Catching up : Reading Challenge 2022

12 Months to Read 12 Books Recommended By 12 Friends

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I’m just catching up on posts I should have posted a long (long, long time ago..), In 2021 I started doing an annual reading challenge where I read a book a month suggested by a person on social media.

Bear in mind I read all of these 2 years ago, so my memory is a little fuzzy, but I’m going to write up a short review anyway… (Most book links are affiliate links to Amazon)

The Books selected for 2022 were (By month):

January: To Sleep in a Sea Of Stars -Christopher Paolini

Suggested by Kevin Duffield

I really enjoyed this one, I just finished the last Expanse book Leviathan Falls and this felt similar enough that it helped ease me out of that headspace. The audiobook is narrated by the person who plays the female Commander Shepherd in Mass Effect, and she did a really good job.

Having not read anything else by Christopher Paolini I was worried I might not like this, but honestly I think is a really fun science fiction book.

The apendix at the end which explains in a little too much detail all the fake physics was a bit much, but still interesting to see that the author had thought through the technicalities of interstellar travel.

February: Catch 22 – Joseph Heller

Suggested by Jen Doig

This has been on my list to read for decades, I’ve never got round to reading it so I’m glad that it was suggested. It’s not often that a book’s title becomes an idiom. Honestly, this is what I was expecting, which is I think why I didn’t enjoy it. Despite wanting to read it for years, I’d never actually looked into what the book was about, and I wasn’t expecting a farcical set of frustrating skits about the ridiculousness of war.

Maybe if I’d come into it with more insight I’d have enjoyed it more, but honestly I found it really tedious, I didn’t really like any of the characters, and it feels very of it’s time.

This was more Dad’s army than I was expecting I guess…

March: No One Is Talking About This – Patricia Lockwood

Suggested by Liam Dalzell-Greenshaw

Again entered into this one blind, it starts off as a vapid satire of social media, and about halfway through gets real heavy real fast…

The book follows a character who has become an internet celebrity by asking whether dogs can be twins, the answer according to the kennel club is apparently yes, and floats merrily around with the kind of internet drama you’d expect a 30 seconds of fame celebrity on Twitter to get involved in.

Until some family issues bring the main character firmly into reality, and they try to understand the world through the lens of a chronically online person who has just discovered that a world outside of social media exists.

At first I enjoyed this purely out of a sense of nostalgia, as someone who is chronically online myself, although not as much as the main character, it resonated with me, and I could find myself remembering the incidents they were evoking. Then suddenly… It gets heavy, and you experience the character’s world come undone, when things that actually matter happen to someone they love, and none of it makes sense to them.

Good read.

April: She Who Became the Sun – Shelly Parker Chan

Suggested by Annabel Campbell

I read two books that reimagining of the lives of Chinese emperors in 2022, this was the better of the two. I liked half of this book, which feels a little weird, I’m planning on reading the sequel, but I feel I connected with one of the point of view characters but not the other.

I liked this enough to want to read the sequel, which I have picked up. But I don’t think I enjoyed it as much as a lot of other people did. It’s undeniably beautifully written, and the story was really well told, but I think the fact that I just fundamentally didn’t connect with one of the two POV characters meant that the book as a whole didn’t click with me.

May: Any Human Heart – William Boyd

Suggested by Lisa

I’d not heard of this before, there were times when I really enjoyed it and time when I didn’t. The books is written as the diary of a now forgotten fictional author as he lives through the events of the 20th century, and interacts with many of its key figures.

I enjoyed the style, I’m not sure you are supposed to like the main character, who is person of questionable morality if memory serves.

The parts that left the biggest impression on me are the absurd ones, like when the author decides as an old aged pensioner that he can make his money go further by eating dog food, which he quite enjoys; and the part where he is held as a prisoner of war after the war has ended but no one believes he is who he says he is.

It’s not a long book, it’s an interesting window on history as seen through the eyes of the main character, but sullied a little by the fact that the main character is a bit of a twat.

I was recently reading Three Men In A Boat, and while Any Human Heart isn’t quite as farcical, the characters occasional disconnect of the character’s view from reality is similar.

