Moving home

Dear very small readership

The long and short of this (well, the short of it) is that I'm going to move by blog away from Google's Blogger to WordPress in the near future. This will mean that:

• The URL will remain the same.
• EXCEPT...if you read a feed this will probably be at a new URL (probably http://blog.wintle.me.uk/feed/). As this is a new feed you may initially see posts that you've already seen.
  
• There will be a new look - which may change again in the near future. (I'm working on a Magic Roundabout, road-sign styled theme. But my graphic design skills aren't much good and I don't really have the time! We'll see).
• You may need a new login to submit comments. I'm reviewing how to play this one.
  

Apologies for the inconvenience. A detailed explanation (the long of it) is below.

I actually first started Blogging several years ago - I was an "early adopter" if you like. I made a few posts and then gave up - partly out of embarassment.

Last year my writing took off, partly as a form of therapy during a difficult time of life, partly as a way to track and report what was going on with me health wise, and it's just bumbled on since then. Regular readers will know that it's mostly notes to self that I hope will be informative/interesting to others, and I hope that my writing will continue in that form.

And alongside this I'm a big fan off Google's online services.  I know that some think they're evil, but things like GMail and Google Reader are so feature-rich and easy to use...and growing in features too...that I'm hooked.

The one service that, in my opinion, hasn't kept up and that suffers from being Google's, is Blogger - the software that publishes this blog.  Specific niggles would be:

• Pages are big and take long to download
• Templates are tricky to edit (even for a relative expert like me!)
• Photos from URLs are a nightmare to add and integration with Google's own Picasaweb and the competitor's Flickr is non-existent.

I've recently started hosting my own, private journal over at Wordpress.com and it's REALLY impressed me.  It's fast, it uses good, open standards, it's got a great dashboard (and an even better one with v2.7 which is awesome!) and it's being developed at quite a rate of knots.

So shifting "Magic Roundabouts..." is a no-brainer for me.  There's a little work to do, but Wordpress even imports from Blogger - comments, users and all.

There MAY in fact be two shifts.  I'm contemplating where to host but want to move quick.  In all cases, I'll keep you posted.

Thanks for reading and for bearing with us during non-essential maintenance.

Social Web - the good and the bad

Control Alt Delete

FIRST: A blatant plug for our favourite, not-very-well-known band (yes, we know someone in it) Iko. We don't like them because we know them - we like them because we think they do really good music!

They are on the verge of releasing their second album and have just released a freely downloadable EP. Take a look over at http://www.myspace.com/ikomusic. To get the EP you'll have to email ikoauto@ikomusic.com with your name in the subject line.

The Social Web

Web 2.0, the social web, networking, life streaming...whatever you choose to call it I'm quite interested in how people use web-based tools to interact, and I've occasionally posted about this in the past.

Lots of people remain skeptical. Facebook is popular but anything else seems to raise eyebrows and questions about what the point is and why it's so complicated. My wife is sometimes amongst these.

The Good - Ravelry

But for some there is this thing called the "Killer App". The one little website or program that gets you excited because it has a real use. And some of my female friends (including Sally) have been getting excited about Ravelry. Ravelry is online social-networking for knitters. You can:

• log what bits of wool you've got;
• log what projects you're working on and your progress with them - linking to the bits of wool you're using in that project;
• register who your contacts/friends are;
• see what your friends are making and what their progress is;
• view and download patterns.

And so on. There are lots of cool things you can do with the information on Ravelry too, such as, if you have some wool, you can look up what other people are making with that type/make/colour of wool and use it as inspiration.

I think it's brilliant site. A really good example of how the web can bring like-minded people together to share ideas and inspire and encourage one another. And the best thing is that it's NOT full of techie people and it's drawn in people who probably wouldn't normally use the web for this sort of interaction.

Well done Ravelry!

The Bad - Amazon.com

This is really an excuse for a website rant. I'm making a vague tie-in to the social-web theme by claiming that Amazon's expansion into social-networking-type activities is killing it.

Well, actually, maybe it was already dead.

Let's remind ourselves about Amazon. It was one of the first big online retailers, selling books, music, DVD's and so on to the masses across the world.

It has since expanded to sell all manner of things, not just from its own warehouses but from a large number of other "marketplace" retailers. It has a complex product reviewing system and, wish lists and customized recommendations.

It was brilliant, quick, easy to use, and sold lots of things that you just couldn't find elsewhere. And cheap too!

This is all well and good, but it's starting to go a little far and, as a result, Amazon's website is now complete information overload!!!

I'd love to paste screen shots but they're technically copyrighted to Amazon, so I won't. I will try to describe. There are some long lists here...for which I make no apology.

The homepage tells me about:

• delivery (and restrictions on delivery)
• VAT rates dropped
• link to personalised recommendations
• link to what to do if I'm a new customer
• "Your Amazon.co.uk"
• Deals of the Week
• Gift Certificates
• Gifts and Wish lists
• Search
• MP3 downloads
• Clearance shoes
• Gift certificates (Again)
• What other customers are looking at Right Now
• Festive streals
• New MP3 store
• Gift certificates (in case I didn't get it the first two times)
• Clothing
• Phillips Imageo candles (2 for £35)
• and all that before I scroll down at which point I get to see Amazon exclusives, email settings, selling and buying stuff on Amazon, more to explore (do I need any more?), web services for developers, perfect gifts for him, UnderArmour performance apparel, Acer notebooks, best sellers in knitwear, shop kickers shoes, powerballs, health and beauty deals of the week, what customers are wishing for in DVD, a Sky TV advert, find great gifts for all the family, featured stores, where's my stuff, delivery and returns, help pages, my recent history and a load of inter-site links.

Phew. Oh, and there's a list of different shop areas to browse, like Music, Books, Electronics, etc.

Most of this is not what I want to see at all. I just want to buy a book and then track the order.

First thing then. I want to buy a book I've seen called "Living Africa". A quick search for this is simple (hooray!) and results are shown in a nice clean search results page with little clutter. This is better. So I select the item I'm after.

One thing that bugs me about Amazon's marketplace is that it's not always clear if Amazon are going to ship you the item themselves or if it will come from a smaller retailer that hasn't yet gained my trust. A small note informs me that this will be dispatched by Amazon (and it's £15 than we saw it in the shops for...bargain!). While I'm hear, I think, I may as well check out the customer reviews, to see if it's any good.

