Archive for the ‘Reviews’ Category

Yousician is a software application that teaches you to play guitar. It is available for iPad, iPhone and Mac (and possibly other platforms). I have been trying out on my iPad because I imagine, and other reviewers have commented, that the iPhone screen is just too small to be practical.

It starts off slowly with a skill test, some basic notes and chords. Each “mission” starts off with a video that you have to watch, then you have to do the exercise. The app listens to your playing and checks you are playing the right note. If you hit a high enough percentage, you pass the mission and unlock the next one. If you fail, you have to retry.

A ball bounces between the notes to tell you when to play them. It falls at different rates though. It flies in an arc, and sometimes will come down steeper than others, so getting the timing spot on is very tricky. I sometimes felt like I was playing an arcade game rather than learning guitar. In the end I adopted slightly different strategies for timing my chords and my individual notes.

It is also slow to get going. I think I must have spent 2-3 hours on it just to get through the basic stuff and up to a standard that I found a challenge. This is despite the “skill tests” it recommended I took to get ahead. Also at one point it decided to remove the chord names and replace them with individual fingering, which was annoying, though thankfully disappeared after a few songs. After that I thought it got very difficult very fast, so it would be nicer to have a more adaptive curve.

Given it is so similar to Rocksmith, it is impossible not to compare it. It is not as well made as Rocksmith. You have to download each mission each time you play it – so even if you have done it before, it re-downloads it. Also all the videos are just embedded YouTube videos, so again you will need internet access for these. There is no offline mode.

It is difficult to gauge how accurate it is, because it could be me missing the notes, or it could genuinely be missing them. On the whole, it is fairly accurate. I started by playing with my guitar amp and the iPad’s microphone. This I found the timings difficult to get right. Eventually I plugged my Apogee Jam interface into the iPad and this made things much better.

It also allowed me to play chords wherever I wanted. For example it recommended I play A5 with the root note of the open 5th string. I played it on the more typical place of a closed power chord on the 6th string and it did not complain.

You are limited to about 30 minutes of game time per day on the free version. It’s not this straight forward though because you have to wait exactly 24 hours between free sessions, so you can only use this if you move your practice time back half an hour every day. This time is also interrupted by ads telling you to upgrade. The game doesn’t pause when these adds appear, so an add will finally disappear only to find you’re about to finish a song having missed all the notes.

Premium gives you unlimited access for £14.99 a month. When I first tried to upgrade to premium it failed every time, and I had to wait until the next day. It’s recurring billing and bills your iTunes account, though you can easily disable auto-renew in iTunes.

Summary

Yousician is like Rocksmith, only not as good. Given the price and the build quality, I would recommend going with Rocksmith instead, though Yousician certainly has its charms.

Oh, where did it all go wrong?

Last week Elina took me out to Everyman Pizzeria where we were scheduled to have our usual: duck pizza for me, pepperoni pizza for Elina, and then sharing a boozy sundae. I’m nearly 30, I have simple needs but am too old to change now.

However, Everyman Pizzeria have rolled out a whole new menu. And it’s not as good.

They have replaced the pizzas with ones that look fancier, but that does not necessarily make them taste any better. My pulled pork pizza was good, but not great. Elina had to get the veggie burger instead which despite listing what we thought was all the ingredients on the menu, came covered in onions.

Finally, when we got to dessert, we found out they had scrapped their menu and now only had a make-your-own sundae. This did not have enough options to re-create their previous range, so we decided to leave it.

The staff were friendly and attentive as always, so no problems there. However, I have written to Everyman Cinema management to request that they send all future changes to me to be approved in writing.

Recently I was looking for a pedal board and settled on the Pedaltrain Jr. If you are not familiar with a pedal board, it is exactly what it sounds like – a board that you put effects pedals on so that you can wire them in to your power supply and transport them around easier when you’re going to jam sessions, gigs, etc.

I went for the Pedaltrain Jr because everyone seems to be recommending. However, I have found the build quality rather poor.

It comes with two holes to connect the power cables through. However, the wholes are slightly too far apart. In the photo above, you can see that you can barely get the power cables through.

Of course you can argue that it is not their fault because my power supply is made by Voodoo Labs which is a separate company. However, the runners are another matter.

You get two braces that you screw into the side of your power supply and then you screw those braces into the frame. However, they do not fit properly. This is Pedltrain’s own braces screwing into Pedaltrain’s own frame, there does not seem to be any reason why these would not fit without having to bang them into place.

Finally, after only a few days, the velcro has begun pealing off the top of the board.

I have been thinking about whether we’re using the right online supermarket. That in itself is a pretty depressing action. However, I’m doing it having spent last week in London and Birmingham, and tonight in Sheffield, so it’s not like I just sit at home thinking about these things.

