Tag: Links

A new app I’ve put on my phone recently that I really quite like is Journey. It’s a journalling app and I’ve been using it for about 10 days now. I’m doing several different streams of things – like photos/notes of meals, photo + notes on the garden, brief notes on the TV we watch and so on. It syncs to Google Drive, and then there’s a webpage to see what’s been synced (only you see your own), and has a variety of sharing options for single entries – my photo per day that I put up on facebook & G+ have been written in Journey first for the last few days, and then I share it from there. The sharing still seems to have a few bugs (like not populating the text into facebook …) but one of the options is to “share” the text to the clipboard, so that’s actually quite convenient – just open up the facebook or G+ app then paste in the text and select the right photo.

TV I’m setting recording today:

• The Wonder of Animals – new series about animals and what has made particular ones successful, starting with penguins!
• The Beauty of Anatomy – new series about human anatomy and the art that shows it.
• Andrew Marr’s Great Scots: The Writers Who Shaped a Nation – new series about Scottish writers.

Huge four winged dinosaur fossils have been found!

Kinda neat – there’s a project to record medieval graffiti in churches.

TV I have set to record last week and this week:

• Talk to the Animals – two part series about animal communication.
• Indian Hill Railways – three part series about three mountain railways in India.
• Every Breath We Take: Understanding Our Atmosphere – one off programme about the atmosphere and how we came to understand what it is.
• Our Planet from the Air: Home – one off programme of aerial footage of the whole world.
• Killer Storms and Cruel Winters – The History of Extreme Weather – Timeshift episode about the extremes of British weather over the centuries.

A group of embroiderers have created an ending section to the Bayeux Tapestry.

TV I’m recording this week:

• John Bishop’s Australia – 3 part travelogue.
• Scotland: For Richer or Poorer? – opinion piece about Scotland’s economy if it becomes independent, presented by Robert Peston.
• A Century in Film: From Scotland with Love – one off programme made up of archive footage of Scotland.
• Isis: Terror in Iraq – Panorama episode about Iraq.

A review of the British Museum Mummies exhibition that I enjoyed reading.

Something upsetting that’s being talked about in the SFF world at the moment is to do with Marion Zimmer Bradley (author of “Mists of Avalon”, and the Darkover series), her second husband and the sexual abuse of children. Jim Hines has a post that summarises it here – I’ve read several more posts on the subject including some of the ones that he links, I’m mostly linking to his because it has those links. In brief – MZB’s second husband was a convicted child abuser both before & after she married him. She was aware of his continuing abuse of children, and didn’t find it a problem. Her daughter has also stated that MZB abused her throughout her early childhood. Thoroughly unpleasant. I own several Darkover books, all bought 15-20 years ago & re-read several times since. I’m not quite sure what I’ll do about them – on the one hand the art is not the artist and I liked those books a lot in the past, but on the other hand how much does knowing more context about the author change how I see the books? Not a question I currently have an answer to.

TV I’m recording this week:

• Lost Land of the Tiger – three part series (from 2010) looking for tigers in Bhutan.
• Tales from the Royal Wardrobe with Lucy Worsley – one-off programme about the last 400 years of the British monarchy, as seen through their clothes.

Awesome flowchart for who to support in the World Cup.

Cat shaming…

Only one new TV series I started recording – Majesty and Mortar: Britain’s Great Palaces, which is Dan Cruickshank talking about royal palaces in Britain.

The internet in real time … animated graphic showing things like number of tweets/second etc.

An editorial on the BBC news site about what the Queen’s Speech ceremony is really about.

TV I’m recording this week:

• Tigers about the House – three part series about rearing tigers.
• A History of Art in Three Colours – three part series about art.

There’s a fascinating blog post on the British Museum site about decoding Anglo-Saxon art.

This lizard has a plan, a plan to take over the WORLD! Muahahahaha!

The only TV I found to record for the coming week is on BBC2 Scotland only, so I nearly missed it, a two part series called The Quest for Bannockburn.

A neat set of photos someone took for a photography project – each pair is herself dressed as a teenager from each decade of the last century, one from mainstream culture, one from a counterculture.

Another gamification of learning site is Memrise which helps you memorise things (unsurprisingly) by making it into a game. There’s a variety of subjects, quite heavy on the languages. I’m having a go at learning some Chinese characters (with accompanying Mandarin pinyin).

An app I recently installed in Notegraphy, which takes your text and typesets it in a decorative fashion. I’m … not sure about it. I tried it out with the text of the first quatrain from Edward Fitzgerald’s Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám. Most of the styles (not the one I used) take the first letter and turn it into something decorative and then repeat it – I would rather the large decorative one be a part of its word. I suspect I could do things I like better in the Gimp if I wanted to, but this is easier.

TV set to record this week:

• Do We Really Need the Moon? – one-off programme about the Moon and the effect it has on the Earth.
• Clydebuilt: The Ships That Made The Commonwealth – four part series about ships built on the River Clyde.

Today (by the time this is published) I start the next of the MOOCs I’ve signed up for on Future Learn. This one is about the Roman port Portus (at Rome) and I think about archaeology in general as well. And despite saying I wasn’t going to overlap courses I’ve also signed up for one starting on 2 June about literature of the English country house – the two courses together are supposed to take about as much time per week as the Shakespeare MOOC I just finished, so hopefully that should be OK. I can always abandon one if not 🙂

J found a phone app that’s just a little like magic – Word Lens Translator translates 6 different languages to & from English on the fly, using the phone camera. So you hold your phone up to a menu or a sign and see an English translation. All languages are free at the moment.

TV I’m recording this week:

• The Crusades – 3 part series about the Crusades.
• How the Wild West Was Won with Ray Mears – three part series about the wilderness of America and how it shaped the Wild West story.
• Tropic of Cancer – 6 part series of Simon Reeve travelling around the world along the Tropic of Cancer.

I rediscovered Khan Academy this week – I’ve had an account there for a few years but had faded out on using it. It does gamified maths tuition and the current way the site is set up has just the right hooks to keep me doing “just another set of questions” for hours. I think I lost 4 hours of Thursday to doing maths 🙂 Before I think you had to start with basic arithmetic and work your way up to the more complex stuff, and that got boring fairly fast. But now there’s a mode where it picks 6 random things to ask a question on, so you get a variety every time ranging from the basics through to things I’m not sure I ever learnt. You can always skip a question with “I haven’t learnt this yet” or get hints if you almost know what you’re doing but just can’t quite remember (or can’t figure out why you got it wrong). I think there’s also some degree of targetting the randomness so there’s a spread between stuff that’s doable and stuff that’s a bit of a stretch (as far as it can tell from your previous answers).

TV set to record this week:

• The Story of Women and Art – 3 part series about female artists from the Renaissance onwards.
• The Search for Life: The Drake Equation – one-off programme about the search for extra-terrestrial intelligence. Actually going to record it next week, I think the showing next Sunday has sign language interpretation which I find distracting.