There’s something rather fruity about the fact that my new RaspberryPi is being powered by an old Blackberry power supply.
Which used to be on the Orange network.
And that I log in to it from my Apple.
Hope it doesn’t turn out to be a lemon.
I love Skype – it’s one of the most-used utilities on my Mac, and a vital business tool.
There are some who don’t understand this, chiefly because they think Skype is about making cheap phone calls. Of course, it’s very good at that too: I dread to think how much I might have clocked up in phone bills on my last holiday if I hadn’t had Skype and the hotel wifi network. It’s also the easiest way I know to set up conference calls.
But mine is configured so that when I double-click on a name, it pops up a chat window, not an audio connection. Though, I admit, the first thing I type is often ‘Are you free for a quick call?’ But that’s so much more polite and… well, British… than simply bursting a ringing phone into someone’s day without so much as a ‘by your leave’.
At other times, the chat window is all I want. I can drop quick text messages in there, like ‘Can you remind me of the login for this URL?’, and it’s generally quicker and less hassle for everyone involved than any other way of transferring that information.
The real power comes when you’re combining the two – a conversation and a chat window. If you’ve ever tried dictating a URL to someone so that you can peruse a web page together while talking on the phone, you’ll appreciate the power of a cut, paste and click to keep things moving along. And, gosh, I haven’t started talking about video calls, about screen-sharing, about file transfer… And the fact that, if you’re willing to pay a few pence, you can send text messages from it, which is so much easier than typing on a phone keyboard.
Anyway, the degree to which you too will discover this brave new world of communicative wonderfulness depends on two things:
Skype first became really important for me when one of my former companies was headquartered in a house with a studio in the garden. Half of the team worked in the house, and half in the shed, so having a quick, lightweight method of communication between the two was important.
When we outgrew that, we moved to an open-plan office. Open-plan offices are things that people used to think were a good idea because they hadn’t tried them. Then commercial landlords realised that it was a much more convenient way to let out office space, so they told their clients, “Oh yes, everybody’s doing this now”. They still continue to exist because the people making the property decisions aren’t writers or software developers, who need peace, quiet and concentration, punctuated by a modicum of social interaction over caffeine-dispensing equipment, to be really productive.
So, in many offices, you have big open spaces filled with people wearing headphones and listening to music loud enough to drown out the distractions of the phone calls around them. They’re more isolated than if they were in different rooms. Managers seem to like this arrangement, because when they walk in they see large numbers of people beavering away, and they fail to realise that those people are beavering about two-thirds as efficiently as they might beaver. Factor that into your rent-per-square-foot…
Anyway, I digress, but the result was that Skype continued to be important when we were all in one room, not to talk to people at the far end of the garden, but for reaching those who were just a couple of desks away but in a completely different musical genre.
If you spend much time sitting in front of a computer, you owe it to yourself to run Skype and get your friends and colleagues doing so too. Yes, there are other systems, but few that run on Windows, Linux, Mac, Android and iOS and give you such a variety of different communication styles.
One final tip for Mac users: the current version of Skype, version five-point-something, is generally agreed to be horrible. Well, not horrible, exactly – in fact, I think it looks quite nice – but it does have ideas above its station and wants to take over your entire desktop. Fortunately, this feeling that it’s got just a bit too big for its boots is so widespread that the previous version, 2.8, is still available from the Skype website on its own download page a couple of years after its supposed replacement was rolled out. Grab a copy and make a backup, in case it goes away…
It’s strange, but not many of my photos end up in black and white.
I’m not sure why – I do really like monochrome images, and it’s an instant way to make almost any shot look more ‘arty’. Maybe that’s the problem: somehow it feels as if I’m hiding something – not capturing the beauty inherent in the world sufficiently well in colour, so I have to do something artificial – turn on the ‘arty’ switch to make it a bit more pretentious…
This is, of course, rubbish. Our eyes are more sensitive, in most ways, to brightness than they are to colour, and you could argue, therefore, that you are capturing the essence of a scene with fewer distractions if you do so in monochrome. It doesn’t bother me that I’m only capturing it in 2D. Why should I hesitate when it comes to discarding another dimension? Perhaps it’s really that I’m not very good at it! I wonder, though… If Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson could have worked in accurate colour from the start, would they have done so? And would there then be such a strong tradition of black and white in art photography?