And...AAARGRH! I then get information overload again! Customer reviews is now 4 pages down the screen. Here's what else I can see from the product page:

• Information about the Amazon Prime programme
• My shopping basket
• 2 lots of information on delivery
• Wish list, wedding list and tell a friend buttons
• More buying choices (new and used from other retailers)....twice!
• Details of other editions
• Details of which promotions this book is a part of
• Details of another book that is often bought together with this one
• List of other things that people who bought this book also bought
• Product details (a page and a half down) including more links to other editions and links to update product details and give feedback on images
• Sponsored links
• Product Description (now two and a half pages down)
• Other Africa-related products
• Tags (suggested by others and the ability to add tags)
  
• What customers buy after viewing this item
• Customer reviews (yay!)
• Customer discussions
• Listmania
• Look for similar items by category
• Look for similar items by subject
• Feedback on the details of this product
• Links to other Amazon "stores"
• Sky TV advert
• Where's my stuff, delivery and returns and help pages
• Your recent history

Flip! All I want to do is buy a book! Don't get me wrong. Some of this is really useful. But there's just too much on one page. I went back just now to look at the tags section and couldn't find it in the 8-screens full of information. What good is any nugget of information if it's drowned out by a forest of other text, links and graphics?

And why would I want to tag a product in a shop anyway? It's great that Amazon remember things that I've looked at recently so that I can find them again, but why would I want to assign keywords to something in a shop?

There's lots of duplicated information (mostly related products presented in a myriad of ways) and the basic information isn't prominent enough.

OK, so I placed an order (which I'm sure happened without a confirmation screen), and I later want to check the status of it. I've since logged out and navigated back to the front page.

Now, where's the login button. Go on - check my list of what's on the front page and see if you can see a log in link! There isn't one! I either have to scroll to the bottom of the page and click "where's my stuff" or, randomly, click on the text "personal recommendations". Admittedly, this text is part of the sentence "Sign in to get personal recommendations", but it's confused by the fact that the linked text is "personal recommendations", not "sign in". Where do I sign in if I don't want to see personal recommendations? It's like writing:

Sign in to get charged by an elephant.

Well, OK, it's only slightly like that. You get my point.

Having managed to log in, I find that Amazon have some old credit card details (for cards that have expired) and a load of old addresses that need cleaning out. Oh, and I can now add a user profile so that I can "Share information about myself" and "Connect with friends and other Amazon customers". Quite why I'd want to do this I don't know.

What I'm saying is that Amazon's site is now plagued by chaotic design, seemingly pointless features and information overload to the extent that I'm reluctant to use it.

Phew. That was a long rant. Sorry.

Christmas is coming. And for once I think I might be jumping in my car to head to the shops rather than doing everything online. Maybe a few hours browsing Borders would be nice. Grab a coffee and get lost in the aisles of books and CD's. Yes, that's a plan.

Now if Amazon could deliver me a mellow, fairly-traded milky coffee in the next ten minutes without me having to leave the comfort of my sofa. THAT would be good!

Software Updates and Progress Bars

A couple of IT annoyances.

Software Updates

It seems that whenever I turn my computer on at the moment, about half of the software needs to auto-update. Pidgin (IM client), Firefox (and extensions), Anti-Virus, Adobe Reader and Flash, Windows, iTunes...it's incessant! And it means that it's about half an hour from pushing the on button to being able to do anything useful.

Of course, I could disable all the auto-updates. What I'd really like is to be able to click a button that says "update all my software now" and run all the updates at once at a time that is convenient to me.

The auto-update problem is only made worse by my second annoyance.

Progress Bars

We did a module in my computer science degree about Human-Computer Interaction. In it we were told that a progress bar should tell you three things:

1. How much work has been done.
2. How much work is left.
3. How quickly the work is progressing.

Some status bars used to achieve this. Actually, the best ones were usually multi-progress bars that showed how far a job involving lots of smaller jobs had got. One bar showed overall progress and the other showed progress of the smaller sub-tasks. Linux installs were always pretty good for this sort of thing.

But I've not seen a progress bar that does any of the above three things for years now. I see progress bars that do all of the following:

• start again from zero once they reach 100%
• advance at unsteady rates
  
• stop for a long time at a certain percentage and then suddenly leap
• advance at a steady rate but then the work is not complete when they reach 100%

And what's really bad is that we now take this for granted. I mean, what if your car's petrol gague suddenly dropped from 3/4 full to 1/8 full? Or if your washing machine showed it was on the last rinse when really it was still doing the pre-wash? Would we accept that?

We should be telling our software installer vendors that this is unacceptable. I've wasted many hours staring at progress bars that are telling me a job is nearly done when it's really far from completion. I've been late home and I've been late to bed because of such things. I bet you could do analysis that shows that businesses are losing millions of man-hours while people wait for things to complete in this way.

We need progress on progress bars! Who will stand and join with me to reclaim our %-complete's and make them what they once were?

Getting Wii Fit

A Confession

Having finally, after many months, confessed to having a Wii and telling the world what I think about it. It's time for the next step of my "coming out".

We, after a long period of searching, also bought a Wii Fit!

If you have no idea what I'm talking about then take a look at the Nintendo Site about it. In short, it's a balance board. A small and sturdy (and quite heavy) plinth that you stand on and it works out how much you weight and tracks you as you shift your centre of balance.

They were, at the time, pretty hard to get hold of. Yet lots of my colleagues at work were raving about them, and the thought of an interactive way to keep fit in your front room sounded pretty good. And we figured that if the quality of the Wii itself was anything to go by, this should be another more-than-half-decent Nintendo product.

Balance Boards and Body Tests

The reality turned out to be pretty good too. The Balance Board is robust and accurate and easy to set up and get going. The Wii Fit game is good too, after telling it who you are, how old you and, and a few other things (you only do this setup once), you get to do a "Body Test", which weighs you and gives you some balance tests to do. At the end of the test you are presented (in quite humourous fashion, with your Wii Fit Age. This is a number between 20 and 99 that represents your 'fitness'. Sort of.

You're supposed to repeat the body test daily and the Wii Fit tracks your weight and Wii Fit Age, and you can set targets. The little animated version of the balance board that talks you through it all, also gives you fitness tips. These get quite dull after a while and I wish now that there was an option to turn them off.

The Wii Fit also tracks how long you spend on it and rewards you with unlocking extra features as you use it more.

Playing!

The game then allows you to start exercising. There are four different types of exercise:

• Yoga - an onscreen "instructor" shows you a pose and you follow. The Balance Board tracks how well you're balancing and the instructor gives you tips or encouragement in response. At the end you are scored on how well you balanced.
  
• Strength Exercises - again, the onscreen instructor shows and you follow, with appropriate feedback and scores at the end.
• Balance Games - skiing, snowboarding, riding a bubble, tightrope walking and a 'sitting still' game. All good ways to fine tune control of your centre of gravity. Thought some are much more fun than others. Again you are scored on how you perform.
  
