Is there anything summerier than a bit of lemonade?

There are, admittedly, plenty of things summerier than Asda’s Diet Cloudy Lemonade (“Made with real lemons”) – I’d love a bit of fresh ice cold still Sicilian lemonade, but this is the nearest thing I can find in the house! It’s 4% comminuted lemon from concentrate and 1% lemon juice…! If you, like me, are unfamiliar with comminuted citrus fruits, check this out.

Hartlepool’s Middleton Grange Shopping Centre used to be home to a Co-op department store, but the shop closed in October last year. However, in a somewhat bizarre state of affairs, the coffee shop it contained remains open. To access the coffee shop, one must walk through the empty department store.

This surely makes Eugene’s one of the strangest coffee shops in Hartlepool, if not the UK. As coffee shop locations go, the back of an empty department store is hardly the most obvious or everyday choice! Despite this, it did appear to be pulling in customers – certainly far more so than the almost deserted Esquires in a more conventional mall spot!

Quite what will happen to Eugene’s when the Co-op store is ultimately let to new tenants remains to be seen.

Abandoned buildings always pique my interest: I always wonder what’s inside, and quite often find myself looking, with fascination, at the blogs and forums of urban explorers.

This gym is just round the corner from the halls I lived in during my first year at uni. Back then (2003), this gym seemed popular, and the car park was often busy. Clearly, somewhere along the line, something went wrong: it’s now an abandoned and increasingly dilapidated site. This seems bizarre given that it’s part of the thriving Teesside Retail Park, where new buildings are being added all the time. Why hasn’t this one been refurbished? Why hasn’t it been flattened and some much-needed car park spaces added? What went wrong? And what’s left inside?

All interesting questions… though the answers are no doubt prosaic!

I’ve had what’s now called the Kindle Keyboard since the day of its UK release – that is, just under two years. I’d never bothered following any of the hundreds of online guides on changing the screensavers until yesterday.

Now I have a pretty collection of all sorts of pictures, including this favourite of the Unisphere in Flushing Meadows. I don’t know why I didn’t do it sooner!

I’m a fairly recent convert to extensive bookmarking. Despite doing an awful lot of stuff online, I’ve survived most of my time with about 30 bookmarks in my bookmarks bar. Up until recently, I considered bookmarks as quick-access links to commonly used sites.

It’s only relatively recently that I got frustrated with losing sites that I didn’t use all that frequently, but wanted to refer to from time to time. And so, after reading about it on the Guardian site, I tried using Pinboard to allow me to store and search through far more bookmarks. This cleared some of the less frequently used ones from my bookmarks bar, which was appreciated, and meant that I got much better at bookmarking any site that I thought I might want to refer back to in future.

Pinboard has a bookmarklet system which allows you to add new items, but Delibar takes this to the next level. Delibar sits in the menubar, and gives me instant, searchable access to all my bookmarks. It also installs a (customisable) universal shortcut which allows me to bookmark any page in mere moments.

It’s a very, very simple app, but one that does it’s job perfectly. It also works with delicious, but I’ve never felt able to get on very well with that particular service, so can’t really comment on how well that works.

Delibar and Pinboard have revolutionised the way I bookmark, and they might do the same for you. Give them a go!

Some of the attractions of The Hoppings just poking above the trees. The Hoppings is the world’s biggest fair of travelling attractions, and it congregates annually on the Town Moor here in Newcastle each June. This is its 130th year.

I’m sure I’ll get along at some point this week for a closer look!

This Costa Express machine is in my local Asda, but they’re spreading all over the place at the moment. When they were first announced, I ridiculed the idea: Costa, Britain’s biggest coffee chain, had just spent a whole heap of money on ads to convince us that their coffee was different because it was made by highly trained baristas, not monkeys with machines. Then they decide to brand, erm, machines. It didn’t make sense to me.

But it turns out that I was wrong. I recently read that these machines have been doing a roaring trade, and sales have soared in places where they’ve displaced other machine brands. Which just goes to show that I know nothing about retail branding!

This rain greeted me as I reached the supermarket earlier today: I sat and sheltered in the car for ten minutes or so while it passed!

Inspired by this article, today’s picture is a cup of coffee. In 1999, there were 700 branded coffee shops on Britain’s streets; there are now 5,000. Independents have also increased in number, but to a lesser extent: there were previously 4,100, now 5,633. So I guess I should probably have featured a photo of an independent… Look back to photo 113 if you feel bad about me featuring Starbucks!

This is a little welding shop across the river from work. I don’t know any more about it than that: I’d never really registered its existence until today!