Penguin Marginalia

Sick of getting yet more snail-mail spam from bloody estate agents, addressed to "the occupier" or "the homeowner" or just nobody, I thought I'd look up how I could at least attempt to have this blocked.

You'd think perhaps that the Mailing Preference Service would be able to help. You can ask that you don't receive junk mail from those companies that are their members, but only mail specifically addressed to a surname and address.

Member organisations of the MPS undertake to remove from their mailing list the addresses of those people who indicate that they want this done. However, the MPS is not designed to stop unaddressed items of mail, direct mail delivered to the door or the delivery of free newspapers; and mail addressed to ‘Occupant’, ‘Resident’ or ‘Homeowner’ is not covered under this scheme.

All right. A bit further down the page it says you can opt out of "unaddressed or door-to-door" mail by contacting the Post Office. But:

If you want to stop receiving unaddressed mail delivered by Royal Mail to your home you can do so by contacting Royal Mail at the address below. However, the opt out service only relates to unaddressed mail. Royal Mail is still legally obliged to deliver all addressed mail, which includes mail that is addressed “To the Occupier” (or with any other generic recipient information), as well as mail that is personally addressed to you by name.

Is there any advice as to how you can stop receiving direct marketing mail with generic recipient information? Is there buggery. Which presumably is why estate agents use this method all the time. The bastards.

http://whatthefuckismysocialmediastrategy.com/

Identify relevant and compelling hooks for the audience, create content around the hooks and integrate it into their social repertoires

Maximise breakthrough by leveraging influencers

Activate audience by giving them compelling social experiences, encouraging advocacy

etc etc

It's amazing how - at least according to the eulogies on Radio 4, which always tells the truth - every British soldier killed in Afghanistan was a dedicated human rights exponent, charity worker, devoted to helping the Afghan people, loved by them all, built an orphanage while teaching girls to read at the same time. Nobody, ever, seems to have joined the army for any other reason; it was never the only job on offer, they didn't go because their mates did, they were never indifferent at best and actively hostile at worst to people who didn't appreciate them being there.

Maybe somebody should have told these laudable dead young men who were so devoted to peace and justice that maybe joining the fucking army wasn't the best thing.

http://www.myboogieboard.com/

Does anyone remember these things? Pressure-sensitive LCD tablets, which only use power when erasing, so last for years. There was a fuss about them a while ago, January or February. For some reason I remembered their existence recently and ordered one, and it arrived today - well, all right, a note saying that I had to pay £12.02 extra to get it arrived today (£4.02 duty, £8 Post Office handling charge :mad: ).



It's smaller than I thought it would be, A5-ish, and weighs pretty much nothing, an ounce or two. It is also much, much dimmer than you'd imagine. I took the photo with my iPhone outside, and you can see from how it's washed out my hand that it whacked the exposure way up. You basically need quite strong light to see it at all, the contrast is really annoyingly low. The pictures on their site where it's practically glowing really aren't accurate.

It's very sensitive, and the width increases dramatically with even slight pressure - the very minimum line is about 0.5mm, just slightly touching it with a fingernail, and writing you're producing lines at least 1mm wide and usually more. Resting your hand on it will also produce odd spots. (This probably means it's a bit pointless in a bag, unless you have a sleeve, which I don't.) You can't partially erase it either - all you can do is press the erase button which resets everything.

There's no save or export function. Take a picture on your phone. Having said that, the above picture came out quite well. No idea if it scans, probably not well since the top bit is slightly raised.

It comes with a microfibre cloth and a stylus, which is decent enough but has no way of being attached to the board - bit of a design flaw.



It's quite fun to write and doodle on the thing, the pressure sensitivity makes it interesting, and it might be useful for taking phone notes, drawing little sketch diagrams, the sort of thing where it would just be a waste to use paper. The poor contrast is annoying though. You have to use it in a bright area, and you can't point a light straight at it either as you get a diffuse reflection from the surface. And it must be said that I *do* have a lot of paper, and pens, too. Still, it is a fun thing for people who come round to play with I suppose.

Dramatic increases in infant mortality, cancer and leukaemia in the Iraqi city of Fallujah, which was bombarded by US Marines in 2004, exceed those reported by survivors of the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, according to a new study.