• Aerobics - well, hardly. But you can do jogging on the spot, step classes and a kind of 'boxercise' type thing. Some of this is fun, some is pretty pointless in my opinion. As always, you are given scores for how well you do.
  

It's very easy to get into and the competetive element with scores and tables showing who's the best, is a great motivator. There are exercises in all categories that I don't like (the bubble game and the jogging on the spot being two in particular), but I'll happily do a bit of each.

So much potential

Now, I think this is a good product. BUT, what I really really wish is that it was a GREAT product. I'm really happy with the Wii Fit, but I have a load of criticisms that could be easily fixed that would make it SO much better.

1. It's annoying after a while. The talking instructor and animated balance board really need to go away after about 2 weeks. They're good for helping you in but once you know what you're doing there really needs to be an option to turn them off.
2. The competetive element is hampered by the fact that only one person can play at a time. Things like skiing and snowboarding would be much better if you could quickly change between players. As it is you have to navigate back out to the profile selection screen, and then back in (past the annoying talking balance board) as the next person. A simple "Play this as a different user" option would go far!
3. The Wii Fit Age is a bit pointless. There's one particular balance exercise that I'm no good at and which gives me an age of about 40. All the others give me an age between 25 and 35. But it varies so wildly that it's meaningless, and the program's critical comments each time I go up are...yes...annoying. This may be related to the fact that...
4. It doesn't cater well for people who are already fit. I expect if you're overweight and unfit then this is a great way to ease yourself into some exercise. But I'm about the right weight and I'm pretty healthy and fit. Yet it demands that I set a target (lose 2lbs this week to aim for your ideal BMI (Body Mass Index), which probably isn't really what I need. Plus it complains if I have a big dinner and put on a couple of lbs. Big deal. Now shut up!!!
5. It doesn't do programs of exercises. I'd like it to say Monday - Yoga and Strength work. Tuesday - some aerobics. Wednesday - Balance Games. Thursday Aerobics and Strength. And so on, and to have it guide me through a program of exercies. As it is you have to select an exercise - say, a yoga pose - do it, get scored on it, then go back to the menu and select the next thing. Occasionally it suggests that you do a yoga pose and a strength exercise together because they complement each other, but you still have to navigate back through the menus to get to the other exercise.

So, much as I like it, I'm looking forward to the rumoured other games that are coming out for the balance board.

I don't think it's made me much fitter, but the balance games are a lot of fun and the Yoga and strength work is great for my posture and core strength, which I need for cycling.

Sally doesn't really like the gym, has free time after work and a lower level of fitness and it's been a really good way for her to burn some calories and build some strength.

Those last two paragraphs are testimony to the universal appeal of the Wii Fit. We both get something from it. It's not a replacement for a gym, or for getting outdoors and doing some real exercise, but it's a fun way to do some mild exercise.

Let's hope there's a Wii Fit 2 that addresses some of my gripes and really brings the balance board into it's own.

Now where's my trainers and the TV remote?

The Wii

I'm sure a million people have reviewed the Nintendo Wii, so my comments on the latest addition to our household will be late and fairly insignificant. Still, having had the Wii for a while, I want to note what I think.

Gaming History and Philosophy in the Wintle Household

Sally and I aren't big gamers. We have PCs and we play silly online games like Stick Cricket (a personal favourite) and The Helicopter Game but in terms of gaming devices, until early June, the most advanced thing we owned was a cheap, 2nd-hand, Nintendo 64, and three games (only two of which were worth playing (GoldenEye and MarioKart).

The reason we own the N64 is for Multiplayer games. We use video games as a fun way to spend time with others.

So when I'd heard much good stuff said about the Wii from my colleagues and had had a go on one round at a friend's house, I...well...I know I shouldn't covet, but, let's say, I put buying one of the consoles on my to do list.

All I had to do was convince Sally. Which is a long story of it's own.

So, shortly before our birthdays in June, we treated ourselves and, after some hunting, found a Wii to buy and bought it.

Initial Thoughts

First reaction? It's a heavy little thing. A small, elegant white box, but solid-feeling and with quite some weight to it! But it seems well built, well packaged and it was simple enough to set up.

The basic package included a single wireless remote, and the "Wii Sports" game. It doesn't have co-axial output so you need a telly with SCART or RGB inputs (we still have a big CRT TV rather than a modern LCD or Plasma screen, but we had enough SCART sockets for this not to be a problem). The only thing that felt a bit flimsy was the remote sensor bar, which you sit on top of or below your telly.

The remote seems pretty robust and after the initial throwing-across-the-room accidents now comes with both a handy wrist strap (that the Wii constantly tells you to use!) and a silicon "jacket" which gives fairly thick padding to further prevent danger.

In fact, the whole health-and-safety thing is a bit overdone with pages and pages of the manual given over to RSI, the dangers of waving remotes around, and how to use your Wii without damaging anyone or anything. All done, presumably, so that Nintendo can say "we told you so" when common-sense-less people try to sue them for damages. What a sad world we live in. Still, I appreciate the wrist strap, which is a highly sensible addition.

Channels

On startup the Wii does a few uninteresting things, like asking you to give it a name, and then presents you with a selection of "channels". These are the different things that the Wii can do, and all the channels are stored in the small amount of flash memory that the Wii has (I think this is 512MB).

Channels are like little applications, and include a photo viewer (the Wii has an SD memory card slot for your camera or phone's memory card to go in), settings pages, news, weather and "Mii" channel where you design your own little character with which to appear onscreen.

You can add channels from some games and they are also downloadable if you set up a wireless internet connection.

The only channel not stored in the Wii's memory is the disc channel, which is where you access the games that come on DVD-like discs.

The only fiddly thing is that the Wii needs to be left on standby to keep the weather and news up to date, which, of course, doesn't appeal to our green sensibilities - yet they are very useful channels.

Design

The Wii is pretty family-centric, and the look and feel could be said to be childish. Yet it manages to accomplish this with some element of style. Yes, the Mii's are little cartoon characters, and everything has round edges and things float and bounce around. But things are smooth and clean, things scroll and zoom nicely, and there are certain whizzy little things that probably shouldn't be there but are - clever touches that grown ups appreciate.

Your first Game: Wii Sports

Wii Sports comes with the Wii and is one of the big lures.  It's simple but makes astoundingly good use of the Wii's remote.  Tennis is a perennial favourite.  Easy to pick up, but as you learn that you can use the remote with twist and flick to achieve subtly different shots, the pace picks up.

Bowling is a great game if you've got people round but only have a limited number of remotes.  Golf is great, but tricky and could do with more depth (only 9 holes which quickly go from being simple to outrageous).  Baseball divides the Wintle household, I love it, but Sally's not a fan.  The little nuances like waggling the bat while you're waiting at the plate are great.  Shame you don't have control over the outfielders though - the game is probably too much left to chance.

