Thomil's Random Ramblings

Apple and cheap – Now there’s two terms you rarely use in one phrase. Even affordable is stretching it, as a quick glance at the price tags in the Apple Online Store will surely tell you. That being said, in recent years, Apple has made moves towards more affordable devices, at least with some of its product lines. The latest effort in this is the new 6th generation iPad that was released in April 2018. It is the device that finally got me to upgrade from my old iPad mini 2.  Now before I get into the review itself, I need to be upfront about a few things. I am a former Apple employee, although I left the company in 2016. I did not receive this device from my former employer, however, and I did not get it at a special discount either. I paid the regular Irish retail price for the device, as well as for the Apple Pencil. My review may occasionally stray from a purely objective path due to this past, so be aware of that. Why mention the pencil, you ask? Well, you’ll have to read t...

Soldiers and armoured vehicles in the streets of Cork! Combat aircraft in the sky above the city! While this might sound like the result of the Rebel City trying, and failing, once again to declare its independence, this event, which took place just this last weekend, had a much less problematic reason. The annual Defence Forces Open Day had come to Cork for 201, with all three branches of the armed forces showcasing their skill and equipment in Cork’s Fitzgerald Park. This Open Day is in a different city in Ireland every year, and this time, it was Cork’s turn. Well, it was a Sunday, and I had nothing else planned, so I figured why not? The weather was great, after all. No, there's no revolution happening in Cork. It's not a military coup, either. There's a perfectly reasonable explanation for all of this. Getting there was easy as usual, thanks to Coke Zero Bikes, and upon arriving at the park, it turned out to be a smart move as well, as there was no parking a...

Germany in the early 1980s. The cold war has reached a new climax. Along a line stretching from the Baltic to the Alps, armies of NATO and the Warsaw pact are staring each other each waiting for the other to make a mistake, the inhibition to strike lower than at any other time since the Cuban Missile Crisis. One of the potential battlegrounds are the vast plains and gently rolling hills of Northern Germany, with the city of Hamburg with its vast deepwater port beckoning as the main prize. Both sides know this, consequently, in the decades since the founding of the Federal Republic of Germany, NATO and the Bundeswehr, the Western German Federal Armed Forces, have ringed the city with scores of army barracks, depots, and air bases. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the National Peoples‘ Army of Eastern Germany, together with the Soviet Forces in Germany, had amassed an entire army corps each to push down the Elbe Valley and into the Northern German plains. Both sides were training ...