Who are the ten best cricketers of all time?

31 May 2009: Christopher Martin-Jenkins recently accepted the thankless (but no doubt rewarding) commission to pick “the top 100 cricketers of all time”). Although he admits “The selection will inevitably offend some”, he has a pretty good stab at things, and if you want to buy the resulting book, it’s £8.99 at Amazon (or it was when I last looked). Anyway, as a little quiz, here are his choices from 11 to 90, grouped in country/alphabetical order. Your challenge is to see how many of the top ten you can get. Bonus points for getting them in order! AUSTRALIA Warwick Armstrong (68) Richie Benaud (41) Allan Border (55) Greg Chappell (38) Jack Gregory (71) Clarrie Grimmett (54) Neil Harvey (87) Ian Healy (91) [...]

GeekChart – more pointless fun

23 May 2009: Cherryhintonblue’s Geek Chart This is fun. GeekChart reckons it shows your activity on all sorts of social media sites in the form of a pie chart. I’m not quite sure about the accuracy of what it’s come up with for me, but it does say it gets more accurate over time, so we’ll see how it changes. I can see a lot of people putting this on their blogs in time though. You can click on the chart to see stuff, and I have a public GeekChart page.

A Decimal Point

23 May 2009: This just struck me as a curiosity, spotted in a display of football memorabilia in our village men’s hairdressers. For an FA Cup match in January 1971, Portsmouth were charging 90p for a ticket in the “Main Stand” (oh, the nostalgia for pre-sponsorship days, eh?). Presumably the match was a draw, because nine days later we have a replay at Highbury …for which Arsenal were asking 12s 6d for entry. Now, was decimal currency introduced slowly from the south coast northwards or something? PS: I tried to find the “Decimal Five” programmes on YouTube, but no luck. Remember the jingle? I still have it in my head 38 years later. Apparently it was written and performed by The Scaffold. Anyway, [...]

Cheap Wii MotionPlus? Looks like Amazon’s the place

20 May 2009: The £20 Wii Motion Plus Accessory is now being made available on pre-order from major retailers such as Amazon, which is also offering its “Pre-order Price Guarantee” (if the Amazon.co.uk price decreases between the time you place your order and the release date, you’ll be charged the lower price). There’s going to be serious demand on this, because it’s almost a mandatory update for Wii owners – most new games will require the add-on device to work, it’s being predicted. UK launch date is 12 June 2009. So, what is the Wii MotionPlus Accessory? Somehow, this brilliant device manages to replicate your entire body movement, rather than just that of your arm and wrist, as this review in Gizmodo explains, [...]

Morrissey at Cambridge Corn Exchange gig review

17 May 2009: Morrissey is one of those acts (like Springsteen) who seems to have so many fans at each gig who follow him around the country that you feel a bit of an intruder if you’re happy to just see him once on the tour, like normal folk. Anyway, those who have seen him earlier on the current jaunt tell me that this was an exceptionally good gig, with Moz in fine voice – which was odd given that he’d had such serious “throat problems” earlier in the week. The Corn Exchange was packed, obviously, with most people in early for the pretty decent support act. Goodness knows how long those down the front had been there in order to get within [...]

Apple Time Capsule – cheap at the price

11 May 2009: I won’t do a full review of my new Apple Time Capsule here because there are millions of reviews all over the place which you can read, but I want to address perhaps the only problem which most of the reviews bring up: the price. All I’d say is: “Have you ever set up a wireless network at home …and do you put a cost on your time?” I had a wireless network at home which allowed my laptop to go online, and the “router” also acted as a hub which connected my desktop Mac to the cable modem directly, and to my printer. Not that complex, although I remember spending hours setting it up a few years ago. For [...]

Sky HD remote control and Yamaha YSP receiver

10 May 2009: This is one of those blog posts which is more for my future reference as it is for general interest, but hey, if you’ve found this on Google and it’s helpful, glad to have been of service. Firstly… What I did when my Sky HD remote control stopped working I’ve no idea why, but the standard remote for my Sky HD box just decided it wouldn’t work any more. It wasn’t the batteries, because the little status light flashed when I hit buttons. So I went off in search of a reset, and here’s the one recommended to me a few forum searches later: - Press [TV] - Hold [select] and [red button] together for around two seconds (until the [...]

Star Trek movie – great. Mainly.

7 May 2009: (Minor spoilers only) OK, here’s the thing which we thought was really clever about the new Star Trek movie. We all know the film is a “start all over again” effort, going back to the beginning of the Original Series. But the smart thing is that you quickly realise what they’ve done is to take (yet another) time travelling premise, where a character from the Star Trek we all know and love comes back in time to tell the new cast that they’re now in an alternate reality where everything he knew is going to be different. Very clever. So in this (and presumably subsequent) movies, we’re now seeing the characters we know and love in a new timeline. See [...]