And then there's boxing.  I put of doing boxing for as long as I could because I thought I'd look really stupid doing it, but it's hugely energetic, and highly addictive.  Definitely a good way to get rid of some stress at the end of a difficult day.

Summary

We love our Wii and it's a big part of entertainment in our home now.  We've added Lego Star Wars, Mario Kart and a Wii Fit (and the barely-worth-mentioning Wii Play) to the collection and, at the moment, that's all that we need.  The download of a web-browser channel has made it useful as well as playful.  I'll maybe write about some of these (especially Wii Fit) in the near future.

I love the way that video games have moved on to be more interactive, and especially they way Nintendo are playing with how we interact with the small-screen.

Overall a clever, simple, addicitve, and highly entertaining toy that hasn't failed to disappoint.

Brain Dumping with wikidpad

Recently someone asked if there was a good tool for dumping lots of stuff that was in their head in a GTD (Getting Things Done) manner.

I use a tool called Wikidpad for this. It's a desktop Wiki, which enabled you to write short or long notes, and link them together in a variety of ways - in much the same way as a web-based Wiki. But it's not very well documented and there's not tutorial for using it. So here's my own little guide to how I use it.

I'm not going to cover the basics of Wikis - you can read about them elsewhere. Wikidpad uses simple CamelCase as WikiWords that automatically become links to other pages (though you can suppress this for specified words).

I'd recommend opening the help Wiki and looking at the pages TextFormatting, TodoItems and WikiDocumentAttributes as a starting point.

For me, what really makes Wikidpad useful is its auto-indexed attributes and todo-type tags. Not only do your pages appear in a tree showing their location within the Wiki (essentially creating folders of related information), but you can also create hierarchical attributes that are
indexed and then displayed as a tree in the "Views" section. This is essentially an index of information that you've "tagged" with attributes.

For example, I can have a "Customer" attribute. If I put the text "[Customer:New Technologies Inc]" on a page, this will create, in the index, a customer folder, containing a New Technologies Inc folder, containing all the pages with that attribute.

This is HUGELY useful because it means I can "tag" information in a whole multitude of different ways:

• By customer
• By any number of different references that may exist (e.g. a request for change reference).
• How's about atrtributes by date? I can effectively create a journal by using attributes like "[Diary.2008.10:07]" - then everything I did on that date is referenced from the index views under 2008 -> 10 -> 07.

Another example is meetings - I write up meeting notes in my wiki with
attributes for like:

[Diary.2008.18:15]
[Customer:Random Corp]
[Meetings.Present:Dave Smith]
[Meetings.Present:Joe Bloggs]

Thus helping me answer questions like "Wasn't that mentioned in a meeting with Dave back in November?" quickly and easily.

The todo's are good too. I can use keywords like "action", "todo", "done", "track" and "question" to gather items that need my attention. If I write "action: Send documentation to account manager", this will appear in the index under my actions. These can also be nested - so I can classify actions. e.g. "todo.Personal: Book next year's holiday", or "action.Objectives:Deliver storage improvement project".

I'm not entirely clear in on the GTD philosophy - I know a little - but this is great, it allows me to group all my meeting actions and todo's together, review them in one go, pick off the little ones that can be cleared down easily, and then focus on the bigger ones.

The only thing that this doesn't really allow is setting deadlines. But I'm sure you could use some combination of todo's and attributes to do this.

In fact, it's the combination of a page hierarchy (as in a standard Wiki), todos, and attributes, that make this tool powerful and flexible. You can really customise it to how you want to work!

Of course, these's a full search facililty, as well as the ability to produce lists of backlinks, rename pages while keeping WikiWords consistent, and you can do neat things like add little icons to your
hierarchy of pages.

It's a bit clunky at first but worth persevering with - it really has become my second brain (and it's backed up to a memory stick FREQUENTLY!). I also export all the pages to HTML every now and then so that Google Desktop can index them too.

Hopefully that's of use to someone. Enjoy! And if you've any other tips for productivity, let me know!

Playing with Symfony

OK, here's where I kinda "come out" as a true geek. Most of this will probably mean nothing to any of you and for that I make absolutely no apology whatsoever.

This whole post is a bit of a brag, but it's writing up what's been an intriguing afternoon/evening for me too.

I have a pretty strong background in Software Engineering, but I'm a bit behind with the times. I don't really know much about how people go about developing applications these days. It's something I've been meaning to get to grips with for a while. Today I've been playing a bit with Symfony - a PHP-based web development framework, with the aim of re-writing the database using a LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP) stack and Symfony. If you really care I'm using an installation of MoWes on a USB stick to keep this all portable so I can develop from work or home. Thanks must go to those on Twitter who have thrown some of these technologies my way.

Web-based applications seem to be the way of things at the moment (unless you're doing hard-core coding for things like OS's or embedded systems, which I'm not). And all the little projects I can either get my hands on, or dream up, are all web-apps that would benefit from a rapid-application development (RAD) type approach.

This has sort-of been happening a bit at work as I look after a database with a web-based front-end. This is currently written in PHP, outputting static HTML (i.e. no JavaScript) but when I wrote it I tried to:

• abstract the database operations;
• separate the data model and the presentation so that the code didn't need to be updated when new fields got added, deleted, etc.;
• create some generic code for those things that remained the same for all pages (cookies/authentication, standard menus, banners, etc).
  

It's a bit clunky but it works well and the time spent coding the abstractions has saved me a lot of time with subsequent modifications.

So it was a surprise to find that most of what I've done, or tried to do, fits with the principles on which application frameworks are based (see the Fundamental Concepts section of the Symfony book I'm reading). The terminology is all a bit much to take in in one go, but essentially I was doing things right.

Or is it a surprise? My computing teachers were always keen to teach us good principles like abstraction, and I've always held that my fundamentals are good. So maybe it shouldn't be a surprise.

That's not to say that learning to use Symfony is quick and easy. I'm working my way through the tutorial, but without a lot of time it could easily leak from my head.

Possibly more techie posts like this to come as I learn more. Or maybe I'll have rewritten the database before I get a chance to write again. That'll depend on how good all this new technolgoy really is!

Google Chrome

The Internet (and, indeed, the press in general) has been alive with talk of Google Chrome.  As always, I won't have much to add to the masses of stuff that's already been written, but here's how Chrome has been for me.

Hearing about it

Heck, it was only yesterday but it seems so long ago!  I guess I originally heard about it from my desktop alerts, or on one of the Blogs I follow on Google reader.  It all started when a 38-page cartoon explaining how Chrome came about and some of the design philosophy behind it (quite techie stuff!) was "accidentally" released before its scheduled time.

