but she's a girl...

Last.fm

I've finally signed up at last.fm. I don't know why I resisted for so long, but the increase in the numbers of full tracks that they feature was certainly an encouragement . I do sometimes listen to the radio stations at work when I'm away from my main iTunes library, but I'm mainly interested in it as a way of discovering new artists. A 'similar artists' station turned up 'Iron & Wine', who I had never heard of before. I liked him (yes, it is just a 'him' rather than a 'they') so much that I bought 'The Shepherd's Dog' recently, as you can see from my recently scrobbled tracks.

It's also interesting to look back at your listening habits. It isn't completely characteristic of all my music listening, because I also listen to CDs on the stereo downstairs, but I seem to oscillate between fairly random playlists of a wide range of my collection and intensively listening to a few albums straight through. I'm in the latter mode right now, it seems.

I haven't really done anything with the social side of last.fm yet (if you're on there and think you might enjoy my musical tastes, do point me to your username), and I wish that the player integrated with iTunes rather than using a standalone player, but otherwise I'm liking it a lot.

Papers

For a while now, I've been using a great programme called Papers to organise PDFs of journal articles along with their associated bibliographic metadata. I use the terrific BibDesk for the output side of references (formatting references into citations and a reference list in manuscripts), but I didn't find it so helpful for gathering, organising and reading articles. Papers, on the other hand, specialises in just those kinds of tasks.

You can do searches within Papers itself for articles, using a selection of the scientific databases like PubMed or Web of Science. You can also select a PDF you've downloaded outside of Papers, and try to 'match' the paper (using the same databases) to download the associated metadata. This is fantastic when it works, because it avoids a lot of tedious, error-prone typing of information.

My workflow is like this; I subscribe to various journal alerts for the areas I'm interested in, and get regular emails listing new articles, with links to the article online. If any of the articles look interesting, I visit the link and download the paper to my downloads folder. If I don't have time to deal with the papers at that moment, they stay in my folder for a while. Then, when I've got time to process them, I drag them into Papers to import them. Papers renames the files in a consistent way, and also moves them to a particular folder to keep everything tidy. I used to have to then match the papers to download the metadata, a process which sometimes failed for particular journals, or for articles which were only recently published. However, in Papers 1.7, there's a miraculous new feature which somehow automatically extracts the metadata from either the PDF or from the web site you downloaded it from on import. It's tantamount to magic to me, but however it works, it's a stunning feature and saves quite a bit of manual work.

Once the papers are imported, I flag them all, and can then view all my 'To Read' papers with a smart folder collecting together flagged items. As I read each one (the full screen PDF viewer within Papers is really nice), I tag it with appropriate keywords, then drag it into specific folders depending on whether it's useful for a particular project I'm working on, or as a reference for a specific module I teach). I also drag it into a 'For BibDesk' folder, which I periodically export to BibTeX format and import into BibDesk, so that forms my canonical list of references.

You can also generate a papers:// URL for each reference, which when clicked, opens the reference in Papers. That's useful when you're writing notes on a paper in a text editor, and want a quick way of opening the original. It's made the whole process of keeping up with the literature a lot easier.

Pixellated portent

I'm one of those people who really enjoys (in a slightly masochistic way) watching Grand Designs. There's no way that Mr. Bsag and I will ever have the money to buy a plot of land and build a house, but we enjoy watching other people go through the process. One benefit of house-building by proxy is that -- while you don't end up with a gorgeous designer home to live in -- you don't spend hundreds of thousands of pounds and go grey worrying about your house slipping down a hillside overnight and ending up in a pile of rubble by the side of the road.

We have, however, noticed something interesting about the programme which adds an interesting dimension to watching it. If you watch carefully, you'll sometimes notice that some of the building firms or contractors involved in the build have their company logos pixellated out. In a surprising number of cases the be-pixellated ones end up being fired from the job, doing something disastrous, or getting into contractual or legal wrangles with the people commissioning the house build. It isn't always the case, presumably because the production company hasn't got permission to feature the logo, or something like that. But it does add a frisson of anticipation to the show when you see a blurred out logo: "That newly installed wall is going to collapse/leak/explode!". Not that I indulge in schadenfreude, you understand...

Perhaps everyone involved should wear a pre-pixellated t-shirt to spoil our fun.

One of those weekends

Well, that wasn't the quiet, restful weekend we'd planned.

