662 – How to make the perfect martini

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Here’s a bonus Tip, akin to the Sweary Broccoli Soup one from last month. Since many of us will be taking time off in the next week, and activities may involve a modicum of adult beverages, what better time that to share some finely practiced tips in making the (IMHO) perfect martini?

The timeless cocktail which comes in many variants, is distinct from the Italian fortified wine, Martini – it’s thought that the barman who first gave the “martini” its name did so as a variant of “Martinez”. So it’s martini with a small “m”. Aficionados would probably choose a more premium vermouth as well…

This is a long post so pucker up and, of course, drink responsively. This is all a matter of opinion and exhaustive research – there are no product affiliations and recommendations are based on preference and plenty of practice.

Classic gin|voka martini | Vesper martini | Espresso martini

Get yourself tooled-up

First off, you need to select the right glassware. The classic V-shaped glass is worth investing in if you think you want to make a habit of martini drinking; if not, a champagne coupe or even a decent-sized wine glass will do.

Since the ideal martini is served very cold, you’re generally going to need something to stir or shake over ice, so a cocktail shaker would make sense. If you don’t have one, Amazon et al have plenty of starter kits that will include a long spoon and even a measuring cup (or “jigger”).

If you just can’t wait to get started, a jug full of ice and a device like an espresso cup or even an egg cup will do. Proportions are important in mixology, and if you’re not an accomplished free-pourer, you’ll need something that can be used to dole out 25ml/50ml shots or whatever size takes your fancy – 1oz in the US is just under 30ml so a little stronger than a UK single measure of 25ml.

Before you start mixing, put your glasses in the freezer and get any garnishes – like olives, or fruit peel – ready. You’ll want to do the stirring/shaking, pour straight in the glass, drop garnish in and then directly to the hands of the eagerly awaiting recipients.

The classic martini

clip_image004Gaining prominence in the 1920s, the original gin martini mixed a good quality gin with vermouth, at a ratio of 2:1, with olives or a twist of lemon peel for garnish.

Good quality” is an easy test – if you pour a little of the gin in a shot glass and take a slurp, does it make you wince and your cheeks pucker? Even though many gins are fine with a splash of tonic water, a gin martini made with 100ml Gordon’s and 50ml Cinzano Bianco isn’t going to set the place on fire. Most definitely stay away from any flavoured gins.

Start with Berry Bros No 3, Tanqueray No Ten, Warner’s London Gin or pretty much any of the millions of craft gins which pass the quality test above. If you fancy yourself as 007, substitute the gin with a quality vodka instead – same test of neat-drinkability applies – such as Grey Goose, Belvedere or anything of unflavoured quality. Smirnoff Red or supermarket own-label paint stripper? Probably not so much.

Vermouth is very much a matter of taste, but you probably don’t want anything that’s too sickly sweet and if you’ve gone to the effort of getting a nice gin, you won’t want to overpower it with cheaper fortified wine. Suggestions include Noilly Prat or Dolin Dry.

Proportions matter. Asking for a “dry” martini basically means less of the vermouth. If the 1920’s drink had 2:1 ratio of gin/vermouth, succeeding decades saw that rise to a more contemporary 3 or 4:1. Vary to your taste and endurance.

Ernest Hemmingway used to favour a 15:1 mix which he called a “Montgomery”, as it was said to be the preferred tipple of Field Marshall Montgomery before heading into battle. It’s amazing he could even see the front line.

“A perfect Martini should be made by filling a glass with gin, then waving it in the general direction of Italy” –

Noël Coward

Mr Bridger would wave his glass to the Italian Martini vermouth factory, while Churchill would supposedly take a glass of ice-cold gin and bow towards France (and Noilly Prat). President Lyndon Johnson prepared an “in & out” martini where he would pour a glass of vermouth, then throw it away and replace it with gin.

As for garnish; some would say a shave of lemon peel is the ideal accompaniment, but for many it’s the green olive that should go in a classic martini, as the saltiness of olives go well with the cold, strong booze.

Take a single or three olives – never an even number. Being served a 2-olive martini in mafiosi days was a signal from the barman that someone in the joint was going to harm you. A “dirty martini” has a sploosh of the brine that the olives come in, and it makes the drink cloudy and salty, if that’s what you like.

