I had recently noticed a number of Thresher’s off-licences closed, but hadn’t actually appreciated that the entire company had gone into administration.

Turns out, that was a year ago. According to that story, only 400 of the 1,400 Threshers branches have been bought for use. The remaining thousand have now been returned to the landlords.

If you’re tired of run-of-the-mill “standard” smartphones, it looks like this may be something that’s of interest.

Synapse Phones will take your order for a customised smartphone (running Android 2.2) and ship it in Q1 of 2011

Think about for what you use your smartphone and what you will do with it. For example if you are someone who loves to take thousands of pictures, you can choose the 12MP camera and a xenon flash for taking pictures at night or under bad lighting conditions or if you want to store your whole music collection on your smartphone just choose a high amount of memory.

Seems like a good idea – and the prices aren’t epically unreasonable either. I hope it works out as a good business.

via Matt Verso on Twitter, I love this notice…

Closed due to administrative cockup - click to embiggenify

It’s worth clicking on the image to see the full glory of the notice.

Oh dear God, the Apprentice is back on.

What always gets me (other than the absolute bollocks that most of these cunts spout) is that all these high-flying business people who are ‘at the top of their game’ are all available for three months of filming.

Yep, that’s high-flying for sure – so essential to their companies, they can take three months out.

Cunts.

Over the last three years, I’ve been using the xMarks service (formerly FoxMarks) to synchronise all my bookmarks between Home PC, Laptop, Work PC, and iPhone. It’s always been a free service – allbeit one I’d have happily paid for – that made life *so* easy when it comes to keeping bookmarks in sync.

So it’s really sad news today that xMarks has 90 days to live. I don’t know of a better service for synchronising bookmarks (and passwords) in the way that xMarks does, and it’s been awesomely useful for a very long time.

For me- and it’s a point they raise in that blog post – I would’ve happily paid for the service. Not loads – but £10 – £25 a year, certainly.

A very sad day.

This week at work, I’ve broken the chair I’ve been using since October. Completely, categorically broken it. The central piston (for raising/lowering the seat) has cracked through the plastic baseplate, and now hits the floor. This has resulted in a chair that is politely known as “broken”. Or in my terminology, it’s “totally fucked”.

Thankfully the directors are OK about it – it’s wear and tear (and me being a weighty bastard) rather than that I’ve wilfully abused/broken the chair.

But because I know that at least some of the blame is due to being rather bulkier than most people, I had a look at the specs for some new office chairs as a replacement. And I know Argos isn’t exactly the centre of the office-furniture world, but it’s a useful reference point.

So looking through the chairs they’ve got listed, and all of them seem to have a ‘recommended max weight’ of 110kg – 17ish stone. You can see what I mean by looking at this one. And don’t just think it’s the cheap-ass ones – even this one for £150 has the same limitaton.

I know I’m not an average size – I’d need to lose four stone just to get down to that ‘max recommended weight’ – but equally I’m not massively obese. Fairly solid, I think it’s fair to say, but not supersized or owt. So why is it that chairs just aren’t available (in Argos, I know, I know) that are designed to support – or at least not fuck up and break – for someone my size?