Category Archives: General

The Church(es) of England?

I have something of a soft spot for the Church of England, having grown up in it, though it’s been rather a long time since I was a regular attender. But I think this article is probably correct when it starts with:

The archbishop of Canterbury must acknowledge that disestablishment has already happened, and look to a future that deals with reality.

I particularly liked one of the illustrations of this point:

The Diana funeral was about half Anglican, and half teddy bears.

Actually, I’ve always thought that the church would probably benefit from disestablishment. This article makes the case for decentralisation, as well.

Now, I know little of church finances, but I suspect that very few current congregations could actually support their clerical staff if it weren’t for the church’s central endowments and investments. No doubt some distribution mechanism could be sorted out, even if the parishes were to be more independent.

But I do remember, sitting in a dull sermon somewhere as a child, realising that if congregations really took the biblical principle of tithing to heart, then it would only take nine people to support a vicar at the same standard of living as they had. Or ten, of course, if the vicar wanted to tithe as well!

Something for the faithful to ponder…

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Universally Challenged?

Christmas-University-Challenge-Series-3-Gonville-&-Caius-1600“Television”, said Noel Coward, “is not something one watches. It’s something one appears on.” But it’s quite strange to have done both, having watched myself on University Challenge just now. (See my earlier post.) I’ve been on TV and radio a few times, but they’ve generally been broadcast live, or in other regions, so I’ve seldom had the chance to see myself at the same time as others do. A most bizarre experience.

Anyway, those who are curious (and in the UK) can see the show here for the next few days. I won’t spoil the suspense, except to say that we didn’t disgrace ourselves. My contribution was rather larger, I hope, than the cameras suggest, but still small. I was, however, blessed with excellent team-mates, and it was all great fun.

A couple of things that might interest regular viewers, that hadn’t previously occurred to me, especially about the starter questions…

The first is that the programme flatters the home viewer. When watching starter questions in the past, I’ve been smugly pleased if I can yell out the answer before the person on screen. But the contestant has had to think of the answer many seconds earlier, press their buzzer, wait for their name to be announced, and then respond. In fact, when you’re on the set, it takes a bit of time to realise that it’s your turn, because you get no feedback on the desk to indicate that you have buzzed first until Roger announces your name. This all takes some time, especially on the (very rare) occasions when he has to say “Gonville & Caius: Stafford-Fraser”! At that point, you have to form some coherent words and speak them out confidently.

The second is that the programme is edited, though very lightly. They try to do it ‘as live’, not least for the benefit of the audience. But there are occasions when contestants responded either a bit faster or a bit slower during the filming than was apparent in the broadcast. Then there are sometimes one or two retakes for technical reasons at the end, so you can be in the unenviable position of having to repeat, earnestly, an answer which you know by then to be false… In general, though, the broadcast is a pretty accurate representation of what it felt like at the time.

Lastly, of course, there are often more people who know the answer than get credit for it, because you usually can’t tell on screen who else is buzzing. I know there were several times where more than one of the Cambridge team, and no doubt several Oxonians too, were pressing their buzzers almost simultaneously, but only one light comes on. Fortunately, Lars Tharp and Mark Damazer were particularly speedy, and they, of course, came from The Right Place.

Anyway, lots of fun, and anyone who’d like to watch any further rounds can find the broadcast times here.

Update: It turns out that at least two of the episodes are available on YouTube, so anyone really keen can see our entry in the first round and the final.

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The long tail of streaming?

I recently tweeted that I had signed up for a (UK) NetFlix trial, but had found little that I wanted to watch, and had been put off by the necessity of installing Silverlight, so was going to return to my trusty ‘Lovefilm by Post’ subscription. This got a lot of responses from friends.

Some expressed surprise that a geek like me should embrace such a backwards technology. Some proposed AppleTV/iTunes or Blinkbox as better alternatives. Others persuaded me to persevere, and recommended the new House of Cards series and Breaking Bad as worthwhile (so I shall certainly give those a go).