June: Harrow the Ninth – Tamsyn Muir

Suggested by Mehran Baluch

Mehran initially suggested Gideon the Ninth, but I’d already read that so I jumped to the next book in the series.

This book is a very different style to the previous book, and written in a completely different voice, which is in itself interesting, and without wanting to spoil the previous book understandable given the events of Gideon the Ninth.

That was a little off putting to start, but I think once I’d gotten over that I enjoyed this more than the first book. There’s less remembering who is which house, and who hates who or has an alliance with who. Listening to either as an audiobook I think, while narrated quite well, the sheer number of characters can be confusing as you don’t get to fixate on the actual names long enough, and as a result I tend to lose track of which character is which.

This book had a much smaller cast thankfully, but the narrative of the book starts so disconnected from the narrative of the first one that it almost ignores the event of that book for a long time. There’s a story reason for this, but it was a little confusing.

All in I enjoyed it, and plan on reading Nona the Ninth, which I understand is also a departure from the first two books.

July: The Plague Stones – James Brogden

Suggested by Dalis Murray

I don’t normally read paranormal horror thriller books, but I enjoyed the plague stones. The general plot revolves around a character inheriting a house in a village where bad stuff happened, and the village is haunted.

This is no Stardew Valley…

I’m not sure I can talk about the book without spoiling it, but it was a fun read.

August: Pachinko – Min Jin Lee

Suggested by Jehane Penfold-Ward

I’ve not read much Korean fiction, this book is set between Korea and Japan while Korea was occupied by Japan… Which in case you didn’t know wasn’t a good time for the Koreans…

I’ve read a lot of Japanese fiction (Okay mostly both Murakamis and Natsuo Kirino) and it was interesting to read a book with a cultural frame of reference which is at times both very similar and others very different to Japan’s.

The book doesn’t pull any punches. A young girl has a relationship with a travelling business man, and ends up pregnant, only to find out he has a wife. She refuses his charity, and marries a sickly priest on his way to Japan.

What follows is a multigenerational story involving gangsters, kimchi, and of course Pachinko parlours.

I really enjoyed this one, would highly recommend it.

September: A Wild Sheep Chase – Haruki Murakami

Suggested by Fraser Skea

I like Murakami’s books, but they kinda meld into one in my head so I had to go back and check which one this was…

There’s a conspiracy involving the wrong type of sheep being in a picture which might have grave consequences for Japan’s government.

There’s a girl whose ears make people who see them have better sex.

I’m sure there are references to the Beatles in this too…

It’s Murakami being Murakami… If you like Murakami you’ll like this.

October: The Chronoliths – Robert Charles Wilson

Suggested by Gary Flemming

This was a weird one, I enjoyed it but it felt like a much older book. I didn’t check the publication date until after I finished it, but I honestly thought it was published in the 70’s purely because that is the style of science fiction it evokes.

Not in a bad way by any means…

Giant stone monoliths appear on earth, with a chronicle of things to come etched on them, antics ensue, but will trying to prevent what they prophesied make it happen?

Fun read, I always enjoy a good time travel story.

November: The Trouble with Peace – Joe Abercrombie

Suggested by Richard Patterson

I’d already read Richard’s suggestion of The Blade Itself… so I had to jump forward 8 books in this series to book two of the second trilogy.

I’m actually a big fan of this series by Joe Abercrombie, so that wasn’t a hardship. Although, I think the standalone books between the two trilogies are a bit hit and miss, I particularly didn’t enjoy The Heroes, which I found a little tedious.

The second Trilogy follows the children of the characters from the first trilogy, with some familiar faces and some new ones added to the mix. It’s a little difficult to review this book without spoiling the series, but the general themes are people are self serving, or naive, and it doesn’t pay to be a hero.

You have to be realistic…

I’ve just remembered I’ve not gotten round to reading the last book in the series… I should do that. This book and series gets a thumbs up from me, I don’t think the second trilogy is as strong as the first, but it’s still good.

December: Trust Me I’m Lying – Ryan Holiday

Suggested by Nick Tenczar

You are being manipulated and you don’t even know it.