I am using Sainsbury’s at the moment. I tried Morrisons last month, and it was very good, but I much prefer the ordering processing with Sainsbury’s and I can amend by orders until 11pm. This is key, because I usually do, whereas Morrisons cut off is 5pm.

I also thought about switching to Waitrose because they have such a good reputation for customer service. However, it is significantly more expensive and their minimum order is like £60-65. Plus their website keeps crashing my computer. They do sell Swiss chard though.

Today I’ve been looking at Ocado. They have won loads of awards of their experience, and do sell chard. However, they are super expensive. They consistently come in the top two most expensive in Which?’s rankings, alongside Waitrose.

I also took a look at mySupermarket which is a really cool service. You add everything you want to your basket and it tells you how much it would cost at each supermarket. Here is the example basket I made for myself:

I started with the Sainsbury’s product set, so I don’t know if this biased it in any way. However, Sainsbury’s does come out really well for price, and with the good service I have always enjoyed, it does not seem to make it worth switching.

While in London, we stayed at the Judd Hotel. It was a mixed bag.

On the good side:

• It was nicely furnished
• The staff were friendly
• Good location, just round the corner from King’s Cross
• It included a cooked breakfast

On the bad side:

• It was freezing cold – the doors and windows did not fit properly which let the cold and the noise in
• The bathroom was so tiny I could barely fit in it
• The wifi might have been free, but it sucked. I couldn’t access my emails or connect to my VPN and trying to download anything was lost cause.

I recently went to see Book of Mormon, the musical by creators of South Park, Trey Parker and Matt Stone.

It was pretty good. Not amazing, but pretty good. I was a little disappointed that it was not about Joseph Smith, though Elina points out that it would have been difficult to do it about that for a wider public audience.

If anything, I think I was a little disappointed by the audience. The best jokes were often missed while the rather racist bits such as mispronouncing an African girl’s name, were lapped up.

Some of the songs were pretty catchy at least. The theatre was also pretty good; you were able to get a drink at the bar with reasonable speed.

On Friday, Sainsbury’s online ordering system was not working, so I decided to give Morrisons a go instead. They charge £5 for Saturday morning delivery, which I think is £1 cheaper than Sainsbury’s, though I only really pay that because I have Delivery Pass and therefore don’t actually pay it.

It was a good experience. When the delivery driver arrived he noted that this was my first delivery and went through the receipt with me. He then explained that each of the bags was colour coded into fridge, freezer and cupboard.

I also get a text a few hours before to let me know my delivery was on the way and it even confirmed that there were no missing items.

The food seems quite good too. My aubergine came wrapped in a polystyrene netting to prevent it bruising and they had the good BBQ sauce and a better selection of yogurts. That sounds really sad now I come to write it…

They also gave me a welcome gingerbread man. That is a real winner.

Recently I have been trying out various running socks to try and stop my toes blistering.

More Mile

Very impressed with these. They provide a lot of cushioning for my feet. I did not notice the difference until I went back to socks without that cushion and they felt a lot rougher.

They don’t entirely stop my toes from blistering, but they’re an improvement on regular socks.

Karrimor

These were rubbish. They did not feel or produce results any better than just a regular cotton socks; they might well have been worse.

Nike

These were special toe-socks (they had individual toe holes) to stop them rubbing together. This seems to have produced good results on the 5km I did today, however they felt quite rough on the rest of my feet, particularly the balls of my foot, so without the padding of the others I am not sure I prefer them. They are also quite difficult to get on.

Pretty gutted that after seven months of having my Sonos Playbar, it died.

Sonos were very good about it. I spoke to them on the phone and we tried a few things to no response. After that they send me through a return request that came with a pre-paid UPS sticker, so I just had to wrap it up and schedule a collection from UPS. They even shipped me a new one straight away, though that did require a credit card pre-authorisation.

Pretty annoying though, if that happens just after the warranty runs out, I will be very unhappy.

Stewart Lee’s 2012 show was entitled “Carpet Remnant World”. I’ve just watched it, and I have to say I was disappointed.

In November, Dominic Cavendish wrote an article in The Telegraph about why he walked out of Stewart Lee’s show. His complaint was that Lee spent too much time insulting his audience. He’s right. The first 10 minutes straight of Carpet Remnant World were essentially dedicated to Lee discussing the contempt he holds his audience in.

I’ve seen Stewart Lee live several times and he does make a lot of jokes like that. At first they were funny. Now they’re old, and increasingly offensive. He parrots out the same joke over and over again until people like Cavendish, and indeed even me, someone who considers myself a big Stewart Lee fan, are fed up and bored.

That is not to say there wasn’t a lot of good material. I particularly liked the bit where he said “dog” in a funny voice. However, a lot of his material is feeling increasingly tired.