Timepieces

The rubber strap on the ancient Casio F-91W watch that I’ve worn for work for the last five or six years finally broke a couple of nights ago, so I’m currently on the look-out for a new watch to replace it.

Normally, I wouldn’t go to the expense of buying a brand new watch – I’d just order a replacement strap online. But the F-91W sits right at the bottom of Casio’s range of digital watches, and is so cheap that a new one currently costs just £7.87 on Amazon, so it’s just not cost effective to buy a new strap – you might as well buy a brand new watch.

As someone who’s quite fussy about watches, instead of simply replacing my old F-91W, I’ve decided to buy something a bit more substantial for my next work watch, though I haven’t quite decided on which one just yet.

I pre-ordered a Pebble smart watch at the beginning of January, but although they put out an email last week to say that they’ve actually started to ship some watches, I wouldn’t be surprised if I’m still waiting to receive mine at the end of the year.

For the time-being I’m going to be wearing my Casio G-Shock DW-5600CS for work until I decide which watch to go for, but one thing’s for certain – I’ll be keeping my Omega Speedmaster Professional Moonwatch for when I’m not at work.

Readers

I’ve been using RSS feed readers to keep track of the blogs I follow ever since I first started blogging back in 2004 – at first using Bloglines, and then eventually moving over to Google Reader. But with the imminent ‘retirement’ of Google Reader on 1st July, I’ve been looking around the web for a similar, free, web-based alternative.

So far, the one I like most is The Old Reader, which looks and feels just like Google Reader because was built in order to replicate some of the functions of earlier versions of Google Reader than the one Google are just about to kill.

At the moment there aren’t any iOS apps that hook into The Old Reader, but this isn’t too much of a problem, as the site seems to work reasonably well as a web app on my iPhone 5.

One of the other feed readers I like is Feedly, but I’m currently considering paying a monthly subscription fee of $2 (about £1.27) to use Feedbin, which not only looks nice and easy to use, but also hooks into the Reeder iOS app I’m already using.

The shutting-down of Google Reader might not be of much consequnece to most people, but for me, a decent RSS feed reader is critical in helping me stay up-to-date with all the stuff I read online.

Reboot

Yes, this is yet another reboot.

So, let’s get things underway here once again, shall we?

- B