... in doing anything with the garden this year?

I've generally been quite keen in the past - even took 12 months worth of photos back in 2009.  It's a tiny plot, doesn't take a lot of effort to turn it into something pretty in a high-walled, Victorian sort of way. But this year I'm not allowed to water it, have acquired two mogs that will dig holes in everything (and shit in them) and haven't been able to get near it until this weekend, on account of the drought being characterised by local flooding. At least the tide of plastic kiddy-crap seems to be abating.

But I finally managed to cut the lawn (twice), cut back a ton of ivy and wave a hedge-trimmer around in what felt like a meaningful way this weekend.  And now I think I'll have to carry on doing stuff. It's just too therapeutic.

Where do I start? Online privacy is almost too big a subject to tackle in one post.  Child safety needs a chapter in its own right. The deliberate obfuscation of settings, coupled with a frightening level of churn in the configuration interface - designed, undoubtedly, to confuse many into exposing their online persona to the wider world - is an affront to the freedom of the individual to maintain instinctive control of their privacy. The dominance of the platform drives homogenisation of the market - in everything - reduces marketing to a quest for mass commonality in desire and, ultimately, commits us to a beige world of limited choice.

But these aren't important right now.

The Problem with Facebook is that it allows my 'friends' to publish pictures of a younger, more innocent timmy, solely for the entertainment of others. 

My name is Tim. And I like the Jesus and Mary Chain, Orange Juice, Aztec Camera and The Smiths.

And the rest of them. Mildly surprising.

It made a cracking film as well.  What's not to like about properly intimidating, bloody great monsters charging around to an Arcade Fire soundtrack? Scared the crap out of Hatty, but she couldn't turn away...

Maurice Sendak. Born 10 June 1928; died 8 May 2012. He let children be just what they wanted

I know what you're thinking.  What did they do with the leftovers?

Pretty much what we always do with left-over roast chicken: We turn to one of the several well-thumbed Nigel Slater books that lie around the kitchen and pick a recipe.  As often as not, we'll do one of the two or three risottos - tonight the creme-fraiche one from Real Food. All wonderful because, frankly, Nigel doesn't do healthy: If it needs butter, it needs 50g of butter.

The great thing about risotto is that it requires very little skill: I could make one with my eyes shut. The not so great thing about risotto is that it does need constant attention, what with that all that ladling of stock... (Does anyone really ladle stock? Rather than put it in a jug and pour in a bit every couple of minutes? Do people feel it's more like proper cooking if they have to get their ladle out?)

So... stuck at the stove with my jug of stock and wooden-spoon, I looked around for something to occupy myself. It was never going to be Simon Cowell. And my camera lay idle...

The observant amongst you may have noticed a slight change to the timmytime sidebar - over there ---> 

You might be a seasoned blog-junkie and have accepted this without question. Equally, you might be seeking a little explanation. So here it is:

Every post in timmytime can carry a category - or several. I've been tagging posts as I go along, but haven't exposed any way to access them via the tags - having moved timmytime to this domain at the start of the year, there hasn't been enough content for it to be useful. There probably now is.  Tagging the posts allows you - gentle reader - to restrict the posts you see to a given category.  It would, arguably, be even more useful to be able to select a collection of categories so you could, for example, remove all the pictures of my Sunday dinners - but you can't. I'm really very sorry about that.

The categories are pretty much self-explanatory - but for the avoidance of doubt:

Note that these aren't exclusive - so, for example, this clip of Hatty carries both the 'Watch' and 'Cherish' tags.

That's about it. Move along please - nothing more to see here.

I'm not given to writing about apps.  There are enough people out there writing about apps, a lot of them quite badly, some of them so well that it seems pointless to attempt to pour more into the floodwaters of Applelove.  But I am going to allow myself the one diversion: iOS devices are fantastic for consuming stuff - and, for a long time, the majority of my targeted consumption has been of RSS feeds. As a result, pretty much the app I consider the most essential is an RSS reader.

I won't witter on what RSS is about - if you know, you can skip a couple of paragraphs.  If you don't... well, there's a brief guide on the BBC site, since the BBC carries feeds to all of its content. But so does just about everything on the web nowadays - there's an RSS feed on timmytime, hence the little orange logo at the top of the sidebar on the right. Depending on which browser you're using, you'll probably see the same logo in the address bar at the top somewhere: click on it to get some idea of how to get started. 

In essence, RSS allows you to read everything you're interested in, in the same place. That same place might well be a web-based newsreader, like Google Reader - probably the most widely used approach and the one I've favoured for general web access for a few years. 

Years back, an installed piece of software was much more common, but I doubt many are still loyal to that approach. (Because the cloud's where it's at kids).  And, in an iOS world, there are Apps.  There are tons of apps - a pretty decent roundup here.

I've been through a few - generally apps that synchronise with Google Reader - but I settled pretty early on Reeder, for both iPad and iPhone. Very minimal, very fast, very nice to use.  The only flaw is its inability to add new feeds from the app, you have to do that in Google Reader. I've yet to find an app that I prefer to this for consumption, although you will have to spend a bit of time working out the interface, so minimal is it. (And don't believe what the roundup says about not being able to read feeds in folders - all this means is that he never worked out how to. Reverse-pinch is what he needed...)

But when I say 'I've yet to find an app that I prefer to this'... well, true - until a week ago.  If there's a single truth about iOS devices it's that, however much you believe you've found the perfect app for a particular function, it will be superseded by something better in a matter of months... And you will buy whatever the latest and greatest is, because it'll cost you a couple of quid at most.  Or you will, if you're me, because you're forever seeking a perfect and optimised experience in your hand/manbag sized computing environment. Perhaps it is just me.

Mr Reader is the latest 'best RSS reader that I've ever seen' £2 investment.  In contrast to Reeder, it has quite a complex interface, needing just as much time to assimilate, for different reasons.  But I've been alternating between the two for the last week and Mr Reader has won out. It addresses the one glaring deficiency of Reeder, which is a big plus... but I've come to love the slightly more feature-rich and colourful interface. And it's slick - really, shiny, oily slick. It even has skins!

But there's no iPhone version.  Which is just fine, because Reeder on the iPhone is perfect - and there's no way I'm ever going to add new feeds from the iPhone, so I really don't care that it can't.

There is another overlapping genre, in Magazine style apps like Flipboard and Zite.  Both can pull in RSS feeds (and Facebook and Twitter etc) - but they also adopt a learning approach which is more generalised, around topics of interest.  The more you read, the more they'll understand what you like to read and present you with better tailored stuff.  I use both, particularly Zite - but I can't quite see them as substitutes for dedicated RSS tools: I don't quite trust the 'getting to know you' algorithm and don't like the way they mix stuff I've chosen to consume with stuff I might well be interested in.  So I use them in quite different ways: Mr Reader feeds me stuff from sources I've selected, Zite and Flipboard are more like glossy mags that just happen to cover areas I can't resist reading about. Your experience may vary - but I can't quite accept technology second-guessing my desires, I like to think I'm just too contrary for that to ever be successful. Without self-image and determination we are but helpless infants...