Anyway, I went ahead, installed Silverlight on my Mac Mini media server, and we watched Encounter at Farpoint from NetFlix last night, and it generally streamed OK, though the quality was somewhere around VHS-level, I think; certainly not like DVD and a long way from the BluRays we now often get through the post. I’m guessing this is just a poor match of Microsoft software and Apple hardware, because we have 120Mbps broadband, and other streamed content plays very nicely.

So we could probably find an online service that worked – why do we stick to that primitive idea of physical media dropping through the letter box?

Well, streaming services, or at least online purchases, are clearly the future, but still cater largely to the mass-market, and we obviously land somewhere in the ‘long tail’. By way of a simple illustration, here are a dozen films we’ve watched and really enjoyed over the last couple of months. Some of them are slightly obscure, but others have big names and Academy Awards.

I thought I’d do a quick check and see where I could get them, either as a digital purchase or rental. I threw in House of Cards season 1 as well, though I haven’t yet seen it, but now intend to!

Film Lovefilm by post iTunes Blinkbox Lovefilm Instant NetFlix UK
Mud Y Y Y
Lincoln Y buy not rent buy not rent
The Impossible Y Y Y
It Happened One Night Y buy not rent
Hyde Park on Hudson Y buy not rent buy not rent
Untouchable Y buy not rent
The Kings of Summer Y buy not rent Y
Now you see me Y Y Y
A Late Quartet Y Y Y
The House of Eliott Y
Shackleton Y buy not rent Y
Moonrise Kingdom Y buy not rent buy not rent
House of Cards (2013) Y Y Y

Now, this isn’t quite fair, because I knew all of these were available from the postal service – that’s where we saw them. And I’m sure it’s possible to find a good list of things on the other services which are not available through the post.

But I guess my point is that, had we restricted ourselves to other services, most of these dozen excellent films would never have made it to our screen, especially if we didn’t want to cough up the money to purchase them outright.

I didn’t make any special effort to select these, by the way: they are not nearly as obscure as some films we watch: they just happen to be (roughly) the dozen most recent films of the… golly!… ahem!… 821 movies we have watched from LoveFilm over the years since we started subscribing. (We don’t have cable, and don’t really watch any broadcast TV.) We couldn’t, in fact, have rented the majority of those from iTunes, but if we had been able to, it would have cost us about £2900 (assuming we didn’t want HD).

Of course, the elephant in the room here is that with postal delivery you have to know, in advance, a list of things you want to watch, and not be too worried about when you see them. I’m blessed with a wife who enjoys finding good stuff and queuing it up, so we always have 30-40 items in the list. And we have a reasonable amount of control of what arrives when based on how we prioritise those.

Some other notes to explain why this works well for us…

  • We live about 20 yards from the postbox, so after we’ve watched something, I stick the disc in the pre-paid envelope and mail it off before we go to bed.

  • We enjoy watching the extra features and commentaries on DVDs – something you often don’t get with other forms of delivery.

  • If we can’t watch a DVD immediately, we can click a button and have a DRM-free copy of it in about 30 mins, complete with special features and commentaries. But that probably wouldn’t be legal, so of course we wouldn’t know how to do that.

  • We can often choose between BluRay and DVD (depending whether we want a modest gain in resolution in exchange for a big delay in startup time).

  • We don’t have to finish watching things within a given timeframe.

  • We currently have the subscription which give you up to two disks at home at any one time, so with that, and the disks we own, and the stuff that EyeTV has recorded for us, we are never short of choice.

  • On average, we probably watch two or three movies a week, meaning that each one costs us about 89p.

In fact, I think we may start moving to some combination of the pre-planned postal and the on-demand streamed systems, and Blinkbox looks like an attractive service, if the quality’s good – on some of the above, purchasing from Blinkbox costs about the same as renting from iTunes.

But we’ve also seen a lot of very good stuff for 89p that we couldn’t have seen anywhere else. And quite often, it’s in 1080p resolution. On other services, the resolution would be lower and 1080p would be the price…

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Do you renounce all other princes?

It does sound from this Guardian article rather as if Ruth Walker’s main aim in becoming a U.S. citizen was to write an article about the embarrassing naturalization ceremony and to mock the country that has just accepted her.