I confess, I put off reading this until it was all over the internet, at which point I thought...oh, well, go on then.

I was quite impressed with the ideas they were putting forward!  And started to get excited about an imminent download!

First Impressions

I got to download quite late on Tuesday, so didn't get to play much.  A second look on Wednesday has left me actually very impressed!

1) It's fast.

There have been numerous benchmarks put forward but I use the global-standard, what-does-Ross-think test, and it rates as fast.  Seriously, my qualitative opinion is that it's quicker then IE and Firefox for most of what I do.

The only real test I've done is where I have a page with a very large table that's basically a dump of an entire database.  This took around 7 seconds on Firefox 3.  Chrome rendered it in less than 3 seconds!  Wow!

2) It's neat.

Like most Google stuff, it just works!  Even version 0.2 works with pretty much everything I've thrown it at.  I just had some struggles with the "New" Faceboook, but that's about it.  Flash, Javascript, Java, it all just seems to work.  Not bad for an early Beta.

There's some really neat features that will please everyone, like the drag-and-drop tabs, the smart location bar, the quick dial.  OK, you can get some of these with Opera or with Extensions to Firefox, but they're here and they're nice.

There's also stuff to appeal to techies.  A separate process viewer, ability to kill individual tabs' processes, DOM inspector and JavaScript debugger.  All pretty neat.

3) It's simple

The UI is typically Google - clean and clever.  I like it.

Things it doesn't have that I like?

I immediately missed mouse gestures, that Opera invented and that are copied with Firefox extensions.

I miss my Twitter client plug in "Twitterfox" - there are other Twitter clients, but running this inside my broswer keeps everything in one place.

And I was immediately baffled as to why Google's browser didn't make use of my online Google bookmarks.

But that's about it!

Privacy Issues

I noticed this myself before I spotted it circulating on the Internet.  The original EULA (User Agreement) contained a section which basically gave Google the right to use whatever you looked at or uploaded using Chrome.  It said this:

"You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. By submitting, posting or displaying the content, you give Google a perpetual, irrevocable, worldwide, royalty-free and non-exclusive licence to reproduce, adapt, modify, translate, publish, publicly perform, publicly display and distribute any Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services. This licence is for the sole purpose of enabling Google to display, distribute and promote the Services and may be revoked for certain Services as defined in the Additional Terms of those Services."

Scary!  I stopped using it at that point and questioned my commitment to Google's services.

Fortunately, common sense has prevailed.  When I got to downloading it at home tonight the same section of the EULA simply said:

"You retain copyright and any other rights that you already hold in Content that you submit, post or display on or through the Services."

A quick and interesting about turn.

Reading comments from Bloggers on this did get me thinking about how much data I trust Google with.  Some think we shouldn't be paranoid about it, they just use it for targetting adverts at you.  Others think that we're doing a mis-service to mankind as a whole when we give Google anything.

I'm not quite sure where I stand on this.  I give a lot of data to Google because I find their services REALLY useful (and growing more so by the week!).  If someone else develops a better integrated set of apps I'll go use that, but, to my knowledge, they haven't.

Sainsbury's get a lot of data from me because I like shopping there.  Is that a bad thing?

I'm actually quite precious about security, especially online, and being a techie who's aware of the risks makes me more so, but I'm also educated enough to know how to stop bad things happening...I think.

Anyone care to correct my view of privacy?  I'm open to hearing why Google are "evil"?

Summary

This is an early v0.2 Beta.

Wow!

Gimme the real thing soon please.  I like it a lot!

Domain Settings

Quick note for any regular readers (I think there might be two of you!), I've been playing with some technical jiggery-pokery (DNS sub-domain/CNAME entries to be exact) and have managed to make Blogger look like it's on my own domain. Woo hoo!

So, hopefully, regardless of where it's hosted (this MAY be under review), my blog should now always be at http://blog.wintle.me.uk/

Not just a pretty face eh?

Garmin Forerunner 50 Heart Rate Monitor

I've had my HRM (Heart Rate Monitor) that I got for my cycle training for about 6 weeks now so it's time I did a bit of a write up.

Why Bother?

First of all, why bother with an HRM? (If you haven't spotted already I'm the kind of person that thinks a LOT and so my process of purchasing a new gadget is usually a long and drawn out one that involved justifying my spend and lots of research on the options before actually spending any cash)

Well, I've been cycling more and more and longer distances and spending longer in the saddle. Unfortunately for me I'm the kind of person who naturally pushes myself to my physical limit. I need no encouragement to go faster or harder, I'm always trying to go as hard and fast as I can. This, it turns out, is not good for you. And you can increase aerobic capacity (fitness) by training in the right zones.

So I wanted an HRM to encourage me to ride at a reasonable pace, so as to:

1. Not knacker myself out on longer rides.
2. Help actually improve my fitness and endurance.
   

Makes sense.

A bit about Training Zones

I'm not expert but it goes something like this.

Any training programme recommends spending time at different heart rate "zones", which are percentages of your MHR (maximum heart rate). It is generally considered that there are 5 zones called various things depending on who you ask but something like:

1. Rest/low activity
2. Recovery
3. Aerobic
4. Anaerobic
5. Maximum

It turns out that I was spending most of my time in Anaerobic or maximum. No wonder I was getting tired!

The theory goes that spending time at Zone 3 increases aerobic capacity and endurance, Zone 4 builds strength, and zone 5 is for, well, sprinting and hill climbing.

Why the Garmin?

There are plenty of HRMs on the market. I chose the Garmin Forerunner 50 because:

• It didn't look rubbish
• It was reasonably priced (relatively)
• It's a watch so I can use it for running/gym work as well as on the bike (I had considered a bike computer with built in HRM but dismissed this idea as lesss flexible)
• It has all the features I need.
• It has a data storage function that can wirelessly upload to Garmin software. (I'm a bit obsessive about how fast/far I've gone - now I can track my heart rate too!)
  
• It has the option to link to a foot pod (pedometer) and a bike sensor to expand its functionality.
  

Is it any good?

The HRM is fine! Does what it says on the tin. I've had a BIT of interferance from the bike computer on one ride, suggesting that it doesn't use a coded signal (this would allow the watch to only count wireless pulses from the HRM), but it's only been tempremental the once. You need to make the chest sensors wet for it to work well too!

The sensor takes a bit of getting used to but is comfortable. I imagine that this is true of any monitor.

The watch is a little bulky but not too un-cool. If you have small arms it might look a bit silly. The display is clear and large. Turning your wrist slightly to look at the numbers while on the bike is a bit annoying. In some ways I wish I'd got an integrated bike computer/HRM, but I chose not to and that's the price I pay. It's not too much of a problem though.

