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Showing posts from December, 2013

Local food for Christmas

In the latter part of this year both my brother and I have bought a new house and my second daughter has just arrived in time for Christmas. Because of this my family decided that we should tone down the level of giving this Christmas. To be fair, between the adults we don't actually spend much money, we operate a secret Santa lottery in which each of us, my brother, step sister, our parents and our corresponding partners put our names into a hat and brokered by my brother in law (who is a Jehovah Witness so abstains from the act of giving itself) picks the names for us and let's us know who we have to buy for. It's a reasonable system as it significantly reduces the cost of Christmas. It's main drawback is that you could have one of the poorer benefactors (namely me and my brother) meaning that you get both fewer and lower quality gifts! This year though, because our coffers have already been emptied we decided to still do the secret Santa; but limit the amount

Do I want to cook with a tiny screen next to me eye?

I really enjoyed this video on the BBC about the home and office of the future.  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-21632855 . One of my favourite items was the giant screen on the kitchen wall and the display built into the work top of the kitchen. I think the large screen on the wall would definitely add to family live. It would be nice if you could hold up paper items and it takes a scan of them and leaves them on the board (no matter how much I try and get rid of them I still get paper bills and letters through the post that I have to do something about). The other use of the screens in the kitchen was for help with cooking. Google have a similar vision with their Google Glass product (it's one of the user stories here ). I find the screens more compelling than the wearable product for this scenario though. I see Google Glass as being useful for specific tasks, not as something I would wear all the time. One of my concerns is that having my vision fixed on somet