Mr. Bsag has been having terrible trouble with his teeth. Several teeth on one side hurt like hell, and were very sensitive to heat and cold. He made an emergency appointment with the dentist he was registered with in our old house, and -- diagnosing a build-up of plaque -- removed the plaque and said all would be well. But it continued to hurt badly, and on Friday, the whole of the lower half of his face had swollen up and he was having difficulty swallowing. In the meantime, I had managed to register him at our local dentist's (after registering with them myself earlier in the week), and we got another emergency appointment for him. It's not quite clear what the problem is, but it seems as if -- in scraping the plaque away -- the previous dentist might have introduced an infection into his gums. So he's on antibiotics, but has been feeling pretty bad all weekend. Mr. Bsag likes his food, and a husband unable to eat solids is not a happy husband.

He's feeling a bit better now, though still swollen, but it has been a weekend of sleepless nights and worry (for us both), and pain (for him).

To cap it all, someone bashed into my parked car in a supermarket car park, so I also spent some of the weekend on a wild goose chase to try and find a touch-up pen in the right colour, and trying to polish the scratches out. The damage is cosmetic, but it was a hassle I could have done without this weekend. Can I have another weekend instead of Monday morning, please?

Symbolic

I'd been meaning to write about a Channel 4 series (now finished) called City of Vice. As usual, I'm too late in writing about it to allow you to watch it, but there was one particular puzzle in the film that I haven't quite solved, so I decided to ask the Lazy Web if anyone knows the answer.

City of Vice tells the story of the establishment of the Bow Street Runners in the 18th Century (the forerunners -- no pun intended -- of the modern Metropolitan Police) by novelist and playwright Henry Fielding, and his half-brother John. The Fieldings were Magistrates and were keen to enforce justice, without the corruption of the thief takers¹. It was a brilliant -- if rather too realistically gruesome -- series, apparently based on records of the time.

One thing intrigued me, though; John Fielding -- who was blind -- was shown wearing a black ribbon like a headband on his brow. That seems to be a genuine detail rather than a TV embellishment, as you can see from this portrait. It was never alluded to in the series, but I had two possible explanations.

1. It was some kind of strap to hold his wig on straight, if he had trouble keeping it straight. That doesn't sound like a good explanation to me, because I'm sure he could feel the canvas edges of the wig with his hands and tell if they were level.
2. It was some kind of symbol of his blindness, so that others could accommodate his needs without needing to ask him if he was blind.

I like the second explanation better, but it raises a lot of questions. There isn't much point in a symbol unless it is fairly universally understood, so was this standard practice in the Georgian period? John used a cane, but it was similar to the kind any Gentleman might carry, and he didn't seem to use it feel his way around, so some other symbol might have been useful. Why did the black band above the eyes symbolise blindness, rather than any other symbol? If it wasn't widespread, and was his own idiosyncrasy, what was the point of it?

I've done a cursory search, and found that Joel Segal had noticed the same thing, but I haven't found any authoritative and definitive answers. So, are there any historians specialising in the issue of disability in the 18th Century out there?

¹ If you had property stolen, you could contact the thief takers. If you paid them, they would 'make enquiries' and -- miraculously -- your property would be mysteriously 'found', though there would be no sign of the thieves themselves. Hmm. ↑

Aeropress

Following the sad demise of our espresso machine, we were looking around for a cheap and temporary method of making nice coffee. We have a cafetière, but we're not keen on the kind of coffee it makes. We seem to end up with bitter coffee, with lots of grounds and sediment in the bottom, and they are a pain to clean in the morning when you're in a rush.

A while ago, I saw an article on the Aeropress, and thought at the time that it looked quite nifty. Faced with the dire prospect of a lack of nice coffee while we find out how much we're going to be charged to repair our machine, I thought I might as well get one. Even with the massive markup of all US-made goods bought in the UK, it only costs £25 or so. There are all kinds of rave reviews for the Aeropress on the Internet, but I decided that even if it only made OK coffee rather than great coffee, £25 would be reasonable for a very portable coffee maker that we could take on holiday with us.

We got our Aeropress last week, and I'm really impressed with it. It's well made (very sturdy, with high quality plastics, so there's little chance of breaking it), and it does indeed make very good coffee if you tinker a bit. It's basically a very large syringe, with a perforated filter cap (lined with one of the supplied paper filter discs) rather than a needle tip. You put the coffee grounds into the outer cylinder (placed on top of a mug), measure hot water into the plunger part, tip it on to the grounds and stir for a short while. Then you slowly and steadily insert the plunger and push down, so that the air pressure built up forces the water through the grounds. When you've pushed the plunger all the way down, it compresses the grounds into a compact puck. You then unscrew the filter cap, depress the plunger fully, and the coffee puck pops neatly out into the bin (or compost bin, in our case). The clever design means that almost no grounds are left in the unit, and you can rinse it under the tap very quickly to clean up.

