Sunday, October 23, 2016

Sleepy Deeds

I've done the deed ...

The sim card is now out of the old phone and into the new, for good or ill. But first !
Yep. That sums up a few of my intentions for this coming week. I have the week off work for a repair and recharge. Definitely need it, I've had that confusion over what day of the week it is lately, which is usually the most prominent sign that I need to chill out and hibernate for a while.

So far, I've had the cricket on for most of the day plus there has been a Grand Prix on in the evening. It was a reasonable GP but to be honest, I barely watched it after seeing a couple of very compulsive viewing days of cricket. There could still be either result tomorrow, England win or Bangladesh win. We've had all sorts in this game, batsmen have never been comfortable, bowlers have still had to work (really hard in the heat over there!) hard for their wickets.

I started yesterday morning fast forwarding through in an attempt to catch up with the live play but quickly abandoned that because there was just too much going on in the game. I'll be looking forward to watching the finish of the game tomorrow, hopefully it'll be a win for England.

I haven't been getting up for the actual play, hell no. They're a good few hours ahead of us here so I've been watching it time delayed ... and attempting to avoid the inevitable spoilers that will pop up on Twitbook.

I've also been in a couple of games :

Darkest Dungeon on the Friday - this is a grim dungeon crawl game, very simple to play, that I find quite compelling. The mechanics, outside of the usual dungeon crawl stuff, include sanity and stress. If things go badly for our adventurers, they get stressed. Past a certain point, they'll have a mental break and react in random ways. Sometimes it is to fight harder, other times they become abusive, masochistic, fearful or other stuff that's bad ... and somewhat comical too.

Yep. I've been enjoying Darkest Dungeon. I'd recommend checking it out if you have something suitable to play it on. It has that magic combination of being easy to play, being unexpected, not becoming boring ...

Stellaris has been the game over the weekend. They've just patched it and made an expansion available. I have a curious relationship with this game. I do like its space strategy theme and the mechanics work pretty well with that. My empire has been building gradually and is now at the point where I could execute a grand campaign where I race across the galaxy like an avenging horde, conquering all, burning what refuses to be conquered ... you get the idea. The empire has the supremacy and no one local is strong enough to challenge it.
But ...

This is also the point where the game gets boring. I've never actually taken a game of Stellaris to its end game where it shakes things up with invaders from another dimension, AI rebellions etc. I haven't taken it to a galaxy purifying conclusion either. It has improved with the patch but there are also new annoyances, new bugs.

I think I'll set the Stellaris game aside for a bit. I do enjoy the early game but games of this type can outstay their welcomes and become boring. There are other games.

And lots of videos to watch and books to read. I must get reading again.

Wait ...

I said something about doing the deed didn't I ?

I have upgraded the phone ... No longer am I an Apple Fanboi. I have the droid I was looking for. It's a Samsung Galaxy S7. Not the Note aka Bombphone which was on display at one of the Three network shops (oops), although I can believe the Bombphone stories now. The S7 gets warmer than I'd like. Perhaps that's a symptom of thinner shells and that I haven't bought it a case yet.

Impressions :

A case will be essential. The outsides are super smooth and likely to cause breakage incidents from the phone slipping through my fingers.
UI - Apple's iOS 6 was genuinely better. There are a couple of features I will miss like "Tap the top of the screen to go to the top of the page." Is there an Android equivalent ? The back button is on the bottom right of the case, it's usually on the top left of the screen on iOS. This makes it far easier to press back when you didn't want to.
Google's interface to its services - is GARBAGE ! It took me ages to get to my blogger page.
Vue's app is still broken.
Battery life is surprising. I gave the phone a full charge on Friday and it is still at 49%. This is really good, although I haven't actually used it that much outside of starting to load it up with apps. Why use the phone if you have better devices to look at the internet with ? I'll be curious as to how the battery holds up to a normal day though.
Transferring settings - was far easier than expected. They provide a wire and an interface that copies everything over, text messages, contacts, all sorts of stuff. I did have to set up my mail app again though and because I'm not using the Safari web browser, I'll have to rebuild my internet bookmarks too.

The great music hope - Doubletwist - hasn't worked yet. This is to get the phone connecting up to my iTunes. I haven't bought the paid side of the app yet but I should be able to connect up with a wire, this isn't working. The paid side lets you connect up via wifi but if that fails, I can still use the iPhone without a sim and have that as an intelligent iPod.

But I'll wait until I do that.

Early days impressions are pretty good and it'll be good to be freed from the curse of broken backwards compatibility that Apple force on their indentured customers. Apple used to be extremely good but I think they've reached that point where you can be happy with Apple stuff if you have it but don't buy anything else from them ... And be very wary if you update it !!!

This week will mostly be a rest, repair and recover week. I am healing much better now but there are still a few hold out bits. My ankles are actually much better now !!! The moisturiser is helping, especially as I haven't used any of the Magic HC45 gunk on them lately. Other bits aren't responding quite so well, they'll need a bit more TLC. But I do have my hopes.

We'll see how it goes ! I think I'll need to consult a doc at some point this week. Perhaps something will arrive from Amazon too as an early birthday present to ME at some point ? A little early but ... if I'm in anyway :-).

To be honest, I'm just looking forward to a really quiet week regaining my strength before the run in to Xmas.
And there's that too !

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