Tagged: musings

Android Kindle Fire tablets need the following hypthothetical app: 1. Use the app’s file manager to select a folder of video files. 2. Automatically make a new playlist of all files in that folder. 3. Then apply a best-guess intelligent re-sorting of the playlist order, if file naming is not strictly 001-100. 4. Allow the user to make final adjustments in the playing order, by manual selection of files and moving them via hold-drag. 5. Save the resulting playlist in the folder, in the playlist format for any chosen video player. Why is this needed? Because no video player I can find has this relatively simple and useful feature. Not even…

I’m loosing count of the number of times I’ve abandoned an Amazon shopping cart for a used paper book, because the Amazon Checkout is trying to trick me into a “we’ve added a 30-day trial of Prime” that I don’t want. I’ve fallen for it once, and don’t want find Amazon attached limpet-like to my credit card again. I’d rather abandon the purchase that risk that happening again, and go to eBay or elsewhere. Amazon, please add a tick-box to the user Preferences labelled: “I have no interested whatsoever in Prime — never tell me about it, anywhere”.

British Comics blog today distils part of the D.C. Thomson formula at Mandy, once an enormously popular pre-80s weekly comic, read by nearly all British girls in middle-childhood and produced by a firm that knew exactly what their audiences wanted (rather than what it was politically correct to give them). This seems rather useful market knowledge for writers of books and comics, as such basic psychology don’t change much at its core and this audience is today a prime demographic. Especially so as in the UK we have the ‘new baby boom’ moving into this …