Jack Cooper

Pretty much everyone I know these days is on Facebook, which makes it an undeniably good site to connect with your friends, and even - much to your own hatred - your direct family. I use it every day to talk to my friends and unashamedly snoop on everyone else's life à la NSA. And yet despite that, I hate Facebook to its core. This wasn't always the case though, as I'm about to point out to you in this post. I was the minimum age when I joined Facebook - 13 - so essentially I have grown up with the website, meaning a lot of changes have happened to get to today. Let's start from the beginning.

Not a care in the world

You're 13. Puberty hasn't quite got full grips on you just yet, but it's got enough of an influence to give you a stroppy mood. You want to join Facebook, really badly. Facebook was for the cool kids; the hierarchy was determined on how early you joined. See that kid over there, in the indoor sunglasses? He joined when he was 9.

Anyway, your parents have finally let you join "that website" (mandatory air punch and prepubescent 'yeah!' instinctively follows), and now you are free to do whatever you want, literally. And that's the first stage: you post all sorts of random crap that nobody in their right mind would care about. But you're 13, you don't think of things like that. And that was why my first ever status was: "chips". You never realise it at the time, but that initial stage was probably the nicest because you literally cared about nothing.

Memes without irony

You're 14, perhaps knocking on the door of 15 now, and you have become somewhat more self-aware. It'd be daft to say you've matured now - not when the hormones are replacing your brain's logic and reasoning - but you are now starting to do your best to appear normal and 'cool'. You want to follow the crowd. So out go the stupid posts about batteries and random TV shows, and in come the memes.

I think most of us know what a meme is: something that is viral on the Internet. There is nothing more to them. That damn multicolour dress is a meme. The Ice Bucket Challenge is a meme. It can apply to anything. But at 14/15, you had a special kind of meme. Those stupid edgy drawing memes that just seemed to pop up everywhere were the epitome of being an awesome and amazing person. They appear so daft now, but if you posted a hot fire meme, you felt like the king of the world... of social networks. Trolololol.

Memes with irony

By the time you're 16 or so, you start to realise that memes in the form of trolls and poker faces are indeed a bit stupid. And you know that everyone else pretty much shares the same opinion. So what do you do? You post more memes, obviously.

However, the difference this time is that you're posting them with irony. For example, you may share a meme in the wrong way and put a hyperbolic caption to it to point out to everyone else how daft they are. Your desired effect from this is that everyone thought you were funny and cool because you were mocking something everyone else follows blindly. In reality though, you just appeared as someone who is trying just a little bit too hard to be funny. The best real world example of this would be the people who apply the Illuminati triangle to stupid little things that vaguely resemble something three-pointed. 2 edgy 4 me, m8.

Is he dead?

Now you're 17; you're nearly an adult, for crying out loud. The hormones are settling down and adulthood is just around the corner, sending you some enticing winks. Maturity has, as near as makes no difference, pretty much fully settled in on you now. As a result, you have realised that doing all of the above is cringe and embarrassing. You stop. As in, completely and utterly stop.

It's this period of time where you go through deleting all your old, ugly profile pictures. A gentle feeling of sorrow winds through you as you realise how care-free life was not four years ago. I was very good at the silence period of Facebook. I felt that I didn't really do anything interesting enough to warrant a post, so I remained a lurker.


Doing this thing called 'adult'

The definition of Facebook has changed for me, as I firmly establish myself as an adult. The website is like a journal, a way of logging in life events with friends and family, and capturing the best moments. It seems to be the same for my friends, who now all just post pictures of elegant outings abroad with their significant other. Three years ago, my feed would be full of groups posing with alcohol like it's some badass thing to do.

I guess the next step would be marriage and baby posts, which is a creepy thought. I'm pretty much going to remain a lurker (my last post was July 2015, celebrating the passing of my driving test), but many of my friends won't. My age is pretty much the first generation who will watch several hundred other people make their own lives, buy their own house, and bring up their own family. It'll be surreal, and cool on so many levels.

So there we are. I've been growing up with Facebook, and things aren't stopping any time soon. Though I'll remain relatively quiet from now on after maturing somewhat, the website will still likely document many of my significant life events if I choose to. In 2050, I can check Facebook to see what day I bought my first apartment. The more I type about this, the more amazing it seems.

Obviously I should say that not everyone would have the same experience with Facebook through time as I did above. I was a socially awkward and relatively immature individual, so memes were perhaps more prominent for me than the average sane teenager. Anyway, I hoped you enjoyed this long read. See you soon!