The technique. Fill your cocktail shaker/mixing glass/jug with ice cubes, pour the gin & vermouth over the ice and stirfor 30 secs. Pour into your frozen glasses, add the garnish of peel or a cocktail stick of olives and you’re done. A dry martini is actually quite low-calorie so don’t feel too guilty.

If you want to go no-alcohol, try Blutul alcohol-free vermouth, possibly mixed with one of the numerous zero-alcohol distilled spirits, like Tanqueray Zero. Or save a fortune and just drink elderflower cocktail in a chilled glass.

The whole Bond “shaken, not stirred” thing came from Ian Fleming’s belief that shaking vodka “bruised” it for a more intense flavour, so it was passed on to Bond. In truth, shaking over ice is only going to cloud the drink somewhat, and will cause shards of ice to be poured into the glass, melting and diluting the drink more quickly. That’s fine if you like you’re drinking Montgomeries, but not desirable for most. The best martini bars won’t even use ice – they’ll store their drinks in the freezer and pour straight from the frozen bottle.

The Vesper

A test of how good a bartender is: ask them to make a Vesper martini even if it’s not on the menu. If they don’t ask you questions about how you’d like it, prepare for disappointment. The ideal Vesper should be ice cold, very strong and is slightly sweeter than a classic martini.

The Vesper (named after the femme fatale, Vesper Lynd) was invented by Ian Fleming supposedly as he took breaks from writing, at the bar of the Dukes Hotel in London. Whether this is a misty-eyed memory or a marketing moment doesn’t matter – Dukes makes arguably the best Vesper in the world; it should be at £25 a pop, but you only need one.

“When I’m, er, concentrating… I never have more than one drink before dinner. But I do like that one to be large and very strong and very cold and very well-made”. – James Bond (Casino Royale)

In Fleming’s Casino Royale book, Bond invents the Vesper asking for 3 measures of Gordons, one of vodka and half a measure of Kina Lillet. It was revisited in the Daniel Craig film. Nowadays, you’d use a higher quality gin (see above – Dukes use Berry Bros No 3), and since Kina Lillet was an old quinine-laced form of aperitif, you’ll need to try a different mixer (Dukes makes their own blend).

Lillet is a brand of fortified Bordeaux which is available fairly widely over the counter or via mailclip_image006. Keep a bottle of Lillet Blanc in the fridge if you like your Vespers. A few drops of Angostura bitters added to Lillet Blanc apparently brings it closer to what Kina Lillet was like with a little more astringency to offset the sweetness.

Many recipes will have a twist of lemon in their Vesper, but to be a little different, Dukes favours a slice of orange for the stronger smell of the orange citrus oil.

If you’re not adept at carving hunks of skin from lemons or oranges (and potentially wasting the rest of the fruit), try taking a clementine/satsuma and slicing it thinly into circles (3-4mm thick) with a serrated bread knife (yes, a bread knife – who’d have thought it?)

Take one of the innermost circles and nick the skin in one place so you can open it out into a straight thin line and peel the flesh of the fruit away. Now take a chopstick or a drinking straw and wind the thin slice of peel into a tight corkscrew and drop it into the glass that’s currently waiting in the freezer.

The measures for a tip-top Vesper are the same as in the Bond recipe – 3 measures of gin, one of vodka (both selected as per the classic martini above), ½ a measure of Lillet Blanc and a few drops of Angostura. Stir with ice in the cocktail shaker for 30 secs, pour and enjoy.

Espresso martini

Much less boozy than the straight up drinks above, and a favourite of the cheaper cocktail bar who likes to feature syrupy sweet stuff that can be advance prepared in bulk. A proper espresso martini is a joyous and unctuous thing.

clip_image008You will need access to good coffee – ideally from an espresso machine, or Nespresso if that’s what you have. At a pinch, you could substitute strong, quality drip, cafetière or even instant coffee.

If you don’t have a kitchen worktop festooned with coffee making gear, go and buy some espresso beans for garnish and to help make your own liqueur.

The spirit of choice is vodka, and since you’ll be adding sweet and bitter additions to it in equal measure, you don’t need to worry too much about the provenance – Smirnoff et al will do nicely. You could tequila instead.

