Category: Life

Have you ever come across Zeller’s formula (aka Zeller’s congruence)? If not directly, you will have indirectly.

For every digital device you have that shows the day of the week, whether your phone or your computer, there’s a chance this is what powers it. Or a variation of it, at least. Created by Christian Zeller in the 19th century, it’s a set of formulas that let work out the day of the week, based on the provided date.

My wife is going through chemotherapy right now and, when it became known, friends and family all bought her various gifts that they thought would help. In addition, I researched various forums and cancer sites for additional ideas too.

This post details the items that have made a real difference, and that she would recommend to anyone thinking of buying for somebody going through the same thing.

I’ve been to Liverpool once before – back in the early 1990s to watch a football match. I don’t think I saw much of the city, and I have very little memory of it other than the match itself. My daughter hasn’t been at all. Yet, we’re both fans of the Beatles.

With the Easter school holidays in swing, it was time to change that and visit the home of the Fab 4 with a 2 day jaunt to the city.

Now this is my own opinion, but Amazon seem to make their hardware to an absolute price point. For the sake of keeping costs low, they will produce something which is absolutely fine for the here-and-now. The result of that is that, a couple of years down the line, their devices are slow and laggy. I found this with FireTV and the Kindle is no different.

On top of that recent change to their UI, which also saw a shift in the programming framework being used, has led to more bugs which Amazon seem reluctant to spend too much time on fixing (software updates don’t come out very often).

So, unless you’re rocking the very latest and greatest Kindle, there’s a chance you’ll experience some lagging and, worst still, complete lock-ups. I’ve put together a number of things to check and do that will help reduce this, based on feedback and general advice from Kindle users.