(As an aside, I’m always surprised when people complain about US immigration and security controls at airports. The staff have invariably been polite to me, and often friendly and good-humoured, in what must be a ghastly job. Brits who complain about the process have clearly never experienced what happens to foreigners arriving at Heathrow. But I digress…)

Anyway, it may be that Ms Walker found the ceremony laughable because she knows that the country as a whole was worthy of better. I hope so. I hope, too, that we don’t impose anything so toe-curlingly trite on people becoming subjects of Her Majesty. Mmm. Perhaps we do.

I rather suspect, however, that we go to the other cynical extreme, and just make new arrivals take a pointless test and charge them lots of money. Is that right? Anyone been through it? That would be a much more British approach…

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Take charge of your batteries!

I get through a lot of batteries.

This is mostly because of my strange habit of wearing a GPS logging device, which means I always use at least three AAAs every day. But even without this idiosyncracy, the increasing number of flashguns, remote controls, bluetooth trackpads, keyboards and mice, bicycle lights, microphones, voice recorders and other gadgets around the house means that I would have been bankrupt long ago if I hadn’t switched over entirely to rechargeables a few years back.

It strikes me that I can’t be the only one in this position. So here are a few ‘workflow’ tips from a seasoned charger, to help you take control of your battery-powered life!

1. Be willing to invest in power!

There’s nothing worse than having to find a fresh battery for your remote control in the back of a drawer, just at the moment at which everyone in the family is waiting to watch a movie. Make sure you have plenty of batteries for your needs, and lots left over. Brace yourself, spend a reasonable amount of money, and your life will become easier. It is Christmas, after all.

2. Set aside space for it.

I have four little storage trays labelled ‘AA flat’, ‘AA charged’, ‘AAA flat’ and ‘AAA charged’, and there are typically about 6-12 batteries in each tray, besides those actually installed in my devices. There are always charged batteries available whenever I need them, and when the ‘flat’ trays start to get too full, I stick a batch of them in the charger before I go to bed.

battery_shelves

There is also a small shelf in our store room which is dedicated to charging. That’s where my iPhone dock, and all the chargers for my various different battery types, live. There’s a multi-way mains adapter so I never have to search for a charger or search for a socket. Makes life much easier.

3. Get yourself good batteries.

And by that, I mean Sanyo Eneloops. These have served me so well that I never buy anything else now. They aren’t the highest-capacity ones available, but they are low self-discharge. This means that you can charge them up, put them in your ‘charged’ tray, and be pretty confident that they will have retained plenty of oomph when you come to take them out again. Traditional NiMH batteries will discharge pretty quickly over a small number of weeks, meaning that there’s likely to be a gap between realising that you need them, and being able to use them again! (It drives a lot of the sales of turbo 20-minute battery chargers, which do work, but will shorten the life of your batteries. And you may still have to wait 20 mins before watching the movie!)

4. Treat yourself to a decent charger.

I have an exceedingly good one by Maha.

maha_charger

Whoa, I hear you say… you spent how much on a battery charger? Well, trust me, it’s possible to spend a great deal more than this, but I went for Maha after seeing recommendations from professional wedding photographers who go through large numbers of batteries every week, and I’ve been very pleased with it. It has fast and slow charging modes, can take any number of batteries from one to eight, but, most importantly, these are 8 independent charging circuits, which means that they will do the right thing even if you mix up partly- and fully-discharged, AAs and AAAs all at the same time. There are smaller Maha ones, but you don’t need to load and unload your charger nearly so often if you can do eight at a time!

But if that seems like overkill for you, then I recommend the Energizer CHCC-UK, if you can still find it.

energizer1

This has four independent circuits, supports 9v batteries too, and doesn’t try to woo you with super-high-speed charging. Fill it up before you go to bed and empty it in the morning. (I’ve found Energizer batteries to be good, too, though not as good as Eneloops).