The beauty of it is that you don't need to steep the grounds for very long to extract the maximum amount of flavour, and the paper filter stops any grounds from making it into the cup. What you end up with (if you do it right), is a very smooth, but very full-flavoured cup of coffee. We usually made Americano coffees with our espresso maker, by topping the espresso up with water, and we do the same very successfully with the Aeropress.

I mentioned earlier that you have to tinker about with it a bit. The makers supply detailed instructions which are a good starting point, but everyone has different taste, and uses different types of coffee, so you might find that you need to experiment a bit. This -- of course -- is actually a massive selling point to any kind of geek, so I had fun with that part.

We have a coffee grinder, and I found that using a slightly finer grind helped, as did stirring the grounds and water for about 20 seconds rather than the recommended 10 seconds. But I like my coffee quite strong, so your mileage may vary. Anyway, it's great fun, makes good coffee, and only requires ground coffee and some way of heating water. We're considering getting our espresso machine repaired and selling it, then using the Aeropress full time.

Take one memory

We watched the film After Life at the weekend, and I really loved it. The film's premise is that people who have recently died arrive at a slightly derelict institution, where they must -- with the help of an advisor -- decide on the one memory that they will take with them to the afterlife. Everything else will be forgotten, and they will live in that memory for ever. At the end of a week, the chosen memory is carefully recreated on video by technicians, and they go off to the afterlife to live in that moment.

Rather than trying to suggest that this is the way things actually are when you die, I felt that the director intended it to stimulate viewers to think about which memory they would take with them, if they were in the same situation. By coincidence, I'm re-reading 'The Amber Spyglass' at the moment (the final part of Pullman's 'His Dark Materials' trilogy), and there is a similar idea in that, posed in a different way. So this has been on my mind recently, and I went to bed after the film thinking about memories.

Think about it yourself -- picking just one special memory is incredibly difficult. I've obviously got a number which are too personal for public broadcast on this blog (ahem), but I thought I'd share a few of the more -- how shall I put it? -- U Certificate ones with you.

{Read more...}

Sowing time

It's that time of year again, when a young young-ish not too old girl's thoughts turn to sowing seeds. We saved quite a bit of our seed from last year (chocolate peppers, peas, cherokee beans), but we also went a bit mad with the Real Seed Catalogue to try out some new things. So we've got two types of pea (yellow mangetout and traditional podded peas), two types of beans, three varieties of tomato (I know, but I love tomatoes) and some rainbow chillies amongst over delights.

Peppers and tomatoes need to be started fairly early to get enough of a growing season with our so-called summers, so I sowed a load of tomatoes, chocolate peppers and chillies last week, filling our airing cupboard with pots. The tomatoes have already germinated, as you can see from the picture, and I get a real thrill from looking at them gamely stretching towards the light on our bedroom window sill.

It was our first time growing from seed last year, but I'm addicted to it now. The sense of satisfaction when you (eventually) eat the vegetables that started off as a seed in some compost in your airing cupboard is immense, and even better if you saved the seed from your crop last year. It also feels like a promise that summer will eventually arrive.

We've been really pleased with the Real Seed Company's seeds. The germination is superb (I've had a nearly 100% germination rate with the tomatoes), and the vegetables are easy to grow and -- more importantly -- delicious! I noticed that they were featured in the Guardian Weekend magazine yesterday, which is great -- they deserve the publicity¹.

Perhaps the most telling sign of our total conversion to the world of vegetable cultivation is the fact that we found ourselves buying seed potatoes last weekend. We didn't plant any last year because we don't eat a huge quantity of potatoes (we eat fairly equal quantities of potatoes, rice, pasta, couscous and so on), and we felt that we'd rather concentrate on crops which are either much nicer when you get them really fresh (e.g. peas), or much cheaper to grow than buy in the shops (e.g. rocket). But such is the mysterious and irresistible pull of the potato to the allotment holder, that we didn't manage to hold out against the spuds this year. An allotment just isn't an allotment without a row or two of spuds. Which is why our conservatory is currently home to a couple of trays of chitting potatoes.

