today has been an exercise in pointlessness, by trying to follow the help pages on BT’s website to plumb in a wireless router. This has the surprising effect of allowing half of a web-page to load before completely stopping all network access, including access to the setup page so you have to do a hard reset. 

The device gets pretty close to working, but the BT router is so unfriendly that it has the giant greasy fingerprints of engineers all over it. I can’t think of the last time I needed to access some of the functions that are listed here, but the essential function (’work with a wireless access point that my girlfriend brought on the high street’) is not there.  

ScribeFire is a rich-text blog posting… thing… that I’m trying out to see if I blog more. It works within the Firefox browser, popping up inside the window you are using when you click a little icon.

This is my first run of using it. I’m writing down my impressions of as I go.

The setup was pretty easy for my wordpress-based blog, and I got presented with the editing function after a few minutes of clicking ‘confirm’ dialogues. The text editing area is displaying the text much larger than I would usually have text, and it’s pretty ugly (but that could be due to Firefox 2.0).

It seems to have the same trouble with text links that most in browser rich-text editors have. It also has a bunch of ’social sharing’ buttons that are all the rage these days, accessible in a different tab. However, the button don’t have the traditional “y-on-its-side” icons. Also struck by how small the area is.

Time to test the publishing.

Update: Well, it worked. However, the interface is nowhere near as fast or as good as the actual interface supplied with Wordpress, and I found no way of putting tags or categories into the post. Perhaps I’m missing something, as it was only my first time of using it, but using the inbuilt interface (and that of Mars Edit or similar) it’s simple to add taxonomy.

Extra Update: The developer of ScribeFire, Christopher Finke, pointed out in a comment that I can add categories from inside the-bit-of-UI-to-the-right. I’m testing that, and he’s right (but I can’t figure out why I ignored that section on my first run - maybe because it was taken up with empty space?) However, I am tweaking and editing this update from within ScribeFire, so it’s capable of dealing with most of the stuff that I would normally have to do when editing.

Kudos must obviously go to Mr. Finke, for being able to deal with ill-informed criticism from people with very little programming skill.

The idea for this post comes from Andy Ihnatko’s series of first-run reviews. He’s much cooler and better at writing than me, so I suggest you check his stuff out.

Click here to see the map I’m talking about.

Being offically ‘old’ this year, it’s my ambition to ride the route know as the coast to coast before I become thirty. As part of that ambition, myself, Alan, and Brian did a training ride today along some of the excellent cyclepaths in the area. We were riding into the strong headwinds on the entire trip out, giving us an average speed of about 10mph, and at one point one of those old gnarly cyclists with legs like granite sped past us.

(I think we got pwned, but Brian says it’s something to look forward to - being old gnarly cyclists, that is, not being pwned)

On the way back we stopped off for a beer and burger combo at a Lloyds sports bar on Newcastle’s Quayside. Although it was only midday, already there was a hen party wearing masks at the bar. I felt a little self-conscious in my cycling gear, but mainly knackered.

It’s late, I’m bored and thinking of Marmite, so it’s time for another review of Bad Tech I Have Brought. This week: the Creative Zen Micro.

I didn’t actually buy the Creative Zen Player for myself. I brought it for my Grandfather, at his express order. He used to get the John Lewis catalogue of tech toys, and he pointed at the Creative Zen and said words to the effect of “bring me back this one, it looks nifty”.

Being from an earlier generation, he was still impressed with the fact that you could store huge amounts of songs on it’s eight gig hard drive. That was where his impressed-ness ended, as everything after that pissed him off.

His computer wasn’t able to run the software that came bundled with the player, and I ended up ripping his small collection of CD’s with my Mac, and then uploading to it using the open source XNJB - and we all know how much fun FLOSS/FOSS stuff is.

But for once, it’s unfair to blame the Open Source community for a bad user experience. Creative have managed to make an object almost unusable for the purpose it was designed. Let’s start off by looking at the case of the unit -

See that screen? See how it’s nearly as big as all the buttons on the screen, but not quite? That would be fine, but all the buttons are touch-sensitive. So every time you touch the surface of the object, you trigger the unit into doing something, or the screen.

This stunning setback to user-friendlyness was only dwarfed by one thing - the user interface. Never have I seen an interface so unfriendly. It practically sets the dogs on you as soon as you press the menu button (which isn’t a menu button, but actually a context-activate button which offers you a drop-down menu from which you can select the top menu to take you to the music menu to take you to the ‘now playing’ menu).

As if the unit wasn’t bad enough, it also tries to do an number of extra things as badly as possible. It has a radio receiver, that doesn’t pick up radio very well owing to electromagnetic interference from the unit. It records sound, but only using the bad inbuilt microphone. It can operate as a hard-drive, but only under some conditions. And you can use it to show your photographs on, if you can ever work out how to transfer your data across to it when not in hard-drive mode.

Eventually, my grandfather gave up on this device, for the reasons outlined above, and it’s rubbish battery life. (It’s supposed to charge from USB, but it really means USB 2.0 charging only.) He gave it to me, and I’ve tried to give it away to other people. As yet, no joy. However, I recently came across a method for getting the hard-drive out, which keeps me going on those long train journeys when I feel like destroying this particular hand-held device, as it might be the only thing worth doing with it.

I thought I’d do some reviews of some of the really really bad tech I own. I’ve got some critical facilities, and I like tinkering with technology. So this seems like a good way to fill in some otherwise empty time.

You might be asking, ‘What is an M3 DS Simply?, which would be appropriate if you are anything but a giant nerd. If you are a giant nerd (by which I mean a nerd who knows a lot of stuff, rather than somebody suffering from giantism who also happens to be a nerd) you’ll know that an M3 DS Simply is a way of playing pirate games on a Nintendo DS.

The devices are advertised as being for ‘homebrew’, which is a type of computer program written by hobbyists, but the majority of people buy these devices to run pirate copies of games. Which is why the M3 is advertised as having a 100% success rate at running ‘backup’ copies of games.

I’ve found the success rate to be somewhere around 2%. I’ll admit to not knowing everything about the process of running my… uh… ‘backup’ games, but I’ve tried pretty much everything I can try without resorting to shaking a dead chicken over the cartridge, or praying to a baleful god of handheld gaming. The few games backups I have got working are so random as to be remarkable in their diversity.

This leaves me running homebrew on my expensive DS. Well… such homebrew as works, anyway. And frankly, if I wasn’t constantly messing around with computers in a way that’s considered ‘arty’, I’d have very little use for most of the homebrew that’s out there.

If you are considering getting a *cough cough* backup device like the M3 DS Simply for yourself, I’d advise against it unless you really wanted to use homebrew software. Even then, I might point you towards a PSP, an iPhone, or an iPod Touch, all of which are more expensive, but have a better track record of running homebrew software. The DS Simply - and other, similar products - are too much bother for too little return.