• Google Android Personal Thoughts – "Uniformity is not a word you’ll find in Android’s dictionary. How about the fact that the application icons aren’t the same size. Uh, why? Since there’s no transparent padding around the icons … there’s no uniformity in the touch areas when you go to tap on an icon." These things probably don't seem important to Google but the attention to detail is what makes the iPhone (usually) a pleasure to use. I've not used an Android handset but these things would bug me pretty quickly.
• Japanese Photographer Bends Electricity to His Will – Beautiful.
• The Cost of Care – Nice graphic showing the relationship between the cost of healthcare and life-expectancy.

• Separating Explosives from the Detonator – A sensible response to the pants bomber…
• Google ‘open’ memo betrays deep corporate delusion – "Aside from Apple, no tech outfit is more secretive about what goes on inside the company."
• Q: “Once in a blue moon” is a rare event. But what does “blue moon” really mean? – These things are never as simple as you think they should be…

• US switch to new lethal injection scrutinised – However you do it, killing people is a cruel and unusual punishment.
• Rudiments of Language Discovered in Monkeys – "Lemasson … suspects that a dense jungle environment drove the evolution of syntax. Since the monkeys had trouble seeing each other, they compensated by talking."
• Google DNS – Why would Google make their own DNS service if there's no direct way to sell advertising from it?

I normally try to be pretty positive here. Most reviews you’ll find here are of products that I’ve bought with my own money and that I’m broadly happy with.

That makes this post the exception.

You may remember that ZX81.org.uk went off-line for over twenty-four hours last month. Shortly afterwards I switched away from Adept Hosting, but it’s not only, as you might expect, because of the reliability.

I posted the following review at Review Centre:

When their systems are up and running everything was fine. Technical support tended to be accurate when a response was received.

That’s the good. But there’s way more “bad” to note. Their servers were not terribly reliable and tended to go down for extended periods of time without warning and with no mention on their support website. Worse, getting through to their technical support team was almost impossible. I have sent four messages so far about my domain name transfer and have not received any response or action so far. I may have to force through the change through Nominet which wipes out any savings that I obtained by using Adept in the first place.

In short: not recommended.

In Adepts favour they were cheap. Plus some of the things they were bad at — billing for example — worked in my favour.

Maybe that’s their problem, perhaps they’re too cheap. They should be able to support their customers. Their suggested response times are not great and they have, in my experience, consistently missed even those.

But whatever their excuse and however cheap they are it’s no longer good enough and I’ve gone elsewhere.

I try to keep ZX81.org.uk free of direct promotion of my iPhone applications but I think the launch of a new one warrants an exception to the rule.

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www.cut is a utility that shortens URLs so that they can be mailed, Twittered or FaceBooked without worrying about character counts or line breaks.

Find out more at the above link or head straight to the App Store to download a copy. It’s free so you have nothing to lose!

• Clive Thompson on the New Literacy – Maybe the Internet isn't the end of literacy after all…
• Galileo’s telescope reaches 400th anniversary – "Exactly 400 years ago today, on 25 August 1609, the Italian astronomer and philosopher Galilei Galileo showed Venetian merchants his new creation, a telescope – the instrument that was to bring him both scientific immortality and, more immediately, a whole lot of trouble."
• Creationists, now they’re coming for your children – "The Greatest Show on Earth is a book about the positive evidence that evolution is a fact. It is not intended as an antireligious book. I’ve done that, it’s another T-shirt, this is not the place to wear it again. Bishops and theologians who have attended to the evidence for evolution have given up the struggle against it."