Astro Star Cafe

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Today my travels took my into the western East End and I was in need of breakfast. When I saw the sign, I knew this had to be tried. Who knows, the owner might be a famous science – fiction writer or an astrophysicist (or a Zoroastrianist).  The amazingly and appropriately named Astro Star Cafe is situated in the middle of hip and happening Bethnal Green in the almost East End of London (also colloquially known as the centre of the known universe). As you can see, the Cafe is rather blurry and has a distinctive right shift. A physical phenomenon directly attributable to its name.

The food is as great as the name of the place. After being greeted with a friendly smile at the counter (and they are so outworldly trustworthy that you don’t even have to pay in advance) you order and sit down and read your ipad Guardian. The food soon arrives, and my god, it’s gorgeous:

Look at the extact geometrical placement of the hashbrowns (it was a bit too early for chips) and the geometrically correct semicircle of this sea of beans. The egg looked like a fiery sun with a golden corona, just about to be attacked by the threatening crispy bacon. And delicious it was as well. The cafe was clean, the swearing factor of the punters moderate (about 3 f-words per minute on average) and service efficient and courteous.

I think I might use this as a permanent deep space docking station.

What to do with an Ipad

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So I had my Ipad now for 4 weeks, and it’s been an interesting experience, to say the least. People still stare at the thing (not so much at me, thanks heaven) when I fire it up on the train and can’t seem to be able to peel their eyes away from it. Initially I was a bit concerned about its potential uses and that I might have bought the most overprived email reader ever, but over the last 2 weeks or so I have slowly but surely started to appreciate its strengths.

So, what is it good for?

Reading

You might think that’s a bit obvious, but since you can import pdf’s into the book reader, I carry a lovely little collection of white papers, studies and manuals around with me that I can read at leisure on the train without showering everybody in paper. The ebooks available on iTunes are still a bit few and far between (not if you’re a Jeremy Clarkson fan though), but if you keep looking you can pick up some pretty good deals. Reading is a joy, especially on busy train rides, as you can use the iPad one handed and switch between pages with your thumb.

Video

Thanks to the iTunes store I now carry a 2 or 3 seasons of my favourite TV shows always around with me, which makes train journeys and flying much more fun. It’s also much easier to watch than with my Macbook. Try unfolding a Macbook on Ryanair or Easyjet! With a good set oh headphones you can forget the world around you and enjoy watching a group of total strangers hunting another group of strangers on a desert island after a planecrash.

Music

As a pure music player it’s a bit bulky, but if you’re reading anyway, it serves this purpose as well

Email and Web

With a zippy 3G connection or Wifi no complaints. Flash would be nice, though.

Everything else

I have suddenly started to take notes during meetings, as text entry is quite easy. Killer applications like Korg’s ielectribe halp with creating beats on the train.

Is it worth the 700 pounds? Likely not.

Is it oodles of fun: Definitely.

Should you have one? It depends. If you have a long commute on the train or if you travel regularly, definitely!

Otherwise, spend half the money on a decent netbook.

Sunshine Days – The official greatest Hits of Matt Bianco

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I always think that a sure sign of getting older is when your favourite band releases its third ‘greatest hits’ album. Well, if I say third: There has been

So it’s actually ‘Best of’ Nr. 7. Not to worry, any new Matt Bianco album is a good album, and thanks to Amazon it was inside my CD player within seconds of being released. The tasteful cover informs us that it’s a mix between re-recordings of the older (=eighties) and newer (90 +) tracks, 18 tracks in total. With other words’s it’s an update of the A/Collection, which attempted the same feat in 1998. Well, that was 12 (bummer, I’m old) years ago and as I said before, there’s always room for another version of ‘Half a minute’. Well, maybe not this time. While HiFi Bossanova was a brillant reboot of almost J.J. Abramsian proportions, this is a mixed bag. It starts well enough with the title track of the last album and the rebooted ‘Lost in You’, but things sag a bit. The eighties staples ‘Get out of your lazy bed’, ‘Yeh Yeh’, ‘Don’t blame it on that girl’, ‘Dancing in the street’, ‘Good times’ and ‘Half a minute’ all suffer from some degree of muzakisation. Whether this is due to the rather uninspired drumpatterns or synth sounds that sound like something from 1994 or the sparse arrangements is unimportant, but these re-recordings don’t match the originals (or even the A/Collection). Just when you want to email Mark Fisher and complain, ‘More than I can bear’ blows you off your feat with a very contemporary reworking of this classic that sounds even better than the original. The two remixes of ‘Half a minute’ and ‘Wap Bam Boogie’ are equally excellent.

So, it’s a mixed bag: Some good stuff, some excellent tracks, some not so good.

Should you buy it? Of course you should. It’s got a nice hardcover, has smiling Marks on the front, three killer tracks and the rest is still excellent music for the car.

Moving from the Mac to Ubuntu?

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It’s time that we had another geekish post, as there has been far too much footy and other stuff lately So today we will focus on the age old lament of people switching to Linux because they fear Apple’s hardware and software lock in. THis time it’s Salon.com’s Dan Gillmor to make the big jump and I completely understand where he’s coming from. I’ve done it numerous times: after I sold/broke a Mac I swore solemnly to embrace Open Source and would end up buying some laptop and install Ubuntu/Suse/Mandriva/Debian/Red Hat on it, just to pine for the functionality of ease of OS X on a MacBook and end up byuying one 6 months later anyway.

It’s perfectly ok to be suspicious of Apple’s control freakery, but in the end their stuff works. No missing drivers, no blue screen of death, no Kernel upgrades that go awry, no hardware problems. I have Ubuntu Karmic installed on my Desktop where it works just beautifully, but just because I continue working under the hood to MAKE it work.

Not so my MacBook (s). Since my first Powerbook 150 back in 1993 they have performed dutifully from day one, survived numerous drops and my current one dutifully updates my Ipad (which I now carry around with me instead).

So if Simon wants to go down the exciting road of Linux on the Laptop, I wish him luck. Being old and lazy now, I prefer to use what works.

P.S. Looks like Ubuntu isn’t working on his new Levono.