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Archive: birthday

A casual coffee lover’s review of the AeroPress

26 March 2008 02:18

Categories: Entertainment, Food and drink, General, Personal, Reviews

I like to think that it is a function of my age rather than my popularity that I got only one birthday present this year! If I stretch the concept a bit, it was announced on my birthday that Formula 1 coverage was moving back to the BBC. But not even I am egotistical enough to believe that Bernie Ecclestone would arrange such things for my birthday.

Anyway, the present I got was from my brother. He got the hints I dropped (before Christmas, mind you) and bought me an AeroPress coffee and espresso maker. (Apparently he almost bought me a Stylophone, which would have been even cooler.)

I first heard of it on Boing Boing TV.

As much as anything else, I thought the mechanism was just ingenious. It would be great enough as a toy. The amazing thing, though, is that the reviews are right — it makes a great cup of coffee. It has a very smooth taste — probably the best coffee I’ve been able to make at home.

I normally use one of these mugs that act as their own little cafetière. This is an improvement over instant, but sometimes coffee granules escape through, leading to a mouthful of grit. It can also sometimes taste quite bitter.

The other method I use is an automatic drip-brew coffee maker. The cool thing about this is that it has an alarm timer on it, so if I have an early start I can be really lazy and lie in for five more minutes while the coffee is made for me. The disadvantage is that it doesn’t taste all that great, although it’s difficult to put my finger on what is wrong with it. Also, these things are not labour saving in the slightest in the long run. Preparing them beforehand and cleaning them afterwards is a faff I could really do without.

I am not a coffee geek. I think if I started to research coffee too much I would become like one of those audiophiles who get fleeced into buying expensive snake oil in the fruitless search for perfect audio. Nevertheless, I take note of anything that promises a better coffee, especially if it is gimmicky.

It did take me a couple of goes to get the hang of the AeroPress, but in the end it has turned out to be quite a fuss-free method. The best part is that the clean-up process is so quick and easy it just feels wrong. You just push the plunger all the way out, and out plops the coffee in one clean ‘puck’. You just need to give the bottom of the plunger a little rinse and that’s it, all set for the next time you want to make coffee.

There are a couple of downsides. One is that it needs a filter. The AeroPress comes with 350 filters, but you can re-use them several times. Some have even reported re-using them up to 20 times, which would make the package good enough for 7000 uses. Not bad.

Another thing is that it seems, from my perspective, to use up an awful lot of coffee. The scoop that comes with it is rather large compared to other scoops I have used, yet the coffee that is produced still tastes about the right strength (once the espresso produced is diluted to make an Americano).

I imagine if I used the AeroPress more than my other methods of making coffee, I would soon find myself spending a lot more money on coffee. On the other hand, the taste is worth it. Maybe it would be best for me to use it as a kind of luxury, like having an occasional glass of wine or something. Sundays, special occasions, tough days and so on. It also looks like it would be excellent if you are travelling.

If you like coffee, I’d definitely give the AeroPress a shot. It only costs around £25.

4 comments

Phone help needed

25 March 2007 00:30

Categories: Blogging, Commuting, Current affairs, General, Internet, Personal, Technology, University

Despite my frightening net addiction and general interest in techy stuff, I am a bit of a Luddite when it comes to mobile phones. I got my first phone only three years ago, which probably made me among the last ½% in the country. I have only owned two phones, including the one I currently use. I have never bought a phone — my first was a gift, and the second is a hand-me-down.

By and large, I’ve been fairly happy with the situation though. I can’t believe the way most people go through phones. Seemingly many people go through them at the rate of about two a year, or sometimes even every other weekend when they forgetfully drop their phone down the drain in a mad binge drinking-fuelled bum-bum performance.

In a way, I’m like one of those insufferable people who go, “OH, I just can’t set my VCR!” People who boast that they can’t set their VCR are stupid posers who really need to find something better to be proud about.

Me? I just go around saying, “Look! My phone doesn’t have a camera on it! It takes me half an hour to send a text! I don’t phone anyone cos I can’t be bothered to top it up!” Yes, I’m one of those terrible people who almost takes pride in how rubbish their phone is. I mean, this is probably three years old, which in mobile phone terms makes it a proper dinosaur. I mean, no camera!

But a certain website has come along and changed my phone habits for the better / worse [delete as applicable]. Yes, that Twitter nonsense means that I now receive about a dozen (probably more — believe it or not, I don’t count!) texts a day. This can be a bit embarrassing. I now receive such a large amount of texts that it suggests that people want to talk to me, when in reality I’m am just getting loads of tweets complaining about hangovers.

Also — I don’t know whether this is down to O2 or Twitter, or just the way that phones work — but often my messages come in clumps of about a dozen or even more. When I’m sitting there in a dull lecture, my pocket is sporadically buzzing away like a short circuiting dildo. All I can say is, thank goodness I don’t have a really annoying ringtone.

Actually having to use my phone has made me realise how clunky and slow it is. For instance, I can’t believe the fact that I run out of memory after about 50 texts. I assume today’s phones can hold a few more messages on them. Also, because of Twitter, I have come to appreciate how handy a mobile phone can come in. And I have occasionally felt out of the loop.