Trust me I’m lying is a confession of sorts, it exposes how easy it is to manipulate public opinion and what appears in media outlets.

It’s an eye opening but cynical read, which I enjoyed a lot.

That’s a Wrap!

All in I enjoyed this challenge enough to do it in 2023, and I’m currently 2 books into my third book challenge in 2024.

I’l write up my 2023 challenge soon, and hopefully try to be more real time with my 2024 challenge, although I’m already running late on that front…

And we’re back?

My blog has been offline for a good few months, and I’ve not written anything in even longer.

With social media falling apart, I’m going to reclaim this space as a hub for myself on the internet.

WordPress is being super janky on my phone but I’m going to test post this just to make sure it’s working.

Ideas are a dime a dozen… Or that time I “Invented” Uber but didn’t do anything about it.

I just opened up a text editor I have on my phone that I use to take down notes and ideas, and I found an idea for an app that I came up with, complete with monetisation strategy and everything.

I never built this app… But someone else did…

Taxi dispatch system consisting of 3 components

  1. Server component to keep track of driver locations and hires.
  2. Customer App (Android and iOS) allows customer to request a taxi. Track location of driver and pay for taxi ride.
  3. Driver component, notifies driver of jobs, tracks driver location.

Customer component will give quote for ride using distance to drive from x to y.

Customer component sends exact coordinates to driver if required and allows driver to see picture of front door.

Driver component transmits location of driver to server/customer to give estimate of how long till driver arrives.
Map integration for customer and driver.
Different version of customer software made available for each customer.

Download via QR code on receipt.

Monetization

Apps are free but 5% of hire is taken as transaction fee if paid through app.

Customisation of customer app is available at a one off cost, depending on level of customisation.

It’s not quite Uber, more “Uber as a service” to taxi firms, but still because I never built it I can just sit and wonder what would have been…

Well that went well…

Apparently I’ve not posted in over a year, so my last blog post was a lie. It does look like my host have upgraded their hardware and software and my blog is slightly more responsive though.

I might start posting again.

Here’s hoping…

Mysterium: The Haunted House

There aren’t enough cooperative asymmetric boardgames, especially not ones that feature a silent ghost trying to give players clues by means of cards with completely abstract art on them.

If you have ever said that to your self then Mysterium is the game for you… Before I start lets talk about the elephant in the room, you may have noticed that the title of the box in the image above doesn’t say Mysterium, it says Tajemnicze Domostwo, which is apparently Polish for “Haunted House”, the reason for this is that Mysterium doesn’t have an English edition, yet…

There is an English Edition on the way, and it will have some improvements / slightly different game mechanics, but as far as I’m aware it doesn’t have a concrete release date as yet. The thing is, that doesn’t really matter. Mysterium has not text in it, apart from the rules which you can get a translated version of over at Board Game Geek.

The story of Mysterium is that there is this house on the outskirts of Paris, and 100 years ago someone was murdered there. The wrong person was put on trial and executed for the murder and they have haunted the house ever since. In an effort to appease the spirit the owners have called upon the worlds foremost paranormal investigators to spend a week in the house to try and figure out who the real murderer was and put the spirit to rest.

Mysterium plays like the bastard child of Cluedo (Clue) and Dixit, but it’s better than both put together… One player plays the ghost, the other players play the paranormal investigators. Over the course of 7 rounds the players have to figure the circumstances under which the murder took place and who the real murderer was.

This is done by way of visions that the ghost player gives each player, the visions are large art cards, which are very reminiscent of the cards from Dixit, each player is assigned three cards in secret:

  • An item: representing “What”
  • A location, representing “Where”
  • A person representing “Who”

The players have to first figure out the what their assigned person was doing, then where they were doing it, and finally who they actually were (I think the new English version changes this order) based on the vision they were given by the ghost. Discussion is allowed among the investigators who can assist in interpreting the vision, but at the end of the round each player has to chose what they think the ghost was referring to with the vision by putting their token on it.

Once all the tokens are placed the ghost is allowed to affirm or reject the investigators guess. If an investigator guesses the correct item they then have to guess the location in the next round and then the person when they have guessed that.

