Saturday, March 28, 2015

New toys

Alex and Clare at British Camp, the Malvern Hills
Here is positively the last of the holiday snaps.

Yesterday I was mulling over a replacement for my 'smashed at the summit of British Camp' Samsung Galaxy S3. So two years almost to the day, a new mobile phone should be arriving this morning, the Nexus 6. It's not cheap, but it gives me hours of innocent pleasure (yes, you at the back!).

We should all be wary of being captured by some tech giant's platform ecosystem, but I am seduced by the lack of bloatware and the raw technical specs of Google's stuff. The pain of configuration hangs as a black shadow, etc ...

The other Amazon toy due today - out of the blue, so to speak - is the "Interstellar" DVD, ordered months ago after I refused to sit through three hours of inchoate mumbly hokum at the cinema. Obviously I have lower standards at home, although I shall tell everyone that it's to study the accurate visualisation of black hole orbital kinematics in regions of ultra-high spacetime curvature .. or something like that.

The chances of it being watched are not high: my copy of the Scarlett Johansson vehicle "Lucy" still lies unviewed weeks after its arrival, and that's been rated pretty good. Last night, after our arrival home, we all sat and watched Sigourney Weaver in "Aliens", marvelling at the mash-up of "Star Wars". "Starship Troopers" and "The Matrix" that film was (I may be getting my chronology a bit mixed up here).