Regular readers may have noted an absence of postings on my blog, well there's at least one good reason for that: I've been busy making my workshop / tool and storage shed.
A few years back now I made an alteration to the "solar hotbox" that my property came with and changed it from a useless spider habitat that was way too hot and into a shed I could park my 4by in.
However I've not had a place for all my tools (a front room of the house being pressed into service for that) nor a place to work on things under cover (the kitchen table limits me).
So finally I have added the "workshop" I needed and wanted. I decided to go with a the same shed brand and determined a simple 3x3 meter arrangement would suit.
Some planning went into positioning and construction
.. and now its pretty much a follow on from the earlier work ... and works nicely.
The kit shed walls are made up of panels of sheet metal and so I could remove 2 of those at the back of my existing shed to give access to the new "room"
I'm still working on the "step across" into the shed
but it is now a fully functional workshop on the end of my shed.
with a newly installed (built it myself) bench and room for storage
So now all this is out of my house and into the workshop where it should be.
The lack of windows is countered by the full surround opening between walls and roof, which does offer some small problems with rain entry on the worst of storms, but as everything is kept off the floor that's not any sort of significant issue to me ...
Lastly here is a quick look around.
So now its onto the next projects I've been planning, such as my solar floor heating in time for winter.
Recently there was this headline on the site "Make Use Of" that exemplified why reviewers are probably the most significant part of the decline of technical gear (including software).
Reviewers are apparently so specialised on reviewing things more than using things that they are bored with offerings quickly and want some new thing to come along and dazzle them (NB allow them to dribble more about stuff). The truth is this simply muddies the waters rather than making better use of things.
This article (especially its title) clarifies that the author goes to their computer for some wizz bang experience and not to actually do work.
In contrast I use my computers desktop to access applications and the file system, I couldn't give a rats arse about animations and slick roll ins. I'm there to make use of my computer to do things:
development (you know, making software)
editors (video, image and text)
communications (email, and other services)
entertainment (playing music and watching video)
I don't want a desktop that gets in the way of the above. I don't want to be constantly re-learning how to actually get to what I want.
Now sure, I like to see some changes, but having been with Ubuntu (to follow this example) since about Karmic Koala and made iterative updates over time. I have always been cautious in my updates but each iteration has been better at fixing issues.
Notably the community of users is actually against adding bling ... but then unlike the author what they want is functionality not "a UI as entertainment" or "user experience" (you can do twitter for that).
What happens with this sort of driver (shallow reviewers) is a thinning of depth of experience which often results in a loss of understanding of what can be done (or indeed the doing of that).
My phone (Android) is a good example of that. Reviewers made shallow and blinkered assessments of that version of software and ignored (because probably they were too naïve and shallow) the great advanced features that it came with (which took some years to find their way into Android officially).
Shallow and dim reviewers pushing stuff to an unsophisticated base of users (who should probably stay with Windows 8) result in people never actually making best use of their stuff (perhaps they aren't able to anyway if my support calls are any indication)
Ultimately my view on a good design is not to continually add more, but the view of when there is essentially nothing left to take away while leaving it functional. Updates should be based on user requirements changing. An example of this is that I once wrote a small bit of software that queried the HR system (on the Oracle server side) and returned names, office location, phone and email. I subsequently left the organisation (to do more advanced things elsewhere) and came back 10 years later to find that the modern iteration of that was just using my original software and wrapping it in a nice HTML presentation layer. Nice pat on my back there.
Ubuntu is pretty much there right now in terms of functionality.
So my next submission is about a phone of mine, I bought it soon after it was released even though I expected the reviews were wrong. I bought it mainly because it had VoLTE capability and as I was entirely "hot-spotting" here at home for my internet needs (laptop, tablet ...) it turned out that 1) VoLTE wasn't effective in my area and 2) the WiFi Hotspot was pretty inferior to my exsting phones exemplary implementation.
However one thing that's ball-tearingly clear in what was wrong with the reviews was Image Stabilisation in video ... this phone rocks!
and yet the brain dead lazy (clearly copy paste each others works) reviewers all said it didn't have stabilisation.
The only way they could have missed this is to not actually try any hand held video and then look at the results.
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