The interesting thing about Mysterium, are first that the Ghost isn’t allowed to communicate with the investigators in any shape of form apart from giving them their vision for the turn and telling them that they guessed correctly or incorrectly at the end of the turn, this leads to a lot of frustration and hilarity on the Ghost’s side because the vision cards are so vague that most of them could literally mean anything. Trying to keep a straight face and not yell at the investigators for being idiots when one immediately guesses the correct card but is then talked out of it by the other players if really difficult

The vision cards are beautifully  illustrated, with tons of elements that you can use to try and hint to the players, the thing is not everyone see’s the same thing when they look at the cards, in fact it frequently occurs that a player will point something out on a card that you never noticed, for example one of the items is a clock, it was multiple play throughs in with 3 three different groups before a player to said they thought that the vision was eluding to the clock because there was a mermaid on the clock, none of us had seen the mermaid up to that point…

Being the ghost is really fun because you essentially know what is going on, and you have to think laterally to try and pick visions that will guide the players to pick the right cards, however, given how bonkers some of the cards are you will get a lot of abuse from the players for picking cards that in their eyes have nothing to do with what they are trying to guess, or worse cards that are blatantly telling them to pick the wrong one, the thing is you can’t defend yourself until the game is over, you just have to adjust your card choices the next turn to line up with the different players’ way of thinking.

With one group we played a game where I was the ghost for the first game, one of the investigators spent the whole game incredulous at my choice of visions, I was “Clearly doing it wrong” because nothing I had played made any sense. That player was the ghost in the second game and they saw quite how difficult it is to guide a bunch of players with only a limited number of really abstract cards.

I genuinely love this game, it looks nice it plays well and it gets your brain going. It also works well for anywhere from 2 to 6 players.

The English version should be out later this year, it changes the setting to a Scottish castle, adds a screen for the ghost to keep his cards in order and hidden, and changes some of the art. To be honest it is probably worth waiting for the English version just for the screen, but the game plays really well as is and you don’t need to speak a word of Polish to play the Polish version.

Hive: Nothing Buggy About This Game


There are some games like Chess, Draughts (Checkers), or Go that are incredibly simple and so easy to teach, but can take ages to master. These games usually have a set of really simple rules and a win condition, that is easily understood. Hive is one of those games.

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Hive is hexagonal chess with bugs, in the base game each player has 11 pieces which represent 5 different bug types, each of these bugs can move in a different way:

  • 1 Queen Bee: Can move exaclty once space.
  • 2 Spiders: Can move exactly 3 spaces.
  • 3 Soldier Ants: Can move around the outside of the hive as many squares as required.
  • 3 Grasshoppers: Can hop over the hive in any straight line
  • 2 Beetles: Can mount the hive and move exactly once space.

There are expansions that add a Mosquito, a Ladybird and a Pill-bug, the first two are included in the Pocket and Carbon edition out of the box.

Players take turns either placing a piece or moving a piece, with the ultimate goal of surrounding their opponent’s Queen Bee.

The only real rules are that you have to place your Queen within your first three turns, you can’t move any placed pieces until you have placed your queen, and you cannot break the hive.

That’s it! It’s that simple!

Of course within that is a world of strategy, do you place the queen early or late? Do you go on the full offensive and hope that you can capture your opponent’s queen before your opponent? or do you play defensively moving your queen out of the way? Can you trap your opponents crucial pieces to prevent them from using them?

The beauty of this game is the simplicity and variety of bugs, which allows for and astounding amount of variance in game-play styles. Although when playing with just one opponent I’ve found that the game can fall into a stagnant rhythm of playing the same moves or trying variations on the same strategy, which can get very frustrating, it’s astounding when playing with a new player how you get those “I never thought of doing that!” moments. Sometimes you just have to think outside the box.

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Hive probably isn’t as deep as Chess for example, but it’s a lot less intimidating, and for a new player it has the advantage that there aren’t books upon books written on how to play this game effectively, I’m sure there are winning strategies and patterns to be discovered but I think that the permutation space for hive might actually be large enough that it’ll take a while for them to be figured out.