¹ I have no affiliation with them -- I'm just a satisfied customer. ↑

Riding the choral wave

This Sunday, my Mum and I took part in the 'Singalong with the CBSO' event. I took part in 2005 and thoroughly enjoyed it, and Mum and I both went along in 2006, because she enjoys singing too. This year's piece was Carmina Burana by Carl Orff. If you're not a fan of Classical music, you probably know at least once movement from either the Old Spice advert or The Omen, depending on your age and cultural tastes. It's one of those Classical pieces which a lot of aficionados look down their noses at, but I think it's wonderful, particularly if you see it performed live, or -- even better -- if you sing it.

There are a nice mixture of movements, including jolly, bawdy songs about drinking, pretty, lyrical pieces, and even a very strange song from the viewpoint of a depressed roasted swan on a spit who is about to be eaten. There's plenty of orchestral colour too, with two pianos, plenty of timpani, bells and even something that sounded like a football rattle. But you can't get away from the fact that 'O Fortuna' (the aforementioned advert/horror film music) is the real star of the show.

Even if the association hadn't already been forged in my mind by the Old Spice advert, singing O Fortuna is a lot like surfing. If you're singing it with about 2,000 other people as we were on Sunday, it's like surfing one of those monster waves off the coast of Hawaii, where you have to get towed on to the wave by a jetski.

As you are travelling out to the wave, it opens with a few big, slow chords. They seem pretty impressive at the time, but it's nothing to what comes later, when you're right up close to the wave. Then, as you're towed into position, there is a soft, staccato passage where the choir sings in unison. Gradually, this builds in volume and tension as the parts of the choir spread out on the scale, and you see the gigantic wave you're going to ride. Just when you think you can't stand the excitement any longer, you let go of the tow rope, stand up on your board, and tip over the lip to career down the mountainous face of the wave. Ten kinds of orchestral and choral hell break out as the Symphony Hall is filled with 2,000 voices giving it some serious vocal welly, booming timpani and a full orchestra having a blast. As the wave starts breaking behind you, you gradually coast to a halt on a chaotic turmoil of unwinding music, desperately trying to sustain the long, last note as the adrenaline knocks all the breath out of you.

Phew. Woohoo! Can we do it again? Luckily, we get to do just that, because the theme is reprised at the end of Carmina Burana.

Upgrading through replacement parts

I was interested by a piece on Gizmodo reporting that Leica -- rather than releasing brand new models of their digital rangefinders -- are offering a service whereby they will upgrade the components of your Leica M8. Given that the M8 costs $4795 (body only -- sheesh) that's probably just as well.

It's rare enough these days to find companies making products which are repairable at all, so it's great to see some enabling not only repair, but also upgrades to the features as technology advances.

We're having problems with our espresso maker at the moment, not much more than a year after we bought it. We're going to try get it repaired (it's a Krups model) because I hate the thought of the financial and ecological waste of essentially throwing out a product so soon after we bought it. We've treated it with care (cleaning and de-scaling it regularly, using filtered water in the tank and so on), but we do use it at least once a day. It seems really difficult to find home appliances that are actually built for frequent use, unless you buy one intended for commercial use.

Lakota Nation

I meant to blog about this long before Christmas, but didn't get around to it: a group of Lakota declared that they were unilaterally withdrawing from all treaties with the US, so that they are no longer citizens of the United States. The group explain their reasons for doing so on their site, and certainly it seems that they have every justification for doing so. The Federal government never properly honoured the the treaties, and for the past 150 years or so, the Lakota people (and other First Nation people) have been gradually impoverished, marginalised and denied access to parts of their land. I'm no lawyer, but there also seem to be legal provisions for such an action within US and UN law.

The original declaration implied that there was widespread support within the Lakota Nation. They posed the intriguing notion that an area within five States of the US (North and South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming and Nebraska) would become an independent nation within a state, with powers to issue passports, their own currency and raise (or not raise) their own taxes. It also implied that anyone living within the five states (Lakota or not) would be welcome to join their new nation.

The practical issues are formidable. How will this new independent nation generate power and income, organise its currency and trade with the rest of the US, or police its borders, particularly since it is currently so impoverished? However, another issue has surfaced since December of last year: it is unclear how much support the proposal has. A breakaway group calling itself 'Lakota Oyate' has emerged, and claims to "represent the people's voice in reclaiming freedom". Elsewhere on the web, allegations have been made that the Republic of Lakotah, lead by Russell Means (Oyate Wacinyapin), does not have widespread support, and has not consulted Lakota Elders or Tribal Presidents. In a response to an email from a Lakota man from Rosebud Reservation, Russell argues that Tribal Presidents are part of the US Federal system:

We did not ask the permission of the US authorities disguised as tribal leaders. They like the existing system. They are in power, and they get to keep that power by begging to Washington for crumbs for our people.

