sonofsanta

The video is fine, but the audio is definitely NSFW:

I've not voted in the poll because I don't know who I'm voting for yet. On the topic of safe seats, I just checked Wikipedia, and the last time someone won here without being a Tory was... 1923. The General Elections of 1922 & 1923 went to a Liberal, and other than that it's Tories all the way back to 1885. I am surprised by just how much I agree with Labour's policies on Health.

Oh goodie, one less piece of administrative faff come September That article doesn't mention it, but the ERA is also provided centrally, which allows you to record TV programmes & use them in school; more details here. As far as I can tell that now means that the DfE provides all the required copyright licences centrally; the only one I'm not sure on is the Collective Worship Copyright Licence, provided by the CCLI. They're mentioned in the original article @GrumbleDook linked, but that same group also provided the School's Printed Music Licence, so it's unclear if the DfE are referring to both - the SPML was already provided centrally, so I would hope the mention of CCLI again means both are now covered. Not that we sing hymns here, anyway, so doesn't matter to me

Looks like I've got to break a 4 year old habit now, then...

Is the Z3 on Lollipop? I can't remember the setting exactly - my Lollipop Nexus 4 is at home, and I only have my KitKat O+O on me right now - but you can set notifications to Private, which should then show you, on the lock screen, what apps have a notification, but no other details. I don't know if there's a way of it showing you who is messaging you without also showing what they're messaging you, though.

Settings > Display & lights > Notification Light > click the + button and start adding apps, then choose your colour, length & speed of repetition. Having problems with battery life at the moment because of the Google Services bug - it's showing as something like 30% of my battery use, far and away the biggest drain. I've tried blocking Google Play Services from Keep Awake and Wake Up using Privacy Guard, but overnight my phone only charged to 54% so obviously it hasn't fixed it yet. Need to try Gservicefix but that requires my battery to be at 100%

This is the saddest thing - they really are all but indistinguishable these days. DRIP was depressing on a number of counts, but most particularly the way all three party leaders agreed beforehand and behind closed doors to support it and whip their parties. Where was the debate? Where was the party standing up for our rights? What is the point in having all this fuss if they all just agree with each other anyway?

Neither do UKIP The only reason UKIP are such a big story is that - fair play to him - Nigel Farage is very good at playing the media game, setting himself up as "Nige down the local with his pint of mild". The Greens have higher membership numbers and actually have an MP in Westminster right now, so are arguably much more relevant than UKIP. The problem is they're nowhere near cynical and manipulative enough with the media; their own naivety in believing that if only they're good enough and their policies strike the right chord, they'll be OK, is what undoes them. Realistically neither is going to get many seats, if any, thanks to the FPTP system. I think last election the Tories averaged 20,000 votes per seat won, Labour 25,000 and Lib Dem about 90,000, because the first two have concentrated areas of popularity whereas the Lib Dems were sort of popular everywhere, but never enough so in any one seat to get the MP in under First Past the Post. UKIP & Greens will suffer the same problem, but exacerbated by everyone's tendency to be quite reserved in their voting when it comes to general elections. People who will happily vote for a fringe candidate as MEP or councillor will hew much closer to the big three when it comes to the general election, and I think Farage may be disappointed with how little he comes out with. None of which is said to change your mind, btw - if you agree with their policies, you go and vote for them, that's what democracy is. Most people never even look at policies. All I'm pointing out is that your reasoning for not voting Green applies just as much to UKIP, so don't pick based on that. Plus, of course, if everyone always thinks "I'll only vote for someone with a chance of winning", we favour the incumbents and we'll never get any real change. People should stick to their guns, odds be damned; it'd probably be surprising who'd get in if we did. Oh, for AV to have come in.

Yeah, I almost regret having to have the case on it because the Sandstone Black back is so lovely! I am really liking it so far, was regretting it a bit at first and worrying that it wasn't enough of an upgrade, that I hadn't needed to spend the money... but having spent most of yesterday on it, going back to the N4 does feel like a real backward step. I am happy Spending absolutely ages tweaking everything. Got my coloured LED notifications set up, still working on getting the brightness levels tweaked to how I like (I prefer my phone a bit dimmer than default so it's easier going on my eyes and the battery). Just about got my widgets sorted - Nova Launcher is a good 'un, and settled on DigiCal as a calendar widget. The biggest problem now is choosing which game soundtracks I should download from Video Game Music at Galbadia Hotel for ringtones EDIT: oh, and my signal on the EE network through BT is much, much better than it ever was on o2. The BT app (for usage etc.) is surprisingly good as well - figures are accurate as of a minute ago, near as damn be real-time, and match what Android itself is telling me.

Well I reckon I'll have plenty of competition; their site is broken with HTTP 509, Bandwidth Exceeded

You can cut overnight battery drain massively by putting airplane mode on. My number isn't switching over till tomorrow, so I've spent all day today setting up the 5.5" O+O and going back to the 4.7" Nexus4 to text the missus (who is still talking to me ). Every time I pick it up now it feels like a child's phone, despite being plenty big enough - I remember it seeming enormous two years ago. God alone knows how you feel coming from an iPhone @Gardinho, what model did you have before? Though even the 5s was only 4" so the O+O must just be massive to you. I'm stopping now before I let any accidental euphemisms slip.

