I am Ashley Elsdon

someone who's doing some things

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Edinburgh Festival: The Sign of Four

Posted by on in Edinburgh Fringe, Festivals, Theatre

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I do like Sherlock Holmes although I’m no expert on the books. This stage version of the “The Sign of Four” was excellent. Running for just over an hour in what can only be described as a cave off Cowgate with only five actors it was to say the least, inventive.

Whilst the venue was somewhat lacking, even by fringe standards the performances more than made up for this. I thoroughly enjoyed every minute of it.

Scotch Bonnet Chilli Pepper Crisps!

Posted by on in Food

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I admit to having high hopes for these. Most chilli flavour crisps are a sad let down so I envisaged something really good with the packet’s description of “fiery hot”. Sadly, I was to be disappointed. The crisps were a real let down. Slightly hot is the best description I could give them.

Just back from Edinburgh

Posted by on in Places

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Just back from Edinburgh after a week at the festival. It was brilliant as always and I loved it. More on that soon, but I thought I’d post a nice shot of the city for now.

IFTTT and connecting things to other things

Posted by on in Tech

I haven’t written about IFTTT for a while now although I’m still a big fan. Of course, of late, their big news is their iOS app. It was a very clever way to bring the service to iOS. They didn’t just bring the web version of the service to the app store. Instead they made it work beautifully, but over and above that gave the app specific iOS only channels. Now that’s clever.

Of course one of the big problems with IFTTT is that it works so well. Which means that actually you can for the most part just forget about it and leave it to get on with what you wanted it to do in the first place. However, I guess that is almost a problem for IFTTT as they probably want you to do more than set up a bunch of recipes and then never return, or rarely return.

So the app addresses that to a degree. I found myself using it for a while and then recently a lot less. Again, the reason is that IFTTT works so well that I don’t need to do anything more.

There are still lots of things I think that IFTTT could improve. Support for multiple accounts for twitter and other services for example, but even without these it is very good.

So, what’s next for IFTTT? Well of course there’s Android. There’s room for an extended iPad version. But always wonder if they could perhaps push a little further than connecting two services. Perhaps they could become IF THIS THEN THAT (AND THIS), or perhaps IF THIS THEN THAT ELSE IF THIS? You get where I’m going anyway.

Who knows. One things for sum. Automation will continue.