If I went to any public website right now where every user had the ability to put their own comments down, I'd be insane. Nobody wants to go to opinion-central. But anyway, let's say I did do such a thing, and I posted a comment saying "Climate change is real, and something needs to be done about it sooner rather than later". Doesn't sound too crazy, right? Well, in this world, saying that is almost as controversial as supporting the English Defence League. And for those of you who are out of the loop, that's bloody well saying something.

via evogreen.co.uk

That's right folks, climate change is still a topic on which many disagree on. There are, of course, many things in this world in which people have strong disagreements in. How the universe started, for example. Or whether there is true life native to a place outside Earth. These are all controversial, because they are topics which haven't been solved, or proven. So people go with their own hypothesis, because that's all there is to go by.

Climate change is somewhat different. It has now been fully proven that climate change has been completely accelerated by human factors. A page from Bloomberg has a fantastic interactive graph which breaks down each natural and human factor that has changed since 1880. It's much cooler to play with the graph yourself to see everything broken down, but here below is the general gist of things:

There is no correlation between natural changes and the warmth of the climate

Human factors on the other hand...

And here we are when we put the two together. Just a little uncanny, if you ask me

So as I hope you can understand, it's pretty cemented that global warming is just one of those things that happen when we burn our fossil fuels, amongst other things. It's basic science; CO2 is a greenhouse gas, which traps the warmer air in, and viola, the Earth is a 'greenhouse'. And bloody hell, do I know how hot those things get sometimes.

Bill Nye, all round good guy, is constantly trying to hammer sense into others on live TV

Ben Carson, a dense mofo, believes the warming is a 'natural stage'

Back in December last year, I made a post where I reported on the condition of my iPad, which was two-and-a-half years old at the time. I stated that it was getting a bit slow now, where websites would freeze, and apps would take their own merry time to open and load new content.

Fun Fact: due to a higher resolution, the iPad 3  is actually slower than the iPad 2

That device is now of course just under three-and-a-half years old, and it's still my daily driver. But to get a sense of its condition now, imagine my car daily driver is a 40bhp VW Beetle, and everyone else is overtaking me on the motorway in their flashy BMWs and Mercedes. What I'm trying to say, of course, is that things haven't exactly got any better throughout 2015. Though one thing that has vanished is the long periods of freezing on a website; that's just been replaced with hardcore lag, right down to when you type something. If you type quick enough, the iPad will quite literally forget what you inputted.

Now I feel the time is ripe to treat myself to a brand new iPad. I, of course, am fully aware that Android tablets exist out there, but they just don't appeal to me. You see, I use tablets as a haven for media consumption - be that websites, YouTube, social media or video calling. I do not use tablets for games, emulation, data tools or activity trackers; things that I personally believe that Android does better. I wouldn't have an iPhone in a million years, but I wouldn't go to anything other than an iPad for tablets. The iPad is locked down and gives very little customisation, but my god does it do media well.

Android tablets don't entice me

Anyway, I'm talking about this because I have come across what has to be one of the biggest first world dilemmas that the world has ever seen. Here's the situation: Apple now has three sizes of iPad available to the public: the Mini (of which I have no interest in at all), the Air series, and the newly announced Pro series. Which one do I go for? It truly is a tricky situation.

If the current Air model (the Air 2) wasn't over a year old now, it would be a no-brainer for me, because I would go straight for that. It's half as much as the new Pro in terms of pricing, and it's still pretty powerful. But there's just something so unsatisfying about buying a product that's already a year old. Granted, you don't pay the full RRP anymore, but it's still a bit wrong for a technophile living in the first world.

The Air 2: Sexy, sleek, and smooth, but already a grandad in the technology world

The Pro on the other hand is so new, it's not even available yet. It has some beastly specs, such as the 4GB of RAM. It doesn't sound like loads, but remember that it runs iOS - an OS that runs smoothly on a single GB of RAM. It also has 4 speakers on each corner, and a processor which should apparently match up to the Haswell Intel i5s you find in laptops, according to Apple. Not to mention obviously the 12.9' screen; it's width is the same as the height of a normal iPad screen. Crazy stuff, and it should make YouTube videos really pop... whilst simultaneously browsing Reddit. Apple finally introduced proper split-screen multitasking for the iPad in iOS 9.

So obviously the Pro is the unsurprising winner in terms of the specs war, but the dilemma I face is this: is it actually worth it? The Pro is going to cost $799, which translates to £530 in today's currency conversions. But such is the way taxes are so heavily involved in the UK, the suggested price is actually going to be £679, which is a huge sting in the tail. For now, these are still rumours, but they are coming from pretty legitimate sources.

