Last month, I picked up a Proviz Nightrider cycling jacket after reading the review by Orange Brompton. I thought I’d write a few words on it, now that I’ve had it for a while. In Short In short, it’s good, but I’m not sure I’d go as far as Orange and say it’s the best cycling jacket ever. It’s a very good jacket, but I’m sure there are some on the market that are better.

Shoes don’t seem like an interesting blog post - however, I sometimes think I’m guilty of being the wrong sex, as I seem to have a few shopping habits that the fairer sex are often stereotypically attributed with - that is, I have a thing for good bags. However, shoes (the other vice women are usually labelled with!) are not something I usually get excited about. However, this is potentially due to the fact that I could never find a good pair - I would settle for a cheap £20 pair of Airwalk’s from Sports Direct as I seem to destroy shoes (the soles would wear through within a month or two).

So it’s been a while since I’ve written here, but things have changed a bit since I’ve been away. For a start, I’ve moved - things finally worked out and my house purchase went through! That means that for a while, I’ve been getting sorted in my new flat with everything that comes with buying your own house. On the plus side, I have a nice new location for the Bromptons!

I’ve covered before my use of Launch Centre Pro (LCP) to easily create a book log in Day One, by using the URL links within iOS and setting up the same in Keyboard Maestro so I can make life easier wherever I am. However, I’ve recently created another action that I felt was worth sharing - one for logging telephone calls. Logging Calls Normally, I wouldn’t log my calls, however, I’ve had to make a number of calls to companies for whatever reason - today, it’s been because money hasn’t been taken from my account for insurance and I wanted to see what the issue was - and more importantly, ensure that there were no fees to pay and that my policy was still in place (it happens that as it was there mistake, my policy is fine).

I’ve spoken before on my use of LaTeX for my thesis. This allowed me to create a great looking thesis, with easy linking, cross referencing and bibliography that users of Microsoft Word struggle with! As plain text, this allowed me to edit my files on the Mac, Windows and iPad with ease - in fact, I write about my attempts to use the iPad only here, which includes me editing my thesis on the go on the iPad.

So this weekend has been the Ride London cycling festival. For those that don’t know, the Ride London festival is a two day cycling festival with the Saturday seeing many of London’s roads closed to allow people to cycle traffic free along parts of London that would usually be full of cars. The Sunday sees the traffic free roads extend down into Dorking and Surrey to allow riders to cycle a 100 mile route with no traffic.

I finally managed to get the second long ride I’d been meaning to do since moving to London done this weekend - London to Brighton. The Brompton club planned and rode this ride a few weeks ago, but I wasn’t able to make it, due to a last minute change of plans and trip to Dorset instead. However, a group of work colleagues wanted to do a London to Brighton ride, so using the course that the Brompton guys had already ridden, I volunteered as ride leader.

So today I ended up doing another Cambridge ride - I’ve pencilled this route in for a London Brompton Club ride in September so I thought I’d give it another run through to ensure that I know where I’m going and to make sure the route is fine. No pictures from the ride - I think I’m becoming guilty of jumping on the bike and just going again, it seems like I need to do a few more social rides to exorcise that from the system!

I’ve recently discovered Launch Center Pro for iOS that lets you create actions and generally extends the abilities of iOS a bit (basically allowing you to create shortcuts to tasks you do often). There’s a number of things I do on the iPhone or iPad consistently, so being able to do these from a single app can make it shorter to do. It’s a one stop shop for accessing stuff. For example, I’ve set up a shortcut so I can message both my mum and dad at the same time, without having to open Messages, select new message (or find a previous message I’ve sent to them both) and add them both to the message and then compose.

Everything seems to use the cloud today and whilst I was initially happy worth that, things such as PRISM and the Snowden releases have left me feeling a bit more lost at sea perhaps. I love the cloud, it makes accessing my own files etc a lot easier, but I also want to be in more control of my data. I also don’t want to end up paying for drive space if I can help it and I seem to be increasing my file usages fairly considerably.