Apart from the coffee itself, the other key ingredient is a coffee liqueur – you could use something like Kahlua, though that is a little too sweet for some. Mr Black Cold Brew is a top alternative, though not inexpensive. If you have time on your side, it’s easy to make your own.

DIY Coffee liqueur

  • Put 500ml of water in a pan with 300g of regular granulated sugar, cook on medium heat while stirring until all the sugar has dissolved. Take off the heat.
  • Take 75g of espresso beans and lightly crush them in a Ziploc/freezer bag, with a rolling pin.
  • Add the crushed espresso beans to the water/sugar mix, along with 500ml of vodka (own-brand stuff is OK though mainstream label might be better), and 1tsp of vanilla essence. Set aside to cool.
  • Once cool, pour into a Kilner Jar or similar airtight container for 3 weeks (give it a swirl every few days), then strain it into a bottle though a coffee filter or kitchen paper etc. In truth, you could dip in after a week or so, but the longer you leave it, the better it gets.

For the price of a half a litre of cheap-ish vodka, some sugar and some coffee, you’ve just made 1L of good stuff that will last for ages in a dark cupboard. Depending on how frequently you partake of espresso martinis, obvs.

When you’re ready to make your pièce de résistance, put the glasses in the freezer and look out 3 coffee beans for each. To make 2 drinks, fill your cocktail shaker with ice and pour in one large measure (the size of an espresso cup, i.e. 2oz / 60ml) of vodka, and the same again of your coffee liqueur. Make espresso coffee into one or two regular sized espresso cups (again, 2oz/60ml) and pour one of them – still fresh and hot – into the shaker.

Put the lid on, give it a vigorous shake for 20-30 seconds. The mix of sweet liqueur, hot coffee and cold ice will froth the mix up and give it a velvety texture, while also creating a lovely crema to top off the pour. If you don’t have a shaker, try a plastic jug half filled with ice; something that you could give a really good strong stir and not worry about smashing the jug…

Dispense into the waiting glasses and top with the coffee beans on each. Drink the other cup of espresso as a chaser, or maybe leave it to the side in case you fancy a refill?

Have a great holiday season, everyone. See you in the New Year!

658 – Sweary 3-ingredient soup

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Since many US colleagues are recovering from an eating & drinking stupor having recently given thanks, this week marks a departure from the usual Tip o’ the Week recipe. Instead of tech tidbits or productivity morsels, we’re making a delicious yet fairly healthy staple in only a few minutes, courtesy of sweary Chef Ramsay.

Yes, readers, fresh soup in less than 10 minutes and with only 3 ingredients – broccoli, water and salt.

It’s not uncommon for soup recipes to start with sweating onions or shallots in butter and garlic, adding herbs, chicken stock etc. But not this – it’s vegan and keto-friendly, and is best if you make it right before eating. Adding creamy cheese to the bowl before serving will give it a nice rich finish (though may compromise the vegan-ness).

The key thing about this soup is that the broccoli is cooked in water with the lid on, and the water is saved and used like stock to liquidize it into a smooth and light soup. It’s important to blend it while still steaming hot, and that means it can be served straight from liquidizer to bowls (though it can be re-heated, frozen etc, if necessary).

clip_image004clip_image006Start with one or two heads of broccoli, the fresher and darker green the better – about 300g in weight before trimming would make enough for 2 or 3 portions (or 4 if you were doing a light starter).

Hold by the stalk and run a sharp knife around the tips to cut off the florets (you can keep the stalks for vegetable stock, or add to a stir fry etc, but in this case we’re just using the darker florets).

Add water to a decent-sized pan with a close-fitting lid – about 1.5-2x as much water as the weight of the broccoli florets. In this example, we started with 300g, which gave 230g of florets, and added 450ml of water. Or 2/3lb of broccoli, yielding about 1/2lb of florets, cooked in a little under a pint of water, if you prefer those measures.

If you’re in a country which still measures mass by fractions of a hundredweight, you might not realize that a litre of water (=1000ml) at room temperature weighs a kilogram, so 1g = 1ml. It’s often easier to weigh water with digital scales than to try to use a volume measuring jug.