Perhaps there's some truth in that, but it seems to me that the movement will not be successful unless it has widespread local support and legitimacy.

It's an interesting situation, and I certainly wish the Lakota well in their struggle to take back control of their own lives from the Federal Government, which seems completely indifferent to them. The thing which shocked me most was reading the statistics about the level of poverty on Lakota reservations. Male Lakota life expectancy is reportedly only 44 years, which would be dreadful for a developing country, but is unbelievable for a community within one of the most prosperous countries in the world. I'm not surprised that some Lakota feel that they couldn't do a worse job of looking after their own people than the US Government.

Twitching

I took part in the RSPB Garden Birdwatch today, and spent an hour noting down the maximum number of each species of bird visiting the garden within the selected hour. As well as being quite fun, and a good way of encouraging people to notice the bird life going about its business in their gardens or local parks, it's also a scientific exercise, gathering important data about the temporal and geographic changes in species numbers. While there is inevitably a small amount of statistical noise introduced because the participants are mostly not scientists, the enormous number of participants and broad coverage of the UK would be impossible without the participation of the public, so it's a valuable exercise.

As I did my hour of observation, I was aware of a familiar non-scientific urge creeping in. Despite that fact that I know very well that a survey period in which few or no birds are observed is as scientifically valuable as one which huge numbers of birds are reported, you can't help feeling disappointed and frustrated -- if it's your garden -- when you get a pathetic avian turnout of a couple a few tits, two robins and a blackcap. I would never note down birds that weren't there (as a scientist, that would rank alongside armed robbery in severity), but that didn't stop me sitting there urging birds (in my mind) to come and visit the garden.

We get a good range of species visiting the garden, in reasonable numbers. Blue tits, great tits, coal tits, and small, bouncy puffball flocks of long tailed tits are regular visitors, along with a pair of robins, a pair of blackcaps (in the winter), blackbirds, dunnocks, wrens, chaffinches and occasional bullfinches. We also had groups of house sparrows (though sadly they seem to have reduced in numbers last year), the ubiquitous magpies and wood pigeons, and rare but startling visits from a sparrowhawk. Of course, that's a cumulative collection of birds, over the course of hours or days, and in any randomly selected hour, we would be unlikely to see more than a small sub-set of those species, which is why my observation hour was so disappointing.

I did see a sparrowhawk flying over the garden during the hour, but the instructions tell you (sternly) to count only those birds actually in your garden. Curses.

Just call me Sparky

It's funny how completing the little jobs that you've been putting off for ages, but aren't really that difficult, can really make your day. If they involve something you didn't know you could do until you tried, it adds about 100 bonus points.

Two things in our house have needed fixing since we moved in over a year ago. The first was the kitchen light. It was one of those 'curved arm holding spotlights' things, with tungsten spotlights, rather than halogen ones. Quite apart from being thoroughly blessed by the Ugly Fairy, two of the light fittings had a fault, and would sulkily blow bulbs as soon as you replaced them. Consequently, our kitchen had several very gloomy spots.

It's one of those things that you look at many times a day and subconsciously think "I must get around to fixing that", before you go on your way with a slight but gnawing feeling of things being unfinished. This week, we finally got around to going to a shop and buying a new light. Ridiculously, that was what was holding the whole thing back: once we'd got our shiny new halogen light, we were raring to put it up. We'd never attempted to replace a ceiling light fitting before, but it turned out to be very easy, once we'd worked out which of the many unlabelled fuses in the fuse box controlled the lighting ring. A few minutes work, some tutting at the messy nest of wiring stuffed into the ceiling space (just like real electricians!), and some work with a screwdriver, and it was done. When we replaced the fuse and switched on the light to find our kitchen bathed in lovely, clean, bright light, it felt like a genuine achievement, and a disproportionately large load lifted from our shoulders.

{Read more...}

Playtime

I love Jacques Tati. Almost nothing cheers me up as quickly as watching one of his films, which is odd really, given that Tati was a very visual, physical comedian, and that isn't normally the kind of thing I enjoy. But I just have to watch a few minutes of Monsieur Hulot walking -- leaning forward, as if into a stiff headwind -- and I'm in fits of laughter.