Beware, though, of more flashy modern imitations like this Energizer CHP42UK:

energizer2

This may have a pretty display, but it only has two charging circuits, so you must insert either two or four batteries at once, and ideally you should always pair up similarly-discharged ones of the same type and age. Too much hassle. It can be hard to find out in advance just what a charger can do; see if you can find the manual online before buying.

5. Old batteries die.

When they do, you should send them to the great recycling centre in the sky. Fortunately, the days of leaking acid destroying the inside of your bicycle lights are mostly behind us, but a dead battery will sap the strength of your good ones if placed in the same device. No point in having taken good care of your troops, if they then have to go into battle dragging an injured colleague with them. (Am I overdoing the analogies?)

When I suspect a battery of being near the end of its life, I make a mark near one end of it with a fine-tipped permanent pen, and then stick it back in the charger. If, at a later date, I again find it rather flatter than I think it should be, it gets another mark. Three strikes and it’s out.

Recently, I’ve taken to labelling new batteries with their date of first use, and a code to help me to keep them together as a batch if wanted. This helps give a clue as to whether a permaturely dead battery is likely just to be discharged, or is in fact very elderly.

eneloop_pack

And so we come to the last point – how do you know when they’re dying?

6. Get a good battery tester.

You want something that can test various different battery types, and test them under load. Simple devices will just measure a battery’s voltage, which is useful, but almost anything more sophisticated will give you a better indication of how it’s likely to perform in the real world.

You need something that will let you quickly check any batteries before you dash out with your flashgun to that important press event. But you should also periodically review the ones in your ‘charged’ tray to make sure they are behaving as they should and won’t take you by surprise in future. Ideally, you want to check your batteries periodically, a few hours after they’ve been charged, to make sure they’re charging properly, and holding their charge. I’m not that disciplined. I tend just to do random spot checks from time to time, but this is much better than nothing.

To do this, I use the ZTS battery testers, which can check a variety of different battery types using a test cycle of just a few seconds, and then give you a simple readout.

zts_chargers

I have a big one for my charging shelf, and a smaller one for the office and when on the road. Once again, you may want to brace yourself before looking at the price, but they’re well-made and I’ve never regretted my purchases. You can get them from Amazon, or, slightly more cheaply in the UK, from here.

zts_charger_2

So there you are: these tips will make you the light of the charge brigade, or something like that. If the above seems terribly complicated, then that’s just because I’ve gone into some detail, but I can summarise it more succinctly:

  • Buy lots of good batteries – more than you need – and a good charger
  • Use a good tester to weed out dead batteries from your stock

And if it seem expensive, that’s because I’m a believer in buying good quality stuff infrequently, rather than rubbish on a regular basis!

Take control of those little packs of power, and they will be your friends, rather than letting you down in times of need. This system has worked well for me now for some time; some of the suggestions must be useful to others!

P.S. In fact, this could be the first draft of the upcoming bestseller, Getting Things Charged. GTD enthusiasts will recognise many of the elements: gathering all your batteries into a limited number of in-trays, processing, sorting, clear labelling, periodic review… it’s bound to be a hit!

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Cheating with Pebble

I’m pleased to say that I hadn’t thought of this particular use for my Pebble smartwatch!

ConTest watchface

Thanks to Alastair for the link

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A super response

We were talking at lunch today about the foolishness of that old interview question:

“What would you say is your biggest weakness?”

Several people proposed suitable responses, but my favourite came from Richard. His suggestion?

“Kryptonite”

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The habits of Hobbits

My quick review of the new Hobbit film: I enjoyed it a lot, though perhaps not as much as the first one. Too much romance, not enough Mirkwood, too many echoes of LOTR, and somewhat excessive use of decapitation, but, it must be said, an exceedingly fine dragon.

Tolkien purists (like Rose) will be furious, but my view is that you have to change even a good book to make a good film. And, if you’re going to invent new characters, then you’ll get fewer complaints from me if you have them played by people like Evangeline Lilly.