Add a good few scrunches of sea salt toclip_image008 the pan, put the lid on and bring the water to the boil. Once boiling, drop the broccoli in and toss it around in the water. Add a little more salt on top and replace the lid.

clip_image010Boil for around 4 minutes, to the point where the knife could cut through the broccoli with no resistance (ie if the knife goes easily through a floret to hit the side of the pan, it’s ready).

Spoon the broccoli into a liquidizer jug and pour the remaining water in – experience will tell you how much is needed (the water will be below the level of the florets in the liquidizer). Season with a final scrunch of salt and black pepper.

Pulse the liquidizer a few times, then start slowly and then give it a 30-60secs on full blast, until you can see the soup is smooth and velvety. You can always add a little more hot water gradually during the blend, if you think it’s too thick (at full speed, look in the top of the jug and you should see a swirling vortex – if it’s just blobbing up and down, it’ll be more like puree than soup so add some more – ideally recently-boiled – hot water).

clip_image012Gordon suggests pairing with some walnut halves and some ash-rolled goats cheese; in this example, it’s Montagnolo Affine, a creamy blue cheese which melts a little into the hot soup and gives it an extra lift.

clip_image014Serve by pouring on one side of the bowl and let the soup flow around. If you’ve seasoned it lightly but often throughout the cooking process, it won’t need anything else on top, other than some froufrou garnish if you like. Enjoy.


Normal service of talking about Excel pivot tables and other rubbish resumes next week. Happy Thanksgiving to those who celebrate it.

531 – Spice up your video conferences

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The New Normal™ will be all about avoiding people and using technology to supplement and even replace behaviours in ways we’d never have expected before The Event.

Video conferencing has been used in tech circles for years, though it was foretold many years earlier. 1989’s Back to the Future II showed one vision of how the future might look, and it wasn’t the only wry prediction.

Now that you’ve frouffed-up your home office backdrop and maybe thought about how you look on video calls, even going for a custom background image, maybe it’s time to mix things up and jazz up your video feed itself.

clip_image004One approach could be to play with Snap Camera, a PC or Mac software solution from SnapChat that takes the feed from your regular camera and applies some effects to it, before presenting that modified stream as a virtual hardware camera to any app that wants it.

clip_image006If you install Snap Camera, you can then use a catalog of “lenses” to add attributes to your video, or to alter the lighting or background, even if your chosen video conferencing app doesn’t give the option of doing so natively.

Roots or dodgy haircut starting to show in the lockdown? Perhaps try a nice tint?

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Want to practice online before going out to the shops? Maybe choose a groovy mask?

Whatever your choice, if you install Snap Camera and choose (or even create) a suitable lens, then the software will run in the background and if you choose the “camera” from your video conferencing app, then the software will augment the feed from your real camera and present that image to your chosen software.

So for Teams, if you want to prank your colleagues, you can set up the lens of choice using that software, then when you go to join a meeting, clip_image010click the “PC, Mic and Speakers” settings cog, to get the Device Settings pane, and choose the Snap Camera as your source.

Just remember to switch back to the regular camera before you have an important customer meeting, OK?

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Tip o’ the Week 471 – Buying stuff at auction

clip_image002As the web turns 30 and its role in the End Of the World As We Know It starts to become more clear, it’s worth reflecting on how the technology has disrupted more traditional businesses, sometimes ironically turning them on their head before turning into them.

One literally dusty and old-school business that is reinventing its traditional method, is that of the auction house. As any Brit hooked on Bargain Hunt or Cash in the Attic might attest, the auctioneer will let any amount of old toot pass under their gavel on the basis that they’re making some commission from the seller and gathering a not-insubstantial buyer’s premium from the successful bidder, too.

ToW#359 covered auctions a while ago, and covered some strategies in making sure you get the best deal.

It seems that the auction market is growing, and not just in high value art or fancy motoring. If you go to the saleroom of a bricks & mortar auctioneer these days, there is likely to be at least as much bidding action coming in online as there is in the room, but it’s all dealt with in real-time by a real-life master of the hammer, even if at some places and times nobody knows what they’re actually saying.

So, as well as perusing the ‘Bay for used stuff to fill your abode, and looking on Gumtree / Craigslist for clutter that’s not only cheap but nearby, it’s worth searching on some sites who provide aggregation services to real auctioneers, listing their catalogues online and providing real-time online bidding too. For a small fee, of course. Examples include The Saleroom, EasyLiveAuctions, iBidder or Invaluable.

You may want to look for your quarry on any one – or all – of the platforms, find an item you like, have a look at the photos etc, then go straight to the auctioneer’s own website and make a commission bid. These are entered on your behalf by the auction house, supposedly only high enough to win the auction unless you’re outbid. In practice, if you put a commission bid of £200 for something because you can’t attend in person or be online live to watch & interact with the auction, then be prepared to secure the item for £200… plus maybe 28% buyers premium, and a hefty charge for post and packaging if you’re not nearby enough to collect in person. Still, you might save the 6% or so that an aggregator would charge on top.

In truth, buying most things at auction is a bad idea: there’s little to no legal protection and if the thing you’ve bought it a dud, then it’s on your head to fix it. Many bidders at auctions are dealers themselves, and they’ll have a canny eye for what to get and what to avoid – and their “good” stuff will end up in their antique shop, with a 100% mark-up, or it’ll be cursorily cleaned up and shoved on eBay.

You’d be better off finding the people directly with things to sell if you can, or ferret around in a charity shop; for some goods, like watches, there are free aggregators (the likes of WatchRecon or WatchPatrol) who scrape all of the private “for sale” ads and let you deal directly with the vendor, rather than going through a middleman like an auctioneer or eBay. For cars, there are both free and paid-for advert platforms (eg ClassicCarsForSale, PistonHeads) that make it easy to find either the dealer or private owner who’s selling up.

clip_image003Selling via auction doesn’t make too much sense a lot of the time, either – you’ll pay fees and you’ll be reliant on them bothering to describe and photograph your item properly, and put some effort into talking it up on the day.

Here’s an example of a consignment to an auctioneer – a box of books, with titles like “A Fortune in your Attic” or “Treasures in your Home”.

The box sold for £2.

So, if you’re buying cheap rubbish, then don’t think twice about which platform you use.

If you’re buying Paul Newmans, though, it could even be worth flying in and doing it in person.

Tip o’ the Week 435 – Symbols, reprised

clip_image002When the late purple paisley musician Prince restyled himself as a squiggle (or “Symbol”), nobody knew quite how to reference him or his work, so he was given the monicker “The Artist Formerly Known as Prince”. The new “Love Symbol” logo that represented his “name” was not a regular symbolic character, and after first trying to get everyone to download a special font file that had that character in it, eventually he relented and rebranded back to Prince again.

Working with special symbol characters was covered back in ToW #362; there are lots of less esoteric characters that are in regular use: but have you ever stopped to think how they came to be?

The Ampersand (&) has been around for 2,000 years, starting as a single character to join the letters e and t, ie the Latin for “and”. It’s a surprisingly common symbol, often used in company names and logos … but not universally loved by writers, or the odd legal secretary in days of dictation typing (the lawyer doing the dictation might record the company name as “Smith & co” since that’s the legal name, but more than one typist has produced the letter addressed to “Smith Ampersand co”…)

What about the @ symbol? Popularised by accountants and keepers of ledgers, the “Commercial At” (short for “at the rate of” – eg. meaning 10 units at the price of 1 shilling – 10@1s), was part of the relatively limited character set of a standard typewriter for over 100 years. It’s arguably called the Asperand though has many other names; contemporary usage has meant the symbol is either the key conjunction in an email address or the start of a digital invocation in the way of a mention.

The Asperand has nearly as many alternative names as the Octothorpe, though modern users wouldn’t necessarily think about the history of the symbol, even though it has variously been used to denote “number”, to be “pound” on your telephone keypad, or the “hash” symbol (a corruption of hatch, as in the hatching pattern) and hence, hashtag.

Tip o’ the Week 392 – distract with GIFs

clip_image001We’re all used to file formats being associated with programs and the data they work with. Some, like .TXT, have been around for so long and are so cross-platform, they transcend association with any one application, whereas .PPT will always be PowerPoint – though that app has gained notoriety in such phrases as “Death by PowerPoint(which we’ve all been subjected to, even if not completely fatal), or “PowerPoint Karaoke(reading out the words on slides without adding anything).

One long-used file type goes back to 1987, the GIF – standing for Graphics Interchange Format, predating the eventually prevalent JPEG format by 5 years. GIFs were relatively poor quality – only 256 colours could be used; 30 years ago, that wasn’t an issue but in recent decades, it’s more limiting. Most people, however, will be familiar with GIFs due to a sub-variant – the Animated GIF. This is a series of frames which are played like a simple video – with low frame rates & no sound, yet they have occupied a niche in the way people use the web.

clip_image003Applications tend not to render animated GIFs well – Outlook, for example, simply inserts a static image, but browsers do show them properly. If you have an email in Outlook that you know has animated GIFs, look for the Actions submenu on the Message tab and select View in Browser.

Adding animated GIFs to chat applications is a good way of making a clip_image005point more vociferously than with smilies… though it can be even more distracting. Skype (the consumer version) added some featured videos (with sound), but both Yammer and Teams have added GIF buttons to make it easy to seach for amusement from online animation repository, GIPHY.

clip_image007clip_image008Try pepping up boring Yammer groups or Teams sites, by looking for the GIF logo on the message box, then searching for a 2-3 second loop that underlines your point. Just make sure the content is suitably Safe For Work or you may find the consequences of sending jokey GIFs to be less than ideal.

Facebook has the same kind of thing on comments boxes, from a variety of sclip_image010ources and also not entirely SFW.

Finally, Outlook.com has unveiled a new beta mode that is available for some users (& rolling out to more – look for a “Try the beta” toggle switch on the top of your Hotmail/MSN/Outlook.com mailbox) – and one feature will be animations that can be easily embedded in mail.

clip_image011clip_image013The “expressions” feature lumps emojis & GIFs together to make it simpler to annoy your recipients.

Read what Thurrot has to say about the other bits of the beta.

Tip o’ the Week #198 – 22 minute meetings

clip_image002Hot on the heels of last week’s How 2 rite English proper tip, and the previous extensive Outlook appointment duration code-a-thon, here comes a simple yet entertainingly effective idea to think about whilst you’re digesting all the over-indulgence of the Christmas period (Merry Christmas, by the way) – if you need to meet in person, why not hold shorter, more engaged and more effective meetings?

clip_image003OneNote program manager Nicole Steinbok delivered an award-winning internal Microsoft presentation, blaming inefficient meetings (in part) on the 30-minute blocks that Outlook defaults to.

Apart from the usual stuff like starting on time, having an agenda, etc etc, there are some great bits of advice for having better meetings – some which everyone knows but nobody follows…

· Stay standing up

· Close all laptops

· Silence all phones

One director in MS UK had a Lync status message, “I try not to IM in meetings, preferring to focus on the people in the room – if really urgent please do text me”.

Perhaps not as fundamentalist a stance as the 22 Minute Meeting method, but definitely a step further in the right direction than most people take.

Proud Canadian Nicole also spoke at an external event called Ignite – improving productivity 5 minutes at a time. It’s well worth watching both this and the internal one.

For more info, there’s a Facebook group now, at http://22minutemeeting.info/.

Tip o’ the Week #197 – When to use apostrophe’s

Grammar and punctuation fundamentalists (the Basterds!) will almost certainly have read Lynn Truss’ (or should clip_image001that be Truss’s… discuss…) seminal book on why punctuation is so important.

The title highlights the difference adding simple punctuation makes to a term said of a Giant Panda, that it “eats shoots & leaves”. Add a comma after the first word, and the same bear becomes a postprandial, gun-toting evacuee.

Misuse of most punctuation doesn’t have quite the same dramatic effect, but it may signal (to some people, at least) a lack of attention to detail, therefore invites ridicule. None more so than using the prolific Grocer’s Apostrophe.

Kingsley Amis, on being challenged to produce a sentence whose meaning depended on a possessive apostrophe, came up with:

  • Those things over there are my husband’s.
    (Those things over there belong to my husband.)
  • Those things over there are my husbands’.
    (Those things over there belong to several husbands of mine.)
  • Those things over there are my husbands.
    (I’m married to those men over there.)

There’s a simple rule when wondering whether you need to add an apostrophe or not – if in any doubt, just leave it out. Jess Meats circulated a now-dead website a while ago – www.canipluralizethatwithanapostrophe.com. Visiting the site displayed a blank page carrying just the word NO. In 96pt Arial Bold.

If you’re not really sure of the rules or if you find you forget them a bit too easily, check out The Oatmeal’s brilliant graphical guide for when to – and perhaps more importantly, when not to – use an apostrophe. There are other wordsmithery wonders too – how to use a semicolon, some words you need to stop misspelling, who vs whom and more. Genius. And really, really funny too.

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Tip o’ the Week #187 – A Route for old times

clip_image002Once upon a time, a company called NextBase wrote some software to help people plan routes across the road network, using a computer. It was expensive in the day (£130 in 1988 works out about £300 in today’s money), but if your job was to schedule travelling reps or delivery drivers, then time was money. Or money was time saved.

Anyway, Microsoft bought the company and brought out Microsoft AutoRoute in the UK (eventually renamed Streets and Trips in the US) and did a modestly brisk trade selling annual versions of the software for a more reasonable (£40 or so) amount, with updates to keep the maps fresh and to add improving functionality.

All of this pre-dates the arrival of Multimap, Bing Maps, Google Maps etc. Nowadays the man in the street can make routing decisions on browsers or phones, free of charge and even taking account of prevailing traffic conditions, generally free of charge.

Nevertheless, the AutoRoute and S&T products soldier on, surprisingly. AutoRoute 2013 can be bought for £39 naked or £85 if you want a plug-in USB GPS module. MapPoint and Streets and Trips are still available for American users. Just don’t try and stick the PC to your windscreen.

The zooming in & out is a big agricultural compared to the Deep Zoom style navigation in and out of Bing or Google Maps these days, but there’s a lot of data behind the app and it’s very usable when it comes to searching and setting particular options – showing how much your journey will cost in fuel as well as how long it will take, for example…

Why?

There are a few key reasons why it makes sense to have AutoRoute instead of relying on online mapping – it’s all available offline for one, it responds comparatively quickly (especially when rerouting via specific places) and it also can show you easily what’s in the neighbourhood of a given point – though some of the data may not be as up to date as online sites.

You can export *.axe routing files to *.gpx using AutoRoute 2013 (or use free 3rd party software ITN Converter to turn out a version for most popular satnavs – so you could spend a while poring over a pan-European route in clip_image003AutoRoute then squirt it down to your TomTom so you end up following the exact route you want, rather than sticking to the motorways, as the device might insist)… though as yet no route mapping is exportable to Nokia’s Here Drive software so you can let your phone guide you.

Interestingly, you can also overlay further data onto AutoRoute maps – maybe Excel spreadsheets full of postcode-oriented data, or even the simple mechanism of plotting all your Outlook Contacts on a map – maybe useful for seeing which of your customers or partners are based nearby a place you’re going. Or where to wind up the windows and keep driving…

Tip o’ the Week #120 – The colour of time

clip_image001This week’s tip is a lovely little Windows app, recommended by Ceri Morris.

It’s a little like the sunrise alarm clocks which start your day by gently lighting the room, or the sleep alarms which gradually fade out the radio instead of a sudden silence in place of music.

This free application, called f.lux, changes the colour temperature of your Windows PC’s display,  based on what the time is. Once the sun goes down, it starts to change the bright white of your Windows backgrounds to a nice soft glow, with the intent that your eyes will adjust to the softer lighting system when you’re looking at the screen in the evening.

Ditto, early in the day, the less harsh, less bright white screen will be more soothing on the peepers first thing, and that will be altogether better. It’s possible to over-ride temporarily, if you’re doing work that is colour-sensitive (like photo editing etc), and you can preview the effect so when you install the software, you’ll be able to see what it looks like throughout the course of night and day.clip_image002

Thousands of comments on the f.lux website list people saying they’re sleeping better since their evening PC use with f.lux helps their eyes relax before settling down for the night. If work/life balance is a problem for you, then maybe you should stop using your work PC in the evening… but if you do need/want to use a computer after the sun goes down, give this tool a try and see how you get on with it.

Check out the site to install F.lux – http://stereopsis.com/flux/ – It’s really rather good.
Now, go to bed!