So, when you consider that I only tend to use an iPad for media consumption (most likely the same as 90% of other iPad users), is the literal 2x price jump worth it? Getting the Pro will of course give me a newer, sexier device that will most likely stay faster for longer, but then again, the £330 Air 2 is not a slouch. It still outperforms pretty much all flagship smartphones from this year, as is on par with the brand new iPhone 6S when it comes to benchmarks, as both return around 4,500 in Geekbench 3 for the multi-core test.

I don't need it, but bloody hell I want it. SO MUCH SCREEN SIZE \o/

A little more than a month ago, I did a review on this blog about my then-new phone, the LG G3. I gave it a lot of praise, and disregarded a lot of niggles the phone has, simply because I hadn't discovered them yet. So this post is to balance things out a bit; what are the downsides to my phone?

To make things clear before we start: I still love my phone, and I don't regret the purchase one little bit whatsoever. It's the most powerful piece of handheld equipment I've ever owned, and I still find it a pleasure to use. However, now that I've spent many weeks with it, I have found a few things that do irk me a little. They are very small nit-picking things, but so damn they should be on a flagship device.

Firstly, the infrared blaster is laughably weak. For those of you who don't know, IR blasters are what enables any remote of yours to 'talk' to the thing you're controlling - say a TV. The one on the G3 is so, so weak, that it almost defeats the object of having one in the first place. You have to be very close and pointing straight at the thing you're trying to control, which is annoying in many situations. I've used many other phone IR blasters, and the vast majority of them have worked better than the G3.

Next, my phone seems to have this peculiar bug with its LED notification light. Every now and then, it will pulsate green like it's got a notification, but when you turn the screen on, you find there's nothing there. More annoyingly, there is literally no way to stop this phantom notification light other than to completely reboot the phone. There is little online about it, which suggests it's not a widespread bug, but it's there for me, and it happens I'd say a few times a week.

The screen. I still can't get enough of that 1440p resolution (even though 1080 I'm sure would've been more than enough), but the resolution is pretty much the only stand-out feature of the phone. It's a basic LCD affair, which means you don't get the deepest blacks around, and it doesn't go particularly bright. It's enough to read in direct sunlight, sure, but when I put it next to the new Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge Plus yesterday, the G3's screen looked positively pathetic. Not to mention the extra pixels put more strain on the processor in the phone. In Geekbench 3, the G3's score ranges from 2,300 to 2,500, depending on how bright the screen is (yes, really). The Samsung Galaxy S5 uses the exact same chip, but due to the lower resolution, the processor doesn't have to work as hard, and it can therefore return a score of 2,700 to 2,900. Still though, the G3 is hardly a slouch.

I'm not done yet. The G3 gets worryingly hot at times, which is a common complaint for the phone. When things do get heated, the phone understandably throttles itself to stop it burning itself out. But this makes the phone agonisingly slow, and due to how easily the G3 heats up, this 'safety sluggishness' happens a lot more than I would perhaps want. Another weird side effect to the heat is the camera loses all ability to focus and stabilise, so you will never get a good picture with a hot G3. In all fairness though, you have to be very intense in usage to get to that stage.

Anything else? Yes, the battery life only just manages to get me through the day, and that's if I put some battery saving consideration into my usage. If I used my phone as much as I want to sometimes, I could easily drain it by late afternoon. Thankfully, the G3 comes with a removable battery, so you can just fling another one in if it becomes a consistent problem. Removable batteries are becoming rare these days, it has to be said.

So there, hopefully that should balance things out a bit. As I say though, I still very much like my G3, and I'd still recommend it if you are looking for a cheap and powerful phone.

I was late to wake this morning, because I am a lazy good-for-nothing teenager. That or I never get enough sleep during the school days, and therefore have to recuperate the lost sleeping hours so heartlessly taken away from me. Anyway, it meant that by the time I did wake up from my slumber, both my phone and tablet were furiously buzzing at me to say that Jeremy Corbyn had won the Labour leadership contest. Mr. Lefty will now be up against Mr. Eton.

The new face of a new Labour

Ed wasn't daring enough to capture the imagination

For the past year, I have been a semi-proud owner of a first-generation Motorola Moto G. It was a phone that was never destined to break any speed records, or look the most premium, but it did everything just fine. No matter what I threw at the phone, it obeyed my every command. Considering I paid just £130 for such a device, I have to applaud how well it performed against me, a fairly heavy and demanding user. But at the end of the day, the Moto G was still a budget phone. Despite the awesome value for money, it would be impossible for Motorola to create something that made the high-end phones unnecessary at this price point.