The warning alarm that tells you if you're outside of your (configurable) training zone is plenty loud and annoying enough. In hindsight I'd like two different alarms, one to say I'm a little over and one to say I'm REALLY over.

I read one review that suggested that the instructions weren't that good and I tend to agree, I've found a lot out just by playing and button-pushing.

Data storage and transfer works well and is very simple. You can review some of the data on the watch itself but after upload to the Garmin software you can see detailed graphs (data is, I think, every 5 seconds). The software really wants you to be using a more expensive GPS device and functionality is limited when just using the Forerunner 50.

It's a little annoying in that the HRM can't take into account your circumstances. If you're pounding uphill, or in traffic, or trying to keep good up pace on a busy road, or fighting a headwind, you need to be pushing a bit to stay safe, or to get where you're going and having the watch beep at you every 5 seconds doesn't help. Perhaps a mute button would be useful?

Has it worked?

YES! Well, I think so. It's certainly slowed me down as my MyCyclingLog.com stats show. This is frustrating at times, like when you find your training zone only allows you to do 12mph uphill into a slight wind. But I recover quicker and feel better after long rides and evidence would seem to show that I'm getting fitter.

It's helped me "tune in" to my body a bit, know where I'm pushing too hard and where I could go harder - even without the watch now! And as time has gone on and I've done more long rides at lower pace, I seem to be able to go faster for the same heart rate - evidence that my fitness is improving after only a few weeks? I hope so!

So, despite the few things that niggle me about it, I've found the experience pretty good and would recommend an HRM as a training tool for anyone doing regular lengthly exercise. And the Forerunner 50 is a fine place to start!

Update: Bizarrely, just today, BikeRadar published this article about training zones and getting fitter by riding slower. They've renumbered the zones slightly but it's the same theory. And it is only a theory - some of the commentors there disagree with that theory too!

Behind with the Times

This is a bit of an unstructured brain-dump of where certain techie things are in my head right now.

I wrote about my use of Twitter a while back. One of the boons of this has been watching the inspiring little comments of an old Bathonian friend of mine.

My friend (I won't name him unless he reads this and decides he would like me to) is...well...I don't really know what he does now. I think he used to work for the Institute of Physics or something, as a web designer, and he seems to have continued in a similar line of work. And now, in the absence of anyone else, he's my personal guru for all things web design, Web 2.0, blogs, social networking and so on. I guess he inspires my inner-geek.

And I do have a part of me that thrives on this stuff. I love the interesting ways that people make innovative use of technology to achieve useful, and sometimes beautiful things. Here are some other little web-based things that I've come across since following this person:

- last.fm - great way to discover new music
- mycyclinglog.com - my current bike logger
- identi.ca - open alternative to Twitter
- ping.fm - update multiple statuses/micro-blogs from one place
- Opera - a rediscovery of the old alternative web-browser

But not just those practical things. My curiosity about the way people are using the web to communicate and interact has been roused. I'm intrigued how people are creating web sites that are simple, functional and well-designed. Things not only of purpose but of beauty.

I'm feeling behind and afraid though. I barely know Java and have heard only rumours of Ajax, let alone other "next big things". I've been toying with client-side scripting, servlets, application frameworks, but not digging deep. I have an excellent grounding in Computer Science and an inquisitive mind, but there's so much to learn and I don't have time enough to invest to satisfy my curiosity, let alone learn anything of much use. And where would I start?

I'm afraid because of security, the nature of my online identity. I'm generally very open, as readers of this blog would know, but there's stuff that I don't want out there on the internet (mostly about other people and work, but sometimes about me). Can I throw myself into the online world of sharing so much with so many in safety? Do I want BrightKite.com telling everyone where I am all the time?

And there's the issue of time. My feed list in Google Reader continues to grow and reading, as well as writing, is a chore. Could I read the Twitter entries of more than about 20 people and have a real life too?

I'm also uncertain about who to take on the journey with me. In many ways I'm a long way ahead of my peers and I'd love to be able to introduce others to my personal world of customised web sites, RSS and Atom feeds, alternative browsers and web presence because I think these things are useful tools. But would they get it? How confusing is it to a non techie? There are so many places to be with new networks and tools appearing all the time. If I can barely keep up, how will they?

I think the web is an exciting, fun, and hugely creative place to be at the moment. Yet it's a big place. A scary place. A confusing place. An ever-changing and unknown place.

My online interaction with the friend I mentioned above is a fine example of how the web can bring together people with a common cause or interest. It can be a very negative place, but it can be inspiring and friendly too. With my friend's help I hope to continue to be a part of this strange world, and to introduce others to it, and maybe, one day, to be responsible for a small part of it.

How Cuil???

A friend of mine is engaged in a little, private "Beta" website that I'm contributing to. It's kinda Christian-themed news and random stuff. I've spent some time tonight on a post which I hope he doesn't mind me cross-posting here.

-----

You may, like me, have noticed the latest big thing on the Internet…a new search engine set up by some ex-Google employees at www.cuil.com (pronounced Cuil).

We have conducted an extensive review of Cuil’s search functionality (OK, we did a few searches, almost at random) and hereby bring you the definitive, Christian-themed review of this new tool.

We’ve run a number of test searches, analysed the results and graded them out of 5. We’ve also stated the “suggested searches” that Cuil came up with as we typed, and what we actually thought we might get.

We didn’t have time (and we’re not THAT sad) to do a complete comparison of Google, Yahoo, MSN and others, so we’ve simply compared the results to those given with Google - it seems appropriate given the circumstances.

Test 1 - “What would Jesus Do?”

Well…what would he? (For those that don't know this was a cheesy Christian slogan used to remind people to ask the question themselves when making decisions - it was probably a good idea until someone got into printing it on merchandise galore - keyrings, wrist bands, etc).

Suggested searches:

• What would jesus buy
• What would jesus drive
• What would jesus eat
• what would jesus do

Expected result: WWJD merchandise, or possibly a site actually stating some things that Jesus did.

Top Cuil result: What would Jesus Buy (www.wwjbmovie.com)

What else we got:

• Lots of references to the film above
• Christian weight loss: What would Jesus Eat?
• What would Jesus shave with?
• The Church of Stop Shopping (presumably related to the movie?)
• www.wwjd.com (we didn’t follow the link and have no idea what it is)
• Listed Categories (to narrow your search): “World Championship Wrestling Alumni” and “American Professional Wrestlers”

Google says:

• What Would Jesus Do on Wikipedia
• WWJD merchandise at www.whatwouldjesusdo.com

Result: Wrestling??? Seriously, we’re NOT making this up!!! Google wins by a clear mile. Cuil gets 1 out of 5 for entertainment value only.