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Putting all that aside, hive is a joy to look at, the pieces are gorgeous. Whether you are playing the original game, the pocket edition, or the new “Carbon” edition, the hexagonal pieces are stunning, and feel really nice in your hand, like Dominoes or nice Mah Jong tiles.

Hive is also a great travel game for two people, it takes up very little space, and comes with a carry case/bag to keep all the tiles in (At least Carbon and Pocket do) and you can play it on any flat surface.

Hive is also available on iOS (£1.49) and Android (Free).

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Tanto Cuoro: Do-maid-ion First impressions

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There are two types of board gamers, those for who the theme of a game is important and those for whom the theme of a game doesn’t matter a toss as long as the game has solid mechanics. (OK so putting everyone who participates in a hobby on a binary like that is ridiculous but I’m not exactly about to formulate an ontology of board gamers based on mechanics Vs. theme I’m just writing the opening paragraph to a shitty review, calm down…)

I bought Tanto Cuoro as a gift for a friend, partly because I’d read that it wasn’t terrible, and partly because she is obsessed with some really weird Japanese niche cultures. I wasn’t expecting the game to be that good, I didn’t even expect to play the game at all to be honest. But then I did…

Gameplay

At it’s heart Tanto Cuoro (Which is Italian for “A lot of heart” apparently) is a deck building game not dissimilar to Dominion, your goal is to assemble the a collection of maids to serve you and become the ultimate master of the house.

Each turn you get a hand of cards from you deck which contains a set of maids and or some “Love” cards which are the games currency, (Yes maids are paid in love not money, I’ll let you think of that what you will) and initially you are allowed to be “Served” by one maid per turn.

Being served by a maid means you play that maid and gain the benefits that maid provides usually this is one of:

  • Extra Love: Giving you more currency to buy maids.
  • Card Draw: Allowing you to draw more cards in the hope of getting more love to spend.
  • Extra Servings: Allowing you to play more maids
  • Extra Employment: Allowing you to hire more maids to your household.

Love is spent in the Town where you can either employ maids or purchase events, the maids you buy are added to your discard pile and are shuffled into your deck when it runs out, you can also buy private maids which don’t go into your deck but give you an ongoing effect which is usually helpful.

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Events are basically a way to screw the other player over by making their maids ill which negates their bonuses, or giving them bad habits which loses you victory points.

You can also promote maids to “chamber maids”, which takes them out of your deck permanently and may give you bonuses at the end of the game.

Once two of the piles of maids is depleted the game is over and each player tallies up the the maids in their house hold and whomever has the most victory points wins.

Opinion

I wasn’t expecting to like this game, don’t get me wrong, I didn’t think it would be a terrible game… I just didn’t think it would be for me. I actually really enjoyed playing it though. Behind the cute anime maids in skimpy maid outfits, are some pretty solid mechanics, the art is also very well done if you are into the theme then that is a bonus, but building a household of maids and then trying to figure out how to chain them to get the most victory points is actually quite fun.

I’ve not played Dominion in 5 years, so the rules for that are a little rusty in my head, but I think this might oddly have a little more depth than the games of Dominion I played, which I found surprising.

If you like deck building games and either the theme appeals to you, or you are willing to ignore it then this game is well worth a look. Also if you don’t want to invest in the physical game there is a version available for iOS and while it’s not free it’s pretty cheap (£2.49 last time I checked) it also benefits from having a tutorial built in to it and varying levels of AI.

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My crowning achievement was chaining a set of maids to add love and servings to my pool such that I managed to accrue 18 love allowing me to employ two copies of “Marianne Soleil” who is worth 6 victory points.

 

Pebble Time Steel One Month On

TimeSteel

I don’t think you can write a review of a device like a smart watch or smart phone until you’ve had a little time to use it. So although I got my Pebble Time over a month I’ve not wanted to write a review of it until I’ve had a chance to put it through it’s paces.

Design

I personally don’t like the look of the regular pebble, it looks too plasticky, so I was disappointed when the Pebble Time was announced that there wasn’t a Pebble Steel analogue, of course it didn’t take long for Pebble to announce the Pebble Time Steel.