So naturally, I was left desiring a powerhouse, something that would accommodate my thirst for multitasking and no lag whatsoever. But I was still on a budget. I still - much to my internal fury - have no job, and therefore do not have half a grand to splash on a new phone. But I had sold a few things on eBay recently, so my budget was a respectable ~£240. My first obvious choice was the OnePlus One. This is a high-end phone with many RAMs and many processors, but at a really low price. A 64GB phone now costs £219, which is smack-bang in my budget. But it doesn't have FM radio! When you're an abnormal teenager like me, FM radio matters.

Finally, I came across the LG G3. This is a flagship smartphone from 2014 that's had a price cut, thanks to the G4 being released this year. Previous gen flagships always get price cuts. But while the Samsung Galaxy S5 and HTC One M8 were hovering at around £350, the G3 was available for a stonking £230. Needless to say, I purchased it in a heartbeat.

Before I get on to what I thought of my phone, here are some core specs for the phone, so you know what's what:

• 2.5 GHz Quad Core Snapdragon 801 processor
• 1440p Quad HD display, with 538 pixels per inch density (basically a lot)
• 2GB RAM
• 13MP camera with optical image stabilisation, 4K video recording, 2.1MP front camera
• And many other things I can't be asked to list

Update, 26/8/15: Camera shaking still present. It only seems to happen when the phone gets really hot, so I wonder if the phone disables the OIS for whatever reason under extreme circumstances. If it starts happening regularly under cool conditions, I will send the phone in for a refund.... and then buy another G3. I'm a sucker.

Nothing quite shows off so well that you're a bit of a knob-end when you post a controversial opinion for all to see. That job is usually reserved to the likes of Katie Hopkins and Piers Morgan - by no coincidence two of the most hated individuals in the United Kingdom. But something recently has been getting up my nose, big time.

The whole world knows about the fiasco regarding poor Cecil the lion. You probably know how the elegant creature was unlawfully shot by a US dentist, who paid an insane amount of money for the action to happen. We're talking tens of thousands of pounds here. 99% of the world will never quite understand the incentive behind it, including me. Now you can breathe a slight sigh of relief; my unpopular opinion is not me being a supporter of the hunt. I may be a dick, but I'm yet to discover how to be that much of a dick. I'm sure I'll find a way, somehow.

 Anyway, it's great that this has significantly raised awareness with regards of endangered species being hunted. Maybe there'll be a bit more of a driving force behind stopping poaching, deforestation, and so on. Upon the good campaigning amongst many people to get the guy (who unsurprisingly has teeth that are seriously on point) extradited to Zimbabwe, I've noticed a different type of protesting popping up on the cancer that is my Facebook feed. And it's all coming from veggies and vegans.

If you fall under one of those groups of people, please try to hold back your steaming ears, boiling blood, and slightly audible grunting. I am not aiming to generalise you lot - especially since I'm friendly with a few veggies, and I'm not a dick in their final form just yet - but all this 'different' protesting has all come from them. So, please, bear with.

It started when I saw someone share a picture from Vegan Publishers. The picture showed the poor lion with the caption: "His name was Cecil, he never bothered anybody". Rightly so, the poor thing. Under the Cecil, there's a picture of a cow. The caption there reads: "She was never named, she never bothered anybody either".

K

Now, if you brain works in a rather crude and narrow way, then you can understand the picture, and why omnivores may be a bit hypocritical when they cry about Cecil, while tucking in to their steak. Sure. But hang on, let's apply an ounce of common sense to this, shall we? There was an outcry about Cecil because he is an endangered, protected species. There are many, many cows. They aren't going anywhere. But to kill an endangered species is something else. That's why you hear no international outcry when someone hunts a deer, or a pheasant. In some areas, it's good population control.

Not only is there a blatant difference between killing something that's being vigorously protected versus something that was - whether you like it or not - born to be killed, but the fact that people (yes, a plural) are sharing this onto Facebook is just salt rubbed into the wound. I applaud people who choose the vegan or veggie lifestyle, because it shows they have great empathy towards the world. But I personally believe that eating animals is part of the natural food chain (albeit humans have altered it a bit to place themselves on top). It happens everywhere you look, right down to fish eating plankton. It's just how the living world works. By sharing these posts, they are essentially saying to everyone else "My way of life is right, and you're all wrong for following your lifestyle. Feel ashamed. Become vegan" It wouldn't be something to complain about if I had my meat-eating friends sharing posts about vegans acting stupid, being wrong etc, but they don't.

So if you're a veggie or vegan, then I sincerely applaud you. But if you preach? Shut up.