Counter-intuitively, Twitter might be making me less of a geek. (Well, it might be fostering a new era of net addiction for me. But I just like to see it as “engaging with society”. Of course.) Because of my busy modern hectic 24 hour lifestyle, on many days I might not find my way onto a computer all day until well after 9pm. Beforehand, I don’t think I really noticed. It didn’t bother me too much — besides, it’s probably good to stay away from the computer for most of the day.

But now with Twitter, I am being constantly reminded that stuff is happening, and I am missing out on it. What if there was a vaguely important email sent to me this morning? I might not see it until late on in the evening. An interesting blog post? I might miss it entirely. Important news event? My face will be nuked off before I know about it.

As somebody who, over the past few years, has been a bit of a “news junkie” and pale blogger, the realisation that I am actually not informed has unsettled me. And the sporadic stream of texts that I receive via Twitter has made me appreciate that this stupid thing in my pocket could actually come in useful.

Also, I didn’t really get anything interesting for my birthday, apart from money. It feels wrong to have turned 21 and only have the Borat DVD (thanks Gordon!) as a memento. I could get an iPod (and believe me, this is a particularly good opportunity for me to get an iPod), but since I just wrote the other day about why I’m not getting an iPod that would be silly. I mean, my iRiver still works…

So, a phone it (probably) is. But, as you might have guessed from what I have written above, I do not have the first clue about phones. So what’s what? Are there any particular good phones that I should go for? Any dodgy things I should know about?

I don’t want anything too swish — after all, that would make me look like a poserish iPod owner / Porsche driver. But I am looking for something that will allow me to check my email, Google Reader, maybe Facebook mobile and the odd news story. And I suppose I should join that mob of happy slappers and get a camera as well (although I don’t imagine you can actually buy a phone without a camera these days).

Of course, I could do the research myself, but I have actually tried and I really don’t know what’s what. Most of it goes straight over my head. So I would be grateful for any suggestions, should anyone be so kind as to pop into the comments.

Update: (Working my way through all the blog posts that I missed during the week) Blood & Treasure: i am a lonely node

6 comments

Thumbs up for iRiver

20 March 2007 13:11

Categories: Entertainment, General, Music, Personal, Technology

My iRiver is two years old today. It was a birthday present a couple of years ago (yes, today I am now officially, unfortunately, in the grip of adulthood… gah).

Recently, the MP3 player started totally acting up. It did so on the same day I got my new PC, so that put a dampener on the whole day. I felt as though I was being punished for having the audacity to buy a PC.

Anyway, as you can imagine — I am a huge music lover — I was pretty upset about it. Eventually, I convinced myself that there was a silver lining. It provided the perfect opportunity to buy an iPod.

Yes, today I would probably buy an iPod. I would still feel like a bit of a posing prick with one, in much the same way as I wouldn’t suit driving a Porsche.

Most people are evil and superficial, and many point out the alleged “enormous” size of my iRiver. I don’t think it’s that big — I would say it’s chunky. But I really like its shape — roughly the dimensions of a cassette case. Fits very nicely in my pocket.

Somebody called outta stace left a comment recently explaining why they would “never get an iPod”. I wouldn’t say that I’d never get an iPod. But it explains well part of the reason why I like my iRiver.

But the iPod is tempting for two major reasons. One: gapless playback. I’ve picked up that you can get this for your iRiver, but only with an unofficial firmware upgrade, which I’m too much of a wuss to do. Two, and even more importantly: it Scrobbles.

(This is even more important at the moment because iTunes for Vista is buggy as shit, and the Last.fm software doesn’t play very well with it either — so most of my tracks are never Scrobbled.)

Still, as tempting as an iPod is, the price tag heading towards £300 pounds (I’d need to get the 80GB iPod as I have roughly 35GB of music) is a hefty hit on the wallet. I realised after a while that my iRiver was still under warranty, almost two years after I’d bought it (If my iRiver had died a month later, it wouldn’t have been — I was lucky).

I sent the player back to iRiver in Germany, who very promptly worked out the problem (HDD failure), fixed it and sent it straight back free of charge. I was impressed with the good service.

So now I have been reunited with my iRiver, complete with new HDD, but with all of the same external scrapes and bruises that have been inflicted on it thanks to two years’ worth of my usage. There’s a bit of life in my iRiver yet. Who needs an iPod?

10 comments

Wikimemeia

7 April 2006 14:31

Categories: General

Yes, it’s an interesting meme! I saw this on Nick Barlow’s LiveJournal, but I think it’s good enough to post on my proper blog.

Go to Wikipedia (http://www.wikipedia.org/). Type in your birth date (but not year). List three events that happened on your birthday. List two important birthdays and one interesting death. Post this in your journal.

Birth date: March 20

Events:

44 BC – Julius Caesar‘s funeral.
1916 – Albert Einstein publishes his theory of relativity.
2003 – 2003 invasion of Iraq: In the early hours of the morning, the United States and three other countries begin military operations in Iraq.

Births:

1873 (O.S.) – Sergei Rachmaninoff, Russian composer and pianist (d. 1943)
1972 – Alexander Kapranos, English singer and guitarist (Franz Ferdinand (band))

Death:

1727 O.S. – Sir Isaac Newton, English physicist (b. 1642)

Update: I’ve never seen so many people doing a meme in such a short space of time. My brother was diverted by it as well for a bit. Whoever came up with this, well done — you’ve done the impossible: coming up with an interesting meme.

1 comment