Status-Q

This marvellous contraption, which I think comes somewhere between R2-D2 and H.G Wells's Martian machines, is part of the exhibition of steelmaking equipment at Kelham Island Museum in Sheffield.

A note for any serious photographers amongst you: I captured this in very limited light at ISO 1600 on my Lumix GH2. I'm becoming increasingly fond of the micro-four-thirds system, but the sensor on this body, though generally very good, isn't always at its best in low-light conditions when compared to recent DSLRs. I didn't quite get what I wanted when processing this photo in Lightroom.

But after seeing a couple of references to it recently especially in the context of high-ISO images, I tried the free Rawker utility to do the initial RAW conversion, and was very pleased with the noticeable improvement. I saved it out as a TIFF and then imported that into Lightroom for final adjustment. I wouldn't do this for all my photos - not least because the intermediate TIFF is 128 MB - but doing a side-by-side comparison with the one imported directly does show a noticeable improvement. This may be down to default settings more than the converter itself, but you might find Rawker worth investigating for important images.

John's been writing about the somewhat bizarre practice of LinkedIn 'endorsements', where you can affirm that an acquaintance really has the skills they say they have.

Well, frankly, I wouldn't, in the first place, link to anyone I thought was likely to lie on their CV. I'm old-fashioned enough to remember the days when a LinkedIn connection was meant to imply some sort of endorsement in itself.

Interestingly, you can also endorse people's expertise in skills they never knew they had. I never listed any on my LinkedIn page until some kind friend said I was awfully good at 'Architecture', which I assume they meant in the sense of 'computer systems architecture', but, who knows, perhaps they had seen my old garden shed modifications? Hoping for some interesting job offers from that one.

It is, of course, a brilliant marketing trick on LinkedIn's part. In a world where page hit numbers are everything, it's hard to imagine a better email campaign to make users feel obliged to come back to your site over and over again.

When it all started, I added 'LinkedIn Endorsing' to my list of skills, and a couple of friends have kindly endorsed my abilities in that area. So maybe, by way of bringing a little festive cheer, I should be endorsing their LinkedIn-endorsing-endorsing?

Oh, and Happy Christmas, everybody!

If I had eight hours to chop down a tree,
I'd spend six sharpening my axe.

- Abraham Lincoln

Tilly in action on a recent walk.

Saw this in a nearby field last week. Tractors are things that shouldn't be done half-heartedly.

It's almost too easy to find inspiring TED talks, so I don't often post them here now, but this one particularly attracted me.

Ernesto Sirolli manages to give some great advice on aid (which is also relevant in the developed world) and on high-tech entrepreneurship (which is also relevant in the developing world). To do both of these in such an amusing and impassioned way, in just 15 mins, is sheer brilliance.

(Very nicely filmed, too)

For some years, I had a handy sign-up form on the right-hand side of Status-Q allowing you to receive new entries by email, thanks to the good folk at FeedMyInbox. Sadly, they're going to be closing down at the end of the year. As an alternative, you can use IFTTT to create RSS-to-email recipes.

However, since the most-used RSS reader out there, by far, is Google Reader, and the various apps that can sync with it (my current iPad favourite being Reeder), I've replaced the FeedMyInbox link with an 'Add to Google' button, so it's dead easy to include Status-Q in your Google feeds, should you so desire.