A day at a time

The racket This is autumn 2025. The one I got is the 2024 Roland Garros edition which I thought had two of my favourite colours blue and orange accents. Last one in my grip size on sale! Alas, not only is the blue a bit on the dull side, the "dead" feel mentioned in a lot of reviews turned out to be worse than "oh it'd be dampened and great - less tennis elbow". It's really dead with the limited choice of hybrid string on offfer - in my case RPM Blast Rough with Wilson Sensation Plus in cool matching orange - to my pleasant surpise.   My weapon of choice since 2018 has been the v2 Babolat Pure Strike 16x19 in G2 and G3. I love big spin and I like thin beams, not only do they look cool but also less likely to frame with western forehand.    Why didn't you demo it? Generally it takes a while to get the hang of the racket and adapt your swing to a new racket. This v9 has a lower ball trajectory and maybe slightly less power. The feedback is simply not there...

First budget set up £1000 Normally I start with waffles so let's dive straight into the technical details first this time. Any feedback and warning welcomed as this is my first attempt. I installed two 375W Eurener Zebra solar panels: one on my south facing conservatory roof and one on the back wall. Solar output peaked at around 600W combined (parallel). I overspec-ed it due to the flattish wall placement and in anticipation of reduced winter sunshine.  [Update: October autumn day averaging only 1.5kWh -- 0.3/0.6kWh when cloudy and 2.5kWh when full sun.] [Update2: As the winter sun gets lower, the panels fall into more shadows.] The panels were chosen for the low weight (19.2kg) to efficiency (20.6%) and ones that I can collect by car; quite often panels are delivered in pallets costing around £50. The 3.3m aluminium mounting rails were hard to source but I was lucky to talk them into supplying two with the panels and fitted nicely into the car, just. Important solution maximise t...

MH3 LHR-KUL July 8, 2020 When I first set sight on the seat I admit to be underwhelmed after walking past (what I now know to be) one row of Business Suite but mostly was disappointed by the lack of screens (I had imagined a modified self-contained pod). But as I sat down and familiarise myself and started the massage chair, I begin to feel both amazing fortune of enjoying such luxury and sadness that why I or every one of my family haven’t or probably won’t be doing it every time! Took a while to realise that business section do away with the center hanging baggage hold, accentuating the vast high ceiling, givng a spacious feeling (if you sit near the back) Economy was full on this MH3 A350! Mostly students going home for summer holidays. The girl behind my original seat 7A wore Imperial College Business School. Although no screen, there is no one within 2 meters. That’s mainly because it is only half full. Friends tell stories of being upgraded but I’m reli...

The road to Rome is paved with gold What Theresa May said but never meant. Now Boris is saying it and don't know if meant it or not. At least the city bought it given how the pound has sunk today. But as one reviewer put it: if the reason to prepare for no deal is to get EU to offer better terms then it's a good strategy.  if it's to be prepared for no deal when the EU doesn't budge, then it's a good strategy.... The referendum was poorly executed - that's without doubt and the reason for liking current approach is Boris gov now actually tells the truth, and not afraid to say it's a bad deal, and challenges the remainers MP to trigger the nuclear option - revoke Article 50. The referendum had some provision built it such as: 60% to trigger article 50, or if Brexit won immediately hold another referendum to decide the type of Brexit. The return of of the prodigal son  Just as well that all parliamentary options are exhausted while May...

Yamaha MCR-B043D Review Like it despite all its problems.... Unique tiny square speaker pair that looks stylish and totally discrete in the dining room. I was coming more up from a sub £200 DAB/Bluetooth speaker than Hifi separate standpoint – not as portable but adds great stereo and USB playback option. I’m not a garden/pool party kinda person and UK doesn’t have that kinda weather for it. It has all the music connection I need (USB is mp3/wma only, no wifi/network). I’m using the USB playback more than I expected but unfortunately there are occasional USB decoding crackles at the start of random tracks. Speakers are not attached which is a bonus. Sound is surprisingly good coming out of the 11cm woofer in only a 4L box with 13cmx13cm square area. The overall sound quite balanced and imaging is ok. Serious air movement coming out of the rear bass reflex port and it can go quite low (registering even 30-40Hz bass) but playing Beyonce Deja Vu or Hotel California pr...

How to stop kids deleting your videos and photos? Learned a new trick today and it was such a revelation to me! Like all parents who had to hand over their iToy to the little ones from time to time, it last thing you want is your apps or photo/videos being deleted or worse still having the little ones calling random people in your contacts:) Enter Guided Access . (General -> Accessibility -> Guided Access) In a nutshell it enables restriction on the app you triple-click the Home button on. Not useful enough I hear you say? The true revelation is the freehand masking of the area that you don't want the little one to touch. Simply shade off any number of area and off they go. The masking feature can only be applied after the passcode is entered and it's in a "zoomed out" mode. Going on a weekend trip to Peak District tomorrow and look forward to trying it!  Important Tips : Make sure that while you are masking the restricted area, you rotate the phon...