The watch may not be to everyone’s taste, but personally I like it, it looks like a watch, and for the most part it doesn’t have the “Oooh is that a smartwatch” aesthetic that the Apple Watch and the regular Pebble have.

Straps

As a Kickstarter backer I got the leather and the stainless steel strap, I’ve tried both and although the leather strap is really comfortable, I didn’t find the steel strap to be very comfortable, it’s possible that I removed one too many links when I was resizing the strap, but it just didn’t feel as nice.

That brings me to my first qualm about the stainless steel strap, although it’s easy enough to get the leather strap off I found it quite difficult to get the stainless steel strap onto and off the watch. Also although the number of links on the steel strap was rather generous, you needed a tiny screwdriver to remove the links to shorten the strap, and it would have been nice to have a small screwdriver in the packaging.

Buttons

The buttons on the watch have a nice feel to them, although I get the feeling that the watch was designed with only right handed people in mind. Although I am right handed I’ve always worn my watch on my right hand rather than my left hand, and the buttons didn’t feel like they were in the right place to use on one’s right hand.

I’ve taken to wearing the watch on my left hand, which is going against 35 years of habit, and for the most part it’s been okay.

There are a total of four buttons on the Time Steel, one on the left which functions as a back button in most cases and three on the right which normally function as up, down, and select buttons. It’s a paradigm that works quite well and it’s relatively intuitive.

Screen

The big new feature of the Time series is the colour e-ink screen, this is the first consumer device I’ve seen with a colour e-ink screen and to be honest I’m quite impressed. The refresh rate is good enough for animation, and the display is probably on par with a GameBoy Advance. You can play games on this, and the refresh is not noticeable, I don’t know how many colours the screen supports, or what the refresh rate is but for a wee screen on my wrist it’s more that good enough.

UI

This is is my first smart watch, so I had not idea what to expect from the UI, I new that pebble had added something called Timeline to the OS but I had no idea how to access it. I found navigating the UI to be relatively straightforward though, it helps that the afore mentioned buttons almost always do the same thing, the once caveat to this being one app where going back required a long press on the back button rather than just a press, so I didn’t think to use the button for anything other than back.

The menu is just a list of options and apps, which you install from the phone app, and selecting an app and using it is fairly straightforward.

It took me two days to discover that clicking up or down opened my “Timeline” though, I probably could have read a manual, or watched a video on using the pebble, but I didn’t so I didn’t know this.

Functionality

The core functionality of the Pebble Time is as a watch, and as a notification system for your phone, it does both of these tasks quite well. This is not a fitness watch, although there are some apps that have some fitness functionality, it’s not what the watch is designed to do.

That said, how useful that watch is depends on your phone, basic functionality like showing you notifications and your timeline works fine regardless of whether you have and iPhone or an Android phone, however, I found that the ways to respond to a notification on Android were much richer than on iPhone, where you could just dismiss the notification.

I was actually quite impressed with the fact that I could dictate a text message to my phone in response to one I had just received, and confirm the message on my watch before sending it. You can’t do this on an iOS device, I dont’ blame Pebble, I blame Apple for not opening up the API for this though…

One thing that the Pebble Time does, that I doubt either Android Wear or Apple Watch can do though is the ability to pair the watch with two devices, with two different operating systems at the same time. The use case for this is probably quite narrow, but if you have an Android phone for work and an iPhone as your personal device then it can be a godsend.

When I tried it I managed to pair an LG Leon and an iPhone 5S to my Pebble Time, and the Leon used regular Bluetooth while the iPhone used low energy Bluetooth. I did have to manage the watch from the Leon, as for some reason I couldn’t manage it from the iPhone, but that wasn’t the end of the world.

Battery

The battery life on the Pebble time is nothing short of amazing, although I never got the reported 10 days, I usually got at least 5 days use out of the watch, and I lived safe in the knowledge that ever if I woke up to a 10% battery warning that I could probably get most of a day, if not a whole days, usage out of the watch. Compare this to my other half who have to charge her Apple Watch every night and for some people that is enough to justify the Pebble.