The middle film of a trilogy is always the hardest to do, to which a fair response would be that they were foolish to do it as a trilogy. That, I imagine, was determined by pure economics. It’ll be interesting to see whether Peter Jackson can do something really new with part III. In the book, Bilbo misses the whole final battle through being knocked on the head. Somehow, I think the movie may deviate from the canon there…

Meanwhile, I imagine that the entrepreneurs of New Zealand’s South Island are already planning barrel riding trips for the spring tourists…

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Being social…

Some people find these scribblings through Google, others through RSS, Tweets, Facebook or App.net posts. And you lovely readers often write comments, but in all these different places, so only a subset of other readers are likely to see them.

In an attempt to make it easier to post comments here on the site, I’ve now enabled one of these newfangled social login things, so you can post using your Facebook or Google account if preferred. Other options may come along in due course!

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Just wondering…

What is it that estate agents really mean when they talk of a “deceptively spacious” property? It’s one of their favourite phrases, after all.

If I say that my wallet felt deceptively full before I left the house, doesn’t that suggest that later, at some inconvenient moment, I discovered I had less money than I thought? Still, perhaps the operative word there is felt, which implies that I was mistaken?

OK, then, so if a house actually is deceptively spacious, that must mean that it does have a lot of space, but for some reason that doesn’t bring with it the characteristics that you’d normally associate with spaciousness. It’s a very inconvenient shape, for example, so you can’t actually use it as you would expect.

Or there is occasionally some warping of the space-time continuum in that area, so that when you visit, it is spacious, but later on you’ll discover it’s only suitable for hobbits? As in, “it’s deceptively spacious at the moment”.

Yes, I guess that must be it. Good of them to warn you in advance.

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Welcome To My Humble Adobe

adobe-logoAs many of you will know, two months ago, Adobe’s servers were hacked into and the user information stolen. At first this was thought to be a major breach, with about 3M records lost. Then the number went to abut ten times that. Now, however, there is talk of it heading for the Guinness Book of Records, as it appears the number may be closer to 150M!

Now, the passwords were encrypted (or, more technically, ‘hashed’), so the bad guys can’t just read them off. But they weren’t encrypted as well as they might be, in particular because if several people use the same password, the system stores the same thing. So if you know one person’s password, perhaps because you got it from a previous hacking incident elsewhere and can tie it to their email address, you can now work out anybody else who uses the same password.

But it’s more fun than that… and there’s a great article on the Sophos site going into more gory detail if you’re interested.

One column that wasn’t encrypted in the database was the one holding the ‘password hints’… you know, the phrases you can put in on some sites to remind you if you forget your password.

Now, the most popular password is “123456”, which encrypts to “110edf2294fb8bf4” in the Adobe database. Hundreds of thousands of people use this one. Another very popular one, believe it or not, is “password”, which becomes “2fca9b003de79778 e2a311ba09ab4707”. (You can see more of the most common choices here.)

If you know the encrypted form, you may not be able to work out the original. But if many thousands of people use it, and just one of them gives it away in the password hint, then things become trivial. And it turns out that there are lots of lovely examples in the Adobe file, where users have put in hints like “Rhymes with assword”, or ‘1-6’…

Anyway, if you’re curious about whether you appear in this list, which you might if, say, you’ve ever downloaded Acrobat, there’s a a very nice service that LastPass have put together at:

https://lastpass.com/adobe/

where you can type in your email address and it will let you know if you’re in the database. It can also email you a link showing how many other people used the same password as you, and what some of their hints were. Which can be quite sobering.

I’m embarrassed to say that mine, which was mildly obscure, I originally thought, had 40 other users. That’s only 40 in 150 million, but it’s still not good for precisely the above reasons. I’ve had an Adobe account for a very long time, and this password predated my use of 1Password to generate unique and complex passwords for each site. Thankfully, since I’ve been storing my passwords in 1Password for quite a long time, it’s easy now (if somewhat tedious) to find the other elderly accounts on which I’ve used it, and fix them…

How about you?

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Time travel

As we know, people in the past were black and white – you can see that in the photos…

But there are some very dedicated artists who, using today’s technology, are doing a fabulous job of recolouring some iconic images from the past.

higheststandard

There’s a great selection here. I find them very compelling.

crash

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