Iraqi doctors in Fallujah have complained since 2005 of being overwhelmed by the number of babies with serious birth defects, ranging from a girl born with two heads to paralysis of the lower limbs. They said they were also seeing far more cancers than they did before the battle for Fallujah between US troops and insurgents.

Their claims have been supported by a survey showing a four-fold increase in all cancers and a 12-fold increase in childhood cancer in under-14s. Infant mortality in the city is more than four times higher than in neighbouring Jordan and eight times higher than in Kuwait.

Toxic legacy of US assault on Fallujah 'worse than Hiroshima'

There is a noticeable depression to the right of the trackpad of my macbook pro. This is either because I have been resting my hand there far too long, or, more likely, because at one or more times I have slammed it there with a fist in irritation, and you know, after a while even a puny human can bend relatively thin aluminium.

When I first read the casual statement in Neuromancer (I think it was, might have been Count Zero) about cash having been made illegal, I thought that was a weird piece of futurism gone too far. It was however, like all the best sci-fi, based on good extrapolation from the present; only I don't think cash will become technically illegal in the near-to-mid future (that would cause a massive outcry and also massive problems) it will just be useless for doing much more than buying a packet of Polos.

You can see here, for instance, Geraint Davies saying that people shouldn't be allowed to buy prepaid credit without identity checks because paedophiles might use it to get child porn - also going for the "think of the children" double by saying that kids use it to buy knives, the little buggers. (Clearly there are no other ways paedophiles or children might get hold of child porn or knives respectively.) Prepaid credit cards are basically internet cash; they can be purchased directly for physical cash, for an extortionate fee of course but that's how it works, with no notice, identity checking or credit reports. And cash is messy stuff. It lets people avoid having their economic transactions surveilled. We can't be having that.

Some readers, not all that many, may have seen my previous flat, which could generously be described as "far too small". In fact even my old landlord said that it was too small for me, when confronted by my drying rack and stinkwood stool (don't ask) a few feet in front of the door when he came in. It wasn't a place where you could really entertain visitors. The bedroom was really a room for the bed, with a gap of a foot or so by the side of it. The shower made an awful grinding noise whenever turned on. The washing machine leaked all over the kitchen floor unless the gap underneath was plugged up with a cloth.

There were mice. Daring, acrobatic mice.

I am now in a larger flat, very close to the old one - literally the next street down. It is a bit more expensive, an extra £90 or so a month, but on the plus side

* it is significantly larger. The bedroom is actually a room that you can walk around in. Kitchen's actually smaller now I think of it but that's okay, it does the job and doesn't have to double as a book storage area any more;
* it's in a block with an internal garden and a caretaker who is I'm told quite nice. Also I know a couple of people who live here;
* there are lots of windows, which are double-glazed;
* there are lots of shelves though I may well get more;
* there are lots of power points in convenient locations rather than "buried behind a radiator";
* there is a (very small) balcony with a view quite a way south. Not an amazingly inspiring view, but the sky is probably the best part and there's a lot of that.

So far, after one night, the only problems seem to be

* the shower is a bit weedy;
* the mattress is a bit spring-poky;
* the fridge smells a bit odd - yes, ha ha fridge smells, yes - I need to scrub it out with some bicarb;
* it's on the fourth floor, though there is a lift, otherwise moving stuff would be a nightmare;
* it's noisy here. It is on a main road, and even though I am four floors up the traffic is louder than I would have thought. There are also aeroplanes. But that sort of noise has never really bothered me much; it doesn't keep me awake.

I have the application he's using, Brushes - though I am nowhere near as good as he is of course - and it really is impressive in use, even though the tools are quite simple, mostly brush customisation, colour picking and opacity. (It does layers as well but I'm not sure he's even using those there.) The iPad provides a proper area to look at an overall image as you're making it, and the zoom gives you the equivalent of a tiny brush as well as a magnifying glass.

Reduced opacity is one of the tools I noticed him using quite a lot; this gives you control over colour in a more intuitive way than picking from a colour wheel, since each successive stroke on top is more intense.