Mobile Phone Review: HTC One V

A little while ago I bought myself a new Phone, the HTC One V.

HTC One V

The One V is the baby of the One range and I've made the move to this phone from the Nokia C7.  Those of you familiar with the C7 will know it runs the Symbian OS and applications are only available through Nokia's OVI store.  I can say this now, as it can't hurt me any more (thank you envirofone), but the C7 was the phone from Hell.  It was slow, clunky and finding any decent applications was like trying to find an honest man in a room full of politicians, estate agents and used car salesmen.

You think your budget deficit was big!  Look at one I made!

So what a delight the HTC One V is in comparison.  It runs Android, currently the Ice Cream Sandwich version if I'm not mistaken, and Android has the mighty Google Play store to choose from a vast array of apps, many of which are indeed useful.

The phone itself is a slick affair, with a metal casing and a screen with a 9.5cm (3.75") viewable area.  In use, the screen changes are fast and I haven't seen it struggle with anything yet.

Robot Devil

Storage wise, it's the only One series phone that has an SD card slot (microSD) for expanding the storage, which was one of the attractions for me.

There are some downsides I've experienced so far, the first is an issue with the SD card in that sometimes the phone thinks the card has been removed (when it clearly hasn't) and that stops certain apps from working (especially ones that are on the SD card or rely on it).  Fortunately, turning the phone off and on again fixes that, but it can be annoying if it happens frequently.

Nokia C7 "Smart" phone

I also came across an annoyance in the calendar function, in that it doesn't do calendar repeats over a fortnight (that's once every 2 weeks for those not familiar with the term).  This is annoying because my bins get collected on alternate weeks and I used to use a fortnightly reminder to remember which bin to leave out.  Now I have to use a weekly one and try and remember what I did last week, which makes me grumpy.

Also, when I get emails and leave the notification sound on, it just beeps at me every few minutes to remind me (and repeats those beeps every few mins ad-infinitum), so I've had to turn the sound off.  It doesn't do it with texts, so why with emails? It's not as if the world will implode if I don't read a new email within 2 minutes of its arrival!

Dave, you've got mail Dave.  You really should look at your mail Dave. I know I've made some very poor decisions recently, but I can give you my complete assurance that my work will be back to normal. I've still got the greatest enthusiasm and confidence in the mission. And I want to help you.  P.S. You've got mail Dave. 

Other than that, a fine phone.  It has a half decent camera, can shoot 720p video (though no forward facing camera for Skype etc) and does what I want it to do, well almost.

A sound 7 out of 10.

P.S. You've got mail.

Recipe for 20 per cent Spelt Loaf

Ok, so here's the actual recipe for the loaf I mentioned in my last post:

Timings

Initial Prep time: 40 mins
Fermenting time: Overnight
Proving time: 1 hour
Final shaping time: 5 minutes
Cooking time: 37 minutes + 5 mins cooldown
Resting time: 45 minutes
Eating time: Not a lot.

Ingredients (makes 2 loaves)

136g Spelt Flour
544g Strong White Bread Flour
2 1/4 Teaspoons of Dried Instant Yeast (not the stuff you have to activate)
1 Tablespoon of Sea Salt (the big grainy stuff - not table salt unless you want a heart attack)
500g Lukewarm Water (yes, weight it).

Method
Mix the flour, spelt flour, yeast and salt in a bowl. Add the water.  If you're fortunate enough to own a Kenwood Chef or similar, mix it with that using the K-beater (not the dough hook) for a minute or so.  If not, then use a spoon and mix the old fashioned way.

Leave for 5 mins to let the water mix in with the flour.

Turn out to a floured work surface.

Use the "stretch and fold" technique that Peter Reinhart talks about here.
For this dough, you can use flour on the work surface, like I do, rather than oil.  Try oil if you like though!

 Stretch and fold from from one side, rotate 90 degrees, repeat until you gone round the whole 360 degrees. Leave for 5-10 mins, repeat the process.  Do this for a total of 4 times, more or less.

Split into 2 portions and put your dough into well oiled bowls (spray oil works well for this). 

Leave overnight in the fridge (or for up to 4 days).

When you want to bake it, you need to be careful. Get your bowl out of the fridge.  Flour the work surface.  Turn out the dough on to the work surface.  It'll slop out.  Grab each "corner" and bring it to the centre.  Flip over the dough and pull the outside of the dough slightly taught towards the centre of the underside.  Be careful not to be too aggressive, you want to keep the air pockets in the dough.

Carefully move the dough on top of a piece of baking parchment and slide a peel (or a chopping board will do) underneath that.  Stick your bowl over the top and leave it to prove for an hour.  This dough will tend to slop out sideways rather than up, so it's a good idea to try and contain it.  Using a couche or just 2 rolling pins round the side of it (under some baking paper) should do it.

When ready to bake, make sure your oven is hot, and you have a hot baking sheet/stone in there, and a hot pan in the bottom.  I set my starting temp at 210 degrees centigrade with my fan oven.  My oven is quite lethal, so you may need a little bit of a higher temperature, it's very oven specific.