Update 8.0.1. Incredible that not even Microsoft managed that kind of scrutiny when a windows release or update goes wrong. The fact that Apple released iOS 8.0.2 the very next day flew people by and all your brain is left with is the impression that the 8.0.1 contained a network bug for a few users in Australia. Ok maybe you wasn't aware of the last bit... I feel like the folks of Axiom in Wall-E, the arms just not long enough to reach for the remote to save themselves. In this case the letter "O" and "P" on the keyboard of my iPhone 6 P-L-U-S are just out of reach of the mighty thumb. It's a ridiculous phone, i.e. it's an insanely crap one for one-handed operation I've been so used to with the iPhone 5. So I kept telling myself I have 14 days to change my mind. I went into a shop and tried out the iPhone 6 again but it just doesn't have the same vibe. Clearly I'm having some fun with the folks. #   ...

Something that puzzles me a lot is the valuation of some large cap stocks. We all heard of the efficient market theory but I'm thinking of stocks like BP, Vodafone, even the latest Royal Mail IPO or Tesla and Facebook. Take Vodafone. They just sold Verizon Wireless to Verizon for U$130bn, and yesterday has a market cap of U$170bn. It seems badly priced. Worse if you think 3 months ago when it's market cap was U$140bn (U$10bn for their non-US, global, operations and assets, including a UK 3G license they paid U$10bn for and cash - granted they have GBP40bn in debt)!! Now AT&T wants to buy up Vodafone, sending shares even higher. I mean who wouldn't at this silly valuation? Can it be true that this Verizon deal that has been on the cards for the last 10 years could lead to their top shareholder, Neil Woodford, the best rate fund manager in UK with the largest fund in the UK to dump all his Vodafone shares (that he held more the donkey year...

Plenty of doom and gloom (again) on Apple's latest quarterly result and guidance. I have been reading articles like "Apple profits decline despite iPhone sales boost " from the BBC, "Despite sales of 34 mn iPhones, including iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C, Apple Inc results fail to enthuse" in the FinancialExpress, Forbes: "...despite selling 33.8 million iPhones, nearly 7 million more than a year ago and a bump of 26%, the company actually saw earnings fall (to $7.5 billion as margins shrunk)." Is it worrying that the margins are down to around 37% this time round, 5 quarters in a trot, from about 47% when they hit a record in 2012? Yes and no. Two reasons I'm not yet panicking as an investor: (1) although the moat is shrinking and price pressure builds up from maturing competition, unit sales held up (2) Fourth quarter is a weak quarter where it includes only one week of new iphone sales, meaning lots of older discounted iphones in that 33....

From http://www.valuewalk.com/2013/09/apple-inc-aapl-estimates-by-morgan-stanley/ "Apple Inc. (NASDAQ:AAPL)’s iPhone 5C was on the receiving end of plenty of derision from analysts, mainly because of how expensive it is. But a few are looking on the bright side. Morgan Stanley analysts Katy L. Huberty, Jerry Liu and Scott Schmitz report that they have raised their 2014 fiscal year earnings per share estimate because of better pricing and margins for the iPhone 5C." What's an analyst if they tell us the story after the event? Aren't they called historian? Such is the global economy we live in.... it turns out the Blighty bought the most 5C (to 5S ratio) compared to the rest of the world; and China (surprise, surprise!) bought the least. Not to say China is now rich but unfortunately an increasing sign of inequality and rich-poor divide throughout the world. Rising trade-ins in the developed worlds will surely find its way to rural BRIC's. This will...

Frankly I still can't quite believe it. Keep hearing and see news proclaiming even today that somehow the iPhone 5C is an emerging market product or worse Chinese targeted product. Southern European maybe to be sarcastic but in fact just a product differentiation for Apple itself. Apple is at the sticky end of journalists fight against extinction. They make a wrong call on 5C being low cost for close to a year and then rolls out articles counting how many chinese are not buying the 5C, sigh. Given the 5C effectively is cheapened but discontinued iphone 5, how is it even newsworthy that's comparable to saying the iphone 4 is not selling as well on the iphone 4S day of launch? Who cares if it's 1X, 2X or 10X? The fact that Apple can force all retailers and networks to stomach so many 5C is a clever copy of Samsung's strategy. Regarding finger print sensor: Apple never claim to invent touchscreen or gyro or MP3. What they do is simply integrate the best technolog...