Now, from very early on, digital cameras have had various ‘modes’ into which you can switch them to get different effects. Serious photographers avoid these, preferring to capture as pure an image as possible and do any manipulation later ‘in post’, where you have a great deal more choice and control than you do on the camera. In particular, the option to take pictures in a ‘black and white’ mode seemed very silly to me from the moment it appeared on my very first digital camera. Why throw away data as soon as you take the photo, and deny yourself the chance of changing your mind and using colour?
My main current camera is a Lumix GH2, and I’ve been enjoying combining this bit of high-tech kit, via an adaptor, with the old 50mm Olympus Zuiko lens I had as a teenager. (It’s a nice side-benefit of the micro-four-thirds format that you can find adaptors for all sorts of lenses.) Anyway, this retro, all-manual operation set me thinking about such things again today, and I realised that something fundamental had changed since my first rejection of such frivolities as black-and-white mode…
I now shoot everything in RAW.
What this means is that all the data actually captured by the sensor is saved, regardless of any manipulations the camera may have been told to make at the time. So, I tried switching on the black and white mode for the first time, and found it quite an interesting experience, because the LCD viewfinder then shows you, as you’re composing the shot, roughly what your image would look like if you chose to keep it in black and white. This makes you look at the scene in a different way, think more about contrast than colour, without committing you to B&W as the final output. (Unlike the new Leica Monocchrome: for a little over £6000 you can get a camera that only shoots black and white.) It was a grey, overcast day today, so not very exciting lighting conditions, but I may experiment more with this in future.
It is also, I think, quite fun that only digital cameras can do this: only now can you get a preview, as you’re shooting, of the results you would have had to get before there was even colour film!
Internet giant Google has teamed up with the Daily Mail to develop a unique version of the online search engine which will confirm the enquirer’s prejudices.
Another nice spoof from Newsbiscuit.
My friend Aideen has been doing fun stuff with the TP-Link micro-routers.
These things are amazingly small – note the relative size of the USB socket – and very cheap.
She’s written it up in a nice blog post here.
Under the Vesari Corridor, Florence.
I like shutters. Why do we have so few of them in Britain?
These are on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.
It’s almost exactly 10 years since we started the Ndiyo project, with the aim of providing computing access to people for something “closer to the cost of a VGA lead than the cost of a computer”. Ndiyo has now formally closed, but it led to many other activities, including the founding of DisplayLink, and successful past projects in collaboration with the GSM Association, No-PC, and others.
Today, there’s some more good news.
Towards the end of Ndiyo’s life we started to experiment with a model we called ‘Hubster‘ – the name coming from using a USB hub as the core of a thin-client terminal, something made possible once DisplayLink’s evolution of the Ndiyo technology allowed monitors, as well as keyboards and mice, to be connected over USB. The idea is to share the power, cost, and the carbon footprint of a PC between two or more users at once, simply by plugging in enough USB peripherals to give the extra users access to it. This is important for everybody, but especially for the poorer parts of the world where the cost of owning one PC per person is prohibitive.
Well, over the last few years, Bernie Thompson at Plugable.com in Seattle has been beavering quietly away to make this more of a reality, by providing DisplayLink-based terminals at reasonable prices and by maintaining the Open Source software to drive them. There are two bits of good news coming from his recent efforts:
Some may, quite sensibly, ask how this compares to the RaspberryPi, which is, after all, even cheaper, and is a standalone machine. Well, this one comes with a box!
No, seriously, they are both excellent projects – I have a RaspberryPi on order, too – but they fill different roles. RaspberryPi, in the early years at least, will be about teaching people the basics of how computing works.
Bernie and the Plugable team are creating a system where providing fully-featured applications to multiple users at very low cost is something that a non-technical user can do simply by plugging in USB devices.
In some situations, perhaps in an internet cafe, you may just want to give extra users access to a Chrome browser. But with this system you also have the option of providing them with OpenOffice, with Scrivener, with Blender, with Corel Aftershot Pro, with Sublime Text, with Skype, with… well you get the idea! And, of course, with access to however many giga- or terabytes of storage you care to put in the PC.
I think the Kickstarter plan is a great one – I wish it had been around when we started Ndiyo.
Please support it if you can… Even if you don’t need more affordable computing devices, for your kids, your school, your internet cafe, your office, there are millions who do. Billions, in fact.