Test 2: “The Bible”

Can Cuil find me a Good Book?

Suggested searches:

• The Bible (yay! First hit!)
• History of the Bible
• How to Read the Bible
• The Bible Code

Expected result: Links to online bibles, or possibly reference articles explaining what the Bible is.

Top Cuil result:Track and Field News: The Bible of the Sport since 1948

What else we got:

• Navigating the Bible II
• bible.crosswalk.com (an actual Bible!)
• The Bible Society
• A few other random bible-related things, none of which seem very important

Google says: www.biblegateway.com - everyone’s favourite online bible!

Result: Cuil gets closer but is again blown away by Google. 2 out of 5 for effort!

Test 3: Lalbagh Indian Cuisine

…because even the faithful like a good curry now and then!

Suggested searches:

• Lalbagh Fort
• Lalbagh Road

Expected result: Web page of my favourite local Indian takeaway, local directory entries and some reviews.

Top Cuil result: Correct listing on donowdo.com (What’s that then?)

What else we got:

• Local newspaper reviews
• Other fairly random listings
• Category: Kings of Mysore
• Wikipedia article on Culture of Bangalore

Google says: The Lalbagh Website, Yell and Thompson directory entries, and reviews of the intended, and other restaurants called “Lalbagh”

Result: Again, I got the information I needed, but a link to the restaurant’s own web site didn’t make the front page. 2 out of 5 again.

Test 4: “Cuil”

Can it find itself? And will Google list their new competitor?

Suggested searches:

• None - though by this point I wasn’t getting any suggested searches at all - perhaps the system was overloaded?

Expected result: Cuil home page, lots of news articles from today about the launch.

Top Cuil result: Properties for sale in Cuil Mhuine, Ireland on Properazzi.com

What else we got:

• References to what appears to be a music album or a band called “Chase around the Windmill”
• Books, and area guides relating to several places whose name includes the word “Cuil”
• Categories: Towns and Villages in Sligo, French Cuisine, Local Breads, Lochaber, and Glens of Scotland.
• I also noticed that Cuil returned 121,578 results, compared to Google’s “about 718,000″ - I’m open to the possibility that less is more in this case.

Google says: News results for Cuil from Information Week and 819 related articles. Cuil Homepage.

Result: What? They’re not their own top search result? Zero!!!!

Test 5: “Help”

Maybe Cuil is a new breed of search engine and I’m expecting the wrong sort of results. Perhaps there’s a help page?

Suggested searches:

• Still no suggested results at all.

Expected result: Cuil help page. Err…not sure what else.

Top Cuil result: This is really REALLY true. I got a page back that said: “No results because of high load”.

What else we got:

• Nothing
• Zip
• Zilch
• Not a sausage

Google says:

• www.help.com - seems reasonable
• BBC Help (www.bbc.co.uk/help)
• Ingenta Connect Help (???)
• Google Help (which is, of course, the equivalent of what we wanted)

Result: Another zero I’m afraid. An overloaded service is no service at all!

In conclusion

We’ve done our best to show you how this new search engine performs. We’ll leave you to make up your own mind from our results. I’m sure you’ll agree they’re a great help!

We give Cuil a grand total of 4 out of a possible 25 points!

We don’t think Google need worry too much.

Tuesday Update:

The service is back up. Searching for "help" didn't.

Oddly, though searching for "Cuil" on Cuil.com gave random results, searching for "Google" on Cuil.com gave lots of links to Google's sites. Weird!

Having a Wii

Just a quick note. As a little joint birthday treat to ourselves, we've managed to track down and purchase a Nintendo Wii!

We're not big gamers but we've always like fun, multiplayer games, and the Wii is cheap and fits the bill.

I'll be writing more about this incredible time-wasting machine soon, but if any readers also own Wii's and want our Wii number then drop me an email. Perhaps we can hook up and have a Mario Kart race one day!

Cycle Logs

I'm strangely obsessed with tracking my cycle times!

I think the whole blogging thing, and tracking my life in general, started last year when I wasn't well and wanted to record some of what was going on so that I could spot trends and try to work out what was causing me to be ill, or what was causing me to be well.

My sister has also been a bit of a role model for tracking fitness, I know she's used various tools, electronic and paper, over the years to track her running alongside injuries, nutrition and other facts that are related.

A while back I wrote about where I store my routes. But I've recently been reviewing where I store my cycle logs too. All prompted by t1mmyb's little note on Twitter the other day.

I started out using Google Docs for tracking my times in a simple online spreadsheet. This was OK but when it started getting big and unmanagable I started looking for something better, and decided to stick with www.bikejournal.com. It's a bit clunky but did a good job.

But Tim pointed me at www.mycyclinglog.com. A fab site which is slick, fast, looks nice and does some interesting things. It also allows you to have a "badge" that you can stick on your blog (look right and down), it integrates with Facebook, and has RSS feeds. I love it and I was an almost instant convert.

In fact, in an odd kind of way, it's reinvigorated my waning passion for cycling. Tracking your times makes you want to improve your times! Perhaps having them on public display will make me want to do that all the more!!

More green than we were? But only slightly.

Sally and I are doing our best to be green. We've very aware of green issues and what the scientists say, but we also just think that it makes sense to do it. Using less energy is cheaper and uses less of the finite resources of the earth. It makes sense to reduce consumption, reuse where possible and recycle materials rather than chuck them in landfill.

So when we were in Comet the other day and noticed that the cost of those little household energy meters had come down significantly, we had a short discussion and decided to buy one.

Of course, at first, you defeat the point by going round turning everything on to see how much it uses. The fun of this quickly wears off, however, and the device remains sat on a worktop somewhere, showing us our electricity usage.

It was very easy to set up and it's been very useful. Lots of people talk about taking things off standby, and I'm sure this has an important part to play, especially as these things, if left on, are on 24x7. But the most interesting things for us have been the effect of lights! You can really see the difference with low-power bulbs. But most of all, the multiple little spotlights that are used in our kitchen and bathroom use LOTS of energy.

It's been fun for a while and the novelty does soon wear off, but it's good to have the meter on, and it's been good to find out what the real energy guzzlers are in our house.

And maybe, just maybe, we'll be doing a little bit more to save the planet because of it.

Observing the Shibboleth

I'm on my own this weekend as Sally's off on a working holiday. So I'm doing some catching up and messing around. Here's a little video I like. It's a time-lapse of people looking at the "Shibboleth" exhibit at the Tate Modern, in December 2007.