There was one day where I left an app (Pixel Miner if you must know) open and it drained the battery in a day and a half. That being said, when the battery died I discovered that the Pebble Time goes into a super low power setting that just tells you the time, this lasted for a day and half so if your smart watch runs out of juice you can still use it as a watch for quite some time before you have to find a charge cable.

Apps and Watch Faces

The Pebble Time has the advantage that it’s backwards compatible with all the old Pebble watch faces and apps, so it already has a vast library thats waiting to be used, a lot of which is in black and white though so you don’t get to make as much use of the lovely screen, although there is a growing number of really nice apps, some of them have more polish than others.

There also doesn’t seem to be as much of a drive for corporations to publish apps for the Pebble, it’s mainly Silicon Valley companies where an engineer has blatantly thrown together the app in his spare time. For exaple I have apps for Swam and Yelp but not for British Airways which would be useful.

The selection of watch faces is vast, many of them actually require explanation on how to read them though…

I currently have Nyan Can on my wrist, and it animates when the light comes on, although I can’t change the date format from US format which is annoying.

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There are also a number of games available if playing games on your wrist is a thing you want to do, including a version of Flappy Bird which is actually not terrible, and a fake Pokemon game.

It’s also really easy to write your own watch faces, within 20 to 30 minutes of loading up the developer kit I had written my own watch face that told the time and a little message which is quite cool:

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Overall Opinion

Overall I’m quite happy with the Pebble Time Steel, it lacks in some of the features that the Apple watch has, so I can’t send my heart beat or drawings of penises to my friends who also happen to have the same watch (Apparently this is what people with Apple watches do…) but it tells me the time, and allows me to keep my phone in my pocket and just check my wrist for notifications. Also the battery lasts for ages, so I don’t need to worry about it running out of juice at the end of the day.

While a smart watch is never a must have device, it is a nice to have, and I’ve found that for the most part the watch has helped to curb my bad habit of receiving a notification on my phone and accidentally opening Reddit, Twitter, Facebook, Tumblr or any of the other millions of distractions on my phone. I can glance at my watch, decide whether or not I need to do anything and just go on with whatever I was doing which is really liberating.

I think I’d like the watch more if I had and used an Android phone more often, because the options for interaction with your phone on iOS seem hamstrung, which is a real shame.

If you have any questions feel free to ask them in the comment, I’m willing to try messing about with the watch to answer most questions.

Update: This Time It’s Personal!

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Woof!

So I’ve not posted in quite some time, If you are some kind of crazy fan of my blog and you have been checking this blog daily then you haven’t seen very much. I’ve been really busy with work and that means that I’ve not really posted anything…
This may or may not change, I’m still really busy with work, but with different work!

I HAVE A NEW JOB!

OK maybe not tomorrow… More like a month ago… But you get the idea.

I’ve gone from working for a small to medium UK based company to working for an enormous company based in Silicon Valley, like seriously I was at their main office a few weeks ago and it’s bigger than Disney Land, they even have a turtle pond.

This is really exciting, and it means that I’ll be really busy working learning a hell of a lot of new stuff, but I’m the master of my own time, so long as I deliver I can choose how and when I work which is nice…

In my last job I was almost alway juggling 4-6 customer projects at any time which meant that I was almost always working on something that needed my attention RIGHT NOW, I’m moving to working on a single product just adding features and fixing bugs so hopefully I won’t be in crunch mode all the time and I’ll get a chance to actually have a life…

Work/Life Balance… It’s important!

I’m really excited about this, but it’s also really scary as almost everyone I work with is 8 hours ahead of me, so I don’t really have anyone to ask questions of when I get stuck. This is both a challenge and an opportunity, I’m going to get a hell of a lot better at learning stuff myself…

Anyway… I felt the need to post something as I’ve been ultra quiet for way too long. I’m going to try to post more often, and I’m going to try to not have all my posts be image dumps of Disney Princesses…

If you are a regular reader and you just want my geeky stuff I say so and I’ll try and work out some way to allow you to just see that and not all the other crap I plan on posting. That said this may be the last personal post I ever do and it might be nothing but Pokémon dressed up as Disney Princesses performing Water-Bending forms from Avatar from here on out…