I've seen 'Monsieur Hulot's Holiday' many times, but recently we've rented some of his other films, and watched 'Playtime' last night. It wasn't a success when first released, and eventually bankrupted Tati, because he spent a fortune building what amounted to an entire town for the set. For those reasons, I wasn't sure that I would enjoy it as much as the other films, but I thought it was wonderful.

Tati films contain very little in the way of plot, but the plot of Playtime -- such as it is -- concerns the efforts of Monsieur Hulot to meet someone in an enormous modern office block. In this film, as in most of the others, Hulot is a kind of passive entropy generator. The world starts out clean and ordered, but when Hulot comes on the scene he unwittingly sets up a chain of events which result in chaos, by doing nothing more than wandering around in a benevolent but bewildered fashion.

It's particularly clear in Playtime that this is a good thing: the clean, modern world depicted at the start of the film is sterile and alienating to humans. We see an elderly porter trying to contact the man Hulot has come to meet using a high-tech bank of switches and lights. It takes him several minutes of tentatively pressing buttons (getting incomprehensible patterns of flashing lights and beeps in return) before he actually manages to communicate with a person. The building is so vast and uniform that Hulot gets hopelessly lost within a short while of arriving. Considering it was made in the 60s, Playtime feels like a modern, satirical film about the perils of modern architecture and technology. When things start to unravel later in the film, the world feels like a much warmer and more friendly place, partly because the chaos means that people actually talk to one another.

There are some wonderfully clever visual puns in the film. A group of female American tourists are all wearing floral hats, and at the restaurant, a waiter appears to be watering their hats with champagne. The film is supposed to be set in Paris, but it is so modern and anonymous that it could be anywhere. However, occasionally when characters open the ubiquitous glass doors, they see the Eiffel Tower, or some other landmark reflected in the door. There's also a brilliant joke about a patent 'silent' door, being shown at a kind of Ideal Home Exhibition. For complicated reasons, the Director of the company believes that Hulot is the man who has been rifling through their office doors, and shouts at him for his presumption before flouncing off through his silent door, slamming it -- completely noiselessly -- behind him. I'm going to have to watch it again soon, because I'm sure that there were probably lots of jokes I missed.

Macworld 2008

So, the Stevenote is over for another year, and some very interesting stuff was announced. The MacBook Air is a really stunning design, I think. I love the way that they emphasise the weightlessness of it¹ by tapering the edges of the case so that they are not actually sitting on the surface of the desk. It makes it look a little as if it's floating. Of course, there's a compromise for losing the weight and shrinking the thickness so the specs aren't as good as the MacBook Pros, but I think it fits its intended niche pretty well. Though it's gorgeous, I don't want to buy one. Correction: I want to buy one, but can't justify a need for it.

I was also very interested in Time Capsule. As it happens, I was in the process of thinking about getting more external storage, possibly Network Attached Storage, to enable me to back up all our computers using Time Machine. Our existing discs are getting a bit too full for comfort, and would be better employed to store music or to hold bootable clones of the drives. Time Machine is brilliant -- one of the best features of Leopard in my opinion, and while I thought I'd only use it for backup, it has saved my bacon a couple of times when I deleted files unintentionally. Anything which makes that process even more transparent and effortless would be a great thing. I don't currently have 802.11n wireless in the house, and Time Capsule seems fairly decently priced for the capacity offered.

I'm also intrigued by the iTunes Movie Rentals. We have a LoveFILM subscription which we enjoy, but it has a number of drawbacks. The somewhat random nature of the order in which you receive the DVDs (depending on availability) means that you often end up with a pile of very serious, depressing films when you actually feel like watching a light comedy. It's also not very spontaneous because of the postal delay, so if you find that all you've got when your parents come to visit is a batch of incredibly sweary films (for example) you're a bit stuck. Finally, we intermittently have trouble with scratched discs (something I've ranted about here before). When our player hits a bad scratch, it tends to jump back to chapter one. This means that we watch films with one eye on the DVD counter, so that if it does its skipping act, you can at least laboriously skip forward through the chapters to just after the point where it failed.

If (when rentals appear in the UK iTunes Store) there is a good range of films (including foreign language films and independents), we might well ditch our LoveFILM subscription and just rent-as-we-go: for our level of usage, the price would be about the same.

¹ OK, I know it's not literally weightless -- 3lb (1.36kg) is not nothing, but it's pretty light. ↑