I'm usually more interested with people's reactions to the Turbine Hall exhibits, than to the exhibits themselves. I like this video because there's so much going on. Most people slowly progress along the crack in the floor. But the group on the right refuse to budge as their tour guide conducts a detailed explanation. And old lady stops to take a deeper look. The gallery employee in the red jacket ambles up and down. I wonder what else there is to spot?

Taking up Twittering as Facebook Flops

Who knows when and by whom this is being read, but as I write there is a new little box in the top-right-hand corner of my blog showing something called "Twitter" updates.

This is a little something I've been playing with and I want to explain why.

A Brief History of Social Networking in the Wintle Household

I was never into MySpace as a social networking tool. Too cluttered and didn't really get what it was all about. Then, a while back, Facebook became popular. It was a real big thing in 2007 and I became a fully-addicted member in about May time. I was a bit skeptical about it. but I've really enjoyed using it to keep up with what's going on with my friends. It DOES have some Friends-Reunited type functionality, but I've rarely spent much time reconnecting with old friends. I mostly use it to watch the short status updates of my real-world friends, share photos, and to play Scrabulous (clever online version of Scrabble).

More and more on Facebook, the advertising is creeping in, and the small amount of useful functionality is becoming obscured by alerts that I'd rather not see, and invitations to use pointless applications.

It seems I'm not the only one with "Facebook Fatigue" either, as this article from The Register suggests.

Blogs!

I also enjoy reading other people's blogs in order to keep up with them. This is also a kind of social networking for me. And, of course, one of my reasons for writing this stuff is so that other people can keep up with me (not many do, but that's OK - there are other reasons to write).

But my blog entries take a lot of time to write and I'm often a week or so behind where I actually want to be with posts.

"Micro-Blogging"

The status updates in Facebook are really a kind of "micro-blogging". Small statements about what's going on with your life to allow others to keep up with you.

I've not looked up a definition of "micro-blogging" but the concept seems to be a series of small notes that track those smaller updates and thoughts that occur between longer "macro blog" entries that people might be publishing about themselves.

I would, in fact, much prefer it if the people I use Facebook to keep up with would do some form of Blogging or "micro-blogging".

Twitter

Twitter is a tool that allows this sort of thing. It's stupidly simple. You can write a status update of 140 characters from the web, your phone (by SMS or mobile web), or using a Google Chat. These can be read by your "followers".

You can also choose to "follow" others, and you can choose to get updates from others from the website, by SMS, or through your Google Chat.

So, I have been doing a bit of Twittering to see if anyone follows.

It feels a bit silly and self-indulgent. But so did Facebook when it started. I wonder if others would follow me in defecting if they knew what it was and why I was doing it? I wonder if others are fed up of the constant hassling of Facebook applications and just want to know what's going on with their friends and family?

Maybe Twitter gives information overload if you have too many people that you're following? I'm not sure. But my future feels like it's more with micro-blogging, using whatever tool, than with Facebook.

Digital Radio

We've been toying with the idea of digital radio for a while. We listen to the radio quite a lot and it's been annoying us that we get bad reception in the new house.

But DAB radio's are expensive and we've questioned the value. Several of our friends have them though - a surprising number in fact! - and with moving out of London meaning we get less access to stations like XFM that we like, we decided to look into them a bit more closely.

I, with my techie hat on, was looking for features. We like the "live pause and rewind" on our Sky+ box, and I was hoping to get that functionality in the radio too - should be simple enough you would think. I also wanted to be able to plug an iPod into it - preferable through a line-in socket. Sally, with her aesthetics hat on (we're a good team) wouldn't let me get a cheap, plastic-looking one - preferring the slightly vintage look of the Pure and Robert's models.

We tested the water by getting a cheap (£35) Roberts clock radio. A lot of our listening is done in bed as we attempt to wake up, so this seemed like a good way to try it out. And...

I was astonished!

I thought we'd get poor reception, with it constantly breaking up. But, no. DAB, here in Swindon at least, is crystal clear. We get a good range of stations. The sound quality is excellent. And the radios are incredibly easy to use - I don't say that lightly by the way, but you literally plug it in and it works with barely a button press.

We were SO impressed that we almost immediately went to Amazon and spent a lot more money on a Pure Evoke 1S for the kitchen. Which is equally easy to use, crystal clear, well built, has most of the technical features I wanted (not live pause and rewind - surprisingly few models had this!), and looks the business.

I'd happily evangelise DAB radio to anyone. If you're thinking you have reason to switch - do it!

I still think the receivers aren't particularly good value but in this case I'm happy to pay the premium for being a fairly-early adopter. Perhaps prices will come down as take-up increases? Or maybe the signal is sufficiently poor on other places to limit its take up. I guess only time will tell.

New camera

During our trip to the Lakes last year, to climb Helvellyn via Striding Edge with my sister and her man (oddly, I didn't write anything about this, but we did!), we managed to drown both our digital camera and a mobile phone. They were wrapped up safely in rucksacks but it was so wet that they filled with water anyway and they never came back to life.

So, after phoning the insurance people and a bit of research, we've bought a new digital camera. We've bought a Canon Ixus 70 because:

1. We've had a Canon before, they're well built (but not waterproof) and we know how to use them
2. It's pocket-sized but has a 3x optical zoom and all the features we need.
3. We'd hoped for a fully-manual mode but there are hard to find on compact cameras. You can manually adjust the ISO setting, but there's no aperture or time priority. But then no other camera we looked at had those either.
4. The flash on our old Canon SureShot A80 was horrible, but this one, in testing, seems to have been improved.
5. We chose the Ixus 70 over the Ixus 75 mostly because it has a smaller screen and therefore better battery life.

Overall we're happy with the purchase. It's small, takes good snaps, the battery lasts long enough (though I don't like having a rechargable - our old one just took standard AA batteries). It's all we expected really. I guess, to the untrained eye, digital cameras are much of a muchness and though the Ixus 70 is nothing extraordinary, it is a well-built and easy to use camera.

It has one feature that I particularly like though - it does time-lapse filming! You can only set it to take a picture every 1 second or two seconds, and it kills the battery pretty quickly, but I've had some fun playing around with it and it gives interesting results. It has prompted a bit of a fascination with life-at-high-speed.

I first started playing around with this after a day's working from home. Here's a bit of me at the laptop - it's quite boring but I had no other subject to try it out on:




For a laugh I tried moving really slowly to see what would happen when speeded back up again. This has a strange stop-motion animation effect and makes me laugh every time:



I wonder what sort of life-observation could be had with this. Look out for speeded-up naturewatch movies next spring!

Facebook Feed

Facebook's import of my Blog into its "Notes" section has been on the blink for a few weeks and today finally gave up on me - so I've reconfigured the feed and re-synchronised everything, so hopefully it will stay up to date now. Apologies for any confusion.