Junk Tour Returns.

Junk tour returns with the boot sales starting up again, after the SARS II electric boogaloo break. 

It's the first boot sale of the year for me thanks to that little mix up and armed with my mask from work, it's time to venture out to see what I could find.

First of all the main boot sale I go to is out at the edge of Kent where it meets London. It's two buses there and back. Along the motorway and along the verges, noting the wild life. I've seen orchids in flower there one Sunday, a few years back. 

Even though I should get up earlier and not leave it to the last minute.

 As I say, leaving earlier, it's like the tide is coming in and everyone has to scurry to safety, This means I have about an hour before everyone packs up and leaves.

I did find a few things, a kids book about Basil Brush, and some British Knights Trainers thrown away, they seem decent, so will have to give them a clean up.

A couple of good doggos seen there too, including what looked like an acutal Greg Mitchell from Reeves and Mortimer (seriously he looked like a toy dog, very blonde and short haired) and the rare mega teckel a big brown version of a dachshund on stilt legs. 

I got to see a stand of Rosebay Willowherb almost going to seed along with some thistles, so expect to see fairies floating round pretty soon.

Ideal phone.

Been thinking about phones recently. Apart from going from none, at the start of the decade to owning three in 2020, they are all pretty much of a muchness. This is a run down of all the phones I've owned with a good approximation of my ideal phone.

Blackberry was like owning an unpopular home computer back in the 1980's something like a BBC Model B with all the support that gathered as well. I know they're ARM now but back in the 80's they were the fail. It's the only phone I've ever cracked the screen of, and predictably fucked it up good.

The only good things about it is that it would connect to a PC with ease and used Micro SD cards for storage so you could grab stuff off it or put stuff on with no problem.

My next phone was my current work phone. This was its replacement and is one of the 1st generation Moto G Motorola phones. It's still works and was used principally as a camera for ages before being demoted to a work phone. It's also the only phone I've ever bought with cash money, the rest were found.

Its kinda like a hermit crab, as its storage is  absolutely stuffed with bugger all room to add new stuff, Largely due to a bloated android system and ill written apps. I wonder if you could run an OS from the memory card. rather than internal storage.

My current phone which is also android but also closer to iPhone in its layout. That stupid SIM card tray and no external storage, but also with a much better camera and a higher operating system.

Finally I had an iPhone 4 which was my work phone for ages, Apple killed support for it years ago and all 32 bit apps have long since been shoahed from the app store. It was a nice palm sized beast even if it did run ios, which required iTunes to sync anything unless its photos. Nice built in apps too.

Ideal phone, then?

Taking the three systems I've owned and breaking them down to essentials, I would part them out as such.

Blackberry. Connectivity to PC.

Android. Wealth of apps and a decent camera.

iPhone. Design and built in apps.

If I was designing an OS, it would go something like this. 

Around 500 MB > 1GB in size. Compact and no bloat whatsoever. Optionally to run from an SD card.

Must connect to a computer without the need for any additional file manager software on the computer behalf. 

A well designed bunch of system apps. This includes a calendar/ diary, basic notebook, world time clock, weather app, internet browser, Camera , text, phone and file explorer. A basic calculator, Sound Recorder and some system benchmarking tools for checking battery life. I really don't want to any Siri or Alexa ok Google type bollocks so it won't be added. 

Mandatory ad blocking system wide and a draconian attitude to app permissions. Think script block but OS based.

A  removable battery and headphone socket would also be mandatory as well.  

Aztec Warriors and that

Having a better week of it this time around, than last time, sky have our mini box up an running and we have a few more tapes brought home and have tackled the ones in the fake library book cases (If you have old videos you'll know what I mean.)

So far there is an opera taped from Channel 4 by my granddad and a bit of Gerald Durrell on Sky News from way back when, before it goes into Ken Russells Salome and Oscar Wilde.

This is not why you're here though. I've transcribed another book and this time its The Mystery Of the Aztec Warrior, the first in the series of Hardy boys books if you're from the UK. Americans can be content with the fact that the Tower Treasure is already up for you to read.

Thoughts and that.

So far an easy ride, replacing lost tildes from the N in Senor in spell check and adding a few hyphens and italics that are lost when they're scanned by whoever does it. Even better it seems to be based on the UK version as it has the Arctic Warrior at the end rather than the Haunted Fort.

It's not a bad introduction, basically the boys go looking for a guy mentioned in the will of the Brookes family and go to Mexico on an extended break to do this. There's even mention of using thread from Agaves and the old canard of getting water from Cacti in the desert to quench your thirst (see also The Mark on The Door for more on this). Me I'm already tackling the cluster fuck that is The Witchmaster's Key, expect it to be scathing.

Aztec Warrior can be found here.

Finally if you want derring do and the risk of life and limb and some classic arcade games, then this is a good read.

Breaking down.

Feels like I'm going through a phase in my life where everything seems to fall apart. A few cases in point.

I suffered a choking fit in the cancer research shop yesterday, you know one of those where you can't breathe. After a while I got better but not before everyone thought I was some sort of plague carrier for SARS 2 electric boogaloo. They offered me a mask but I had my own with me. I know I'm fine but its that accusation that I'm not that carried over and it bugs me.

I tried in the week to get a photo of a cartoon guinea pig for my mum from an old diary chucked out, only for me to be cunted down by some Karen in the block asking why I was photographing her diary, she chucked out. I had no real reason that, only that I liked the design and that but of course I can't say that and fear took over and now I feel like I'm the monster.  Some how I just wish to be like normal people for once.

Last straw is the TV downstairs broke and we got lucky with grabbing a new one from Currys. Set up is a doddle but doing so broke Sky Q so now we have to get this working especially the small "satellite" box for downstairs TV, which is ironically closer to the router than the main Q box. Also we lost picture on the VCR and as we're back full time, grabbing has slowed significally.