Boil a small jug of water (half a litre or so)

Pour the water into the hot pan at the bottom of the oven to create your steam bath.
Carefully slide your bread dough and baking parchment onto your baking tray in the oven.

Shut the door and wait for 12 mins.

After 12 mins, turn the loaf around, shut the door and reduce the temp to 180 degrees.  Bake for 25 minutes.  Turn the oven off, and leave the bread there for 5 minutes.

Take it out and cool it on a rack for 45 minutes or so.

Eat.

You should get a crumb with big holes in it, and a fairly crispy crust.  I get a lot of separation from my crust and the crumb as well.

Give it a go and see.

You can also just use all white flour if you fancy it (that was the original recipe anyway) - that's 680g in total to save you the trouble.

Bread

Bready, Steady.... GO!
A while ago, I found myself randomly flicking through TED videos, and came across Peter Reinhart talking about bread.

I've been trying, on and off, to make decent bread (mostly through the medium of the pizza base) since 1999, and never seemed to be able to figure it out. I always ended up with dense inedible lumps.  Peter's little talk made me go and buy one of his books, Artisan Breads Everyday.

I found this book very useful. It make me understand much more about what actually happens when you knead bread, when you prove it; basically the whole process.

I've since tried a few of his recipes, and I think I've made some pretty good bread as a result.

These days, I make at least a loaf a week, sometimes more, and it really doesn't take that much effort (using his overnight fridge fermentation method), and I haven't had to buy any fancy utensils or whatnot to get some great outcomes.

My latest bread takes his basic French bread, and just adds 20% Spelt flour to the mix and I've found that is makes a bread with a bit more flavour than the standard plain white stuff.

I'd encourage anyone who likes good bread to give it a go.

The Leap to Linux

Death of a Laptop?
Thanks to a recent birthday, I have inherited my wife's old laptop.  It was the black sheep of my computer family, as it had the much hated Windows Vista operating system pre-installed on it when it was new 4 years ago.  After all those years of use, with no refreshing, the poor laptop had ground to a halt.  Even using the web browser seemed to drag it down like a pack of wolves attacking a bison; except there was no film crew on hand and Sir David Attenborough wasn't narrating.

So, what to do? Chuck it in the bin?  Dust off the backup disk and re-install Vista?  Well, no.  For a while now, I'm been dabbling with Linux every once in a while, so I thought that it was time to bite the bullet and see if I could live with using Linux on a more or less every day basis and give an old laptop a new lease of life.

Choices Choices...

Horny Heffalump?

But, which distribution to use?  There are quite a few to choose from to say the least.  The most popular choice these days seems to be Ubuntu in one of its many flavours, mostly because of its famed ease of use for first timers.  I've tried using it a few times, but to be honest, the default colour scheme just annoyed me. It was brown.  I gather these days it's some kind of purple, which is more appealing, but once bitten twice shy, so, what about something else?  

Minty Fresh!

Well, I settled for something that is based on Ubuntu (so should suit my ham fisted approach), but has a much nicer colour scheme.  LinuxMint 12 (http://www.linuxmint.com/).  This particular version also has a nice name, Lisa, which is much easier to remember than "Horny Heffalump" or "Kinky Kylie" or whatever Ubuntu releases are called these days.

Installation
Fairly simple really. Download a disc, burn it, shove it in the DVD drive and reboot the machine.  It loads the live CD version of Mint and then you just click on "install" to install it.  Ok, so you have to follow some prompts like telling it what keyboard you have, and what you want to do with your hard drive, but it's not that difficult.  All in all, a pretty easy experience, if anything, easier than installing Windows 7 from scratch (and I've had to do that a few times).

First Impressions?
Well, first it uses GNOME3 as it's user interface.  There's a lot of controversy out there in Linux Land about this one.  The power users tend to agree that they don't particularly like the switch from GNOME2, and there are many and varied posts saying how to undo it and make things like they were in the good old days.  To be honest, I'm not much of a power user, and to me, it looks fairly pretty and well organised.  You can search your programs to find the one you want, or just use the "start menu".

Oooh err, that's different from Windows!

The one criticism I would level at this interface is the lack of ability to right click on a program and add it to the desktop.  I love this feature in Windows and older versions of Linux I have seen.  I like to clutter my desktop with shortcuts, and I'm pretty miffed that it won't let me do it.  Ok, sure, I can find a way around it using command line to create a shortcut, but your average user might find this a bit tricky, and I'm not the greatest fan of the CLI, I like my GUIs.

At least you can add your "favourite" programs to the favourites bar on the start menu, but it just doesn't feel the same somehow.

Installing stuff is a doddle!

Aside from this gripe, the rest of it looks pretty good.  The package manager makes installing new programs a real doddle, and the system runs pretty quickly compared to the years old clunky Vista machine it was until recently.  A look at the system monitor tells me the laptop is barely breaking a sweat, which is nice.

Should I Stay or Should I Go?
So will I keep this up. Well, yes, I think I like this setup and I'll use it for a while to see if I can get used to Linux on a more regular basis.  I've already got my podcasts and radio stations set up using Rythmbox, and I can use Firefox or Chrome just like I do on Windows.  Let's wait and see how this plays out.