Letting Vodafone off an enormous tax bill was a bad looking disaster of their own making though, no? My problem is that the Tories seem to believe privatisation is the answer to everything. The free market is their hammer that makes every problem look like a nail. The converse to your point is that the rail system hasn't actually got any better, has it? It's not achieved anything the privatisation was promised to. Royal Mail was suspiciously underpriced as well. My main point, though, is that privatisation cannot possibly be the best solution when the best outcome of a service is not profit. You can't quantitatively measure education or health, despite the best efforts of the last two decades, so how can you possibly use a private enterprise approach that relies on profit to measure success? Don't think I'm advocating out-and-out inefficiency when I say this, but the efficiency-above-all-else quest does a disservice to patients and students alike. If you want to maximise your resources, slash your staffing in half - that way, everyone is busy all the time and you're maximally efficient! But health and education are both better served by having some inherent inefficiencies. It's probably not efficient to have a primary school of only 100 kids, but to those 100 kids in that village it's everything, and much better than getting on a bus every morning at five years old for a half hour trip to the nearest town. Already in Lincolnshire we're losing primary schools that were only tenable under the LEA model, wherein they were propped up by the efficiency of larger town schools. Now everyone has gone to an academy - and in Lincolnshire, it's really been pushed - those small primaries are having to close, because by themselves they're not sustainable. Have we got a better provision because of academies? Not at all. It's been a net loss for the county, I'd argue, as top heavy as the old LEA could be.

Or, from another perspective: The Tories get in and slash public spending so they can spend it on white elephant projects (HS2) or cut taxes for their friends, privatising as they go (Royal Mail, trying to do it with the NHS), all but destroying public services in the process - the NHS had an awful winter this last year, and I've never seen teaching staff so stressed and vacancies so under-applied for. Labour get in and have to overspend to fix things quickly, meaning they have to make the unpopular choice of raising taxes to do so. The Tories get back into power and slash and burn all over again GOTO 10 Point being, and I reckon we can all agree on this, everyone is only ever concerned with what they can achieve short term, making a name for themselves in whatever cabinet position they're in, and blaming the last lot/undoing what they did due to ideological differences. We end up going round in circles and wasting time, effort and money all the way, all at the expense of lives lost and educations under-served while we go through the paroxysms of change. The entire political class seems - from my lowly perspective down here - to have lost sight of what they're actually there for.

See, I like my widgets (stop sniggering). I have home & work email inboxes, calendar, weather, news & Flipboard widgets, then various app shortcuts dotted around them. I like being able to glance at information without going into an app. This is why I like Android. We can all set it up in precisely the way we like it. This is like having to set Firefox up again after a fresh install*, except ten times more work. *because I always, always forget to back up my profile first. You'd think I'd learn.

You lot are angels. I'm almost ready to forgive you for leading me down this path of temptation, like silicon sirens, luring me onto rocks made of old discarded CRT monitors, beige towers and other discarded tech. There's a story idea in there.

Ok, Nova Launcher is good. Just need to get used to my home screen being in the middle again, not on the left as in Google Now. It's a bit weird about widget resizing, even if I disable its override control - the BBC News widget, for example, just keeps zooming in, instead of showing two stories side by side (as I had it on my N4), but I'll work it out. Tell you what, though, just compared a photo side by side on my N4 and O+O, and the colour accuracy on the O+O is fantastic. The N4 is green and lacking in contrast; skin tones on the O+O are much, much better.

IrfanView has been my quick 'n' easy tool of choice for well over a decade now. Set Photoshop as an external editor and you can open the current image in Photoshop with a single key press (Ctrl+E) for when you want to do something a bit more serious to a file.

I'm gonna leave that typo up there, much more entertaining that way More info @ Protest votes count and elsewhere on that site. If everyone who didn't turn up instead spoilt their ballot, we'd all know that a full third of the country doesn't want any of the muppets we have at the moment, and maybe - just maybe - that'd be a wake up call to someone to do something different. Probably not, mind. If politicians have a defining characteristic, it's how remarkably sound proof their own rear passages are once their heads are stuffed up there. Apparently the head-stuffing is part of the initiation into the Bullingdon Club.

Spoiled ballots are counted and reported as a percentage of the vote, so is acknowledged as a protest vote - that is, you actually bothered to turn up to the voting station, rather than apathetically sitting on your backside and watching Netlix instead.

Ah, fair enough I never make polls so I didn't know about the cap. Thanks for the edit - though I still can't vote as I still don't know!

Thanks, but... still no Monster Raving Looney party (as said, I'm considering it as a protest vote) or Spoil My Ballot option. The former could well fall under Other, I suppose, but the latter seems an important option in these days of drudgery and all-but-identical policies & politicians.

You mean if my wife, who is a teaching assistant, wants a job as a teaching assistant? Yes please!

Yeah, scrap HS2 and HS3 and spend all that money on a massive nationwide roll out of FTTH. Would be cheaper, would be a massive boost to our economy both in terms of the work (like motorway-building projects used to be) and in terms of positioning us for the future, and would completely undermine the need for a stupidly expensive rail network built on the premise of getting businessmen to meetings quicker.

Huh, so it does. They were all hidden out the way, had to swipe up on the settings so hadn't spotted them yet. Cheers! Will see how I get on with Trebuchet (and how much I miss saying "Ok Google"), and if it doesn't work for me I might have to look at Nova. It's worth a few quid on apps to get it working right.

Reckon I'm dusting my CV off then: