I'm a vegetarian, and while I don't have that much of a sweet tooth, I do like to have something sweet and flavourful to munch on during long journeys. Finding sweets that don't contain gelatine is quite a challenge :( Recently, I was in Marks and Spencer picking up a bottle of mineral water, and at the counter I noticed Veggie Percy - a chewy fruit-juice sweet shaped like a pig, "Now with the Green Ear Guarantee". These sweets contain no gelatine, and have a green ear so that you can tell them apart from the normal, beef gelatine containing... Continue reading

Most of the travel that I do is for business, but I make a point of taking at least one afternoon to explore the places I go to. I'm self employed, and if my budget allows, I'll add an entire extra day on to the end of international trips so that I can look around and relax for a while before flying home. I assumed that most people would want to do something similar, given the opportunity, but it seems that there are a lot of people who go on holiday, but are then scared to explore. Approximately one in... Continue reading

So, thanks to a last minute booking for Develop Conference, I found myself in need of some more business cards. The local store that I usually get cards from has closed down, and the other two local alternatives aren't very good. One uses the cheapest card stock I've ever seen, and the other one prints cards so badly they look like they were done on an old dot matrix printer. I decided that I'd try Moo.com out. I'd heard good things about them, and seen some nice cards made by them. I ordered two sets of 50 double-sided cards printed... Continue reading

Foursquare is perhaps my favourite travel app. I started using it back when it was just a basic "check-in-and-earn-badges" app, and still use it mostly for that purpose. The check-in and mayorship bonuses are nice to have, but I've found the tips, search, and badges to be the most interesting parts of the app. I even defected from Windows Phone to Android specifically for this app and Gowalla, back when Windows still had a shortage of apps. When I'm in a new area, I've found that searching for "gastropub" or "pizza" on Foursquare produces more reliable results than reading reviews... Continue reading

Tineladia is now the proud owner of an iPad, so I have their old A500. The A500 is a nice Android tablet, or at least it was; until it got the Ice Cream Sandwich update. It's recently developed a problem sleeping. When you put the screen to sleep, it wakes back up every 15 seconds or so, sleeps again, then wakes back up. Some quick Googling offers several possible solutions, but none of them work for me. I've tried turning off WiFi, going into Airplane Mode, uninstalling virtually every app, and playing with the sleep settings, but nothing helps. The... Continue reading