Every $10 we can shave off the cost of access to IT makes it accessible to many thousands of new people globally… and now you have a chance to help.
Someone I have never met, communicated with, or even heard of has just sent me a LinkedIn invitation:
XYX has indicated you are a Friend:
Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.
I guess he must just have a very positive view of mankind…
It reminds me of Zaphod Beeblebrox:
“Who are you?”
“A friend!” Shouted back the man. He ran toward Zaphod.
“Oh yeah?” said Zaphod. “Anyone’s friend in particular, or just generally well-disposed to people?”
Douglas Adams was a true visionary…
I am not in any sense a political animal, so I approach the subject with due humility, but as a mostly-detached observer with no party loyalties I’ve enjoyed watching the tactics in the run-up to some sort of local election which appears to be happening in the next few days.
The Labour candidate’s leaflet is emphasising the number of ‘broken election promises’ from the Lib. Dems. If memory serves, they formed a coalition with a very different party and had few, if any, election pledges in common with them. And they had about one-third of the number of votes of the Tories. So, on a rather simplistic but purely statistical basis, we should expect them to have to break their election promises about three-quarters of the time, shouldn’t we, to be democratically fair?
As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other ones which have been tried!
A few of my favourite iOS apps at present:
I’ve always had mixed feelings about mind-maps. They’re a great way to capture thoughts and to brainstorm, but a terrible way to communicate with others. The chief responsibility of somebody writing a paper or giving a talk, it seems to me, is to turn such a personal 2D ‘splat’ of ideas into a logically-ordered serial presentation that can be followed by others with different mental processes, and not just to serve up the splat in its unprocessed form.
Still, I do use them for my own notes, and a paper and pen has always been my medium of choice. I’ve tried several highly-regarded pieces of desktop software, but keyboards and mice just don’t seem right for doing this. iThoughts on the iPad is the first environment that feels pretty natural, especially if you use it with a stylus.
I listen to lots of podcasts, every day, while shaving, driving, walking the dog. I always used the facilities built into the iPhone music player and iTunes, which aren’t bad, so I had never really thought about using a separate app for it. And then I tried Instacast and was an Instaconvert.
If you have a recent iPhone with a good camera, then Scanner Pro is a really useful thing to have in your pocket. In essence it’s a photo app designed for capturing documents, or parts of documents, and it makes it easy (a) to crop and de-warp the images so as to get something closer to a proper scan and (b) to capture more than one ‘page’ as a single document and then (c) to email that as a PDF to someone (or upload it to various services). While you’d never confuse the results with the output of a proper scanner, there are times when you might be browsing in a library or perusing a magazine and you don’t happen to have a flat-bed scanner in your pocket…
The dictionaries
OK, here’s where you might need to start spending some real money… but I’ve definitely found it worthwhile when travelling to have the Collins language dictionaries in my pocket. I’ve now bought the expensive versions of the German-English, French-English and Italian-English ones and, even though they’re amongst the most costly apps on my phone, have never regretted it. They cost about the same as a hardback equivalent, but are a lot easier to carry around and I find, surprisingly, that I can look things up more quickly in them than on paper.
Another wonderful treat is to have the Shorter OED on my phone, something which in dead-tree form is hard even to lift off my bookshelf! (The current edition comes in two large hardbacks of around 2000 pages each.) It’s fabulous for all those times when someone at the restaurant tables asks, “What is the origin of the word ‘poppycock’?”. Sadly, the iOS app has been discontinued, so if you haven’t already got it, you’re out of luck, but there are a lot of lesser-but-much-cheaper options available, including Chambers.
Yes, you can often find good stuff on web, but not as quickly, especially if the restaurant table is in a basement. And if it’s in a foreign basement, then looking stuff up online may be rather expensive too.
Vous êtes hereux de me voir, ou vous avez une bibliothèque dans votre poche?…
Update 2012–08–14
Since this post, I’ve switched from using Instacast to Downcast. Its interface is a little crowded, on the iPhone at least, but it has a couple of nice features over Instacast.
The first is the ability to skip forward and backwards by a certain number of seconds: useful to skip ads, or to rewind a bit if you were distracted and lost the thread. Instacast has this, but it’s always been very unreliable. With Downcast it’s still a bit hit-and-miss – the buttons often seem to do nothing, or perhaps they’re just too small and so easy to miss – but my success rate is higher.
The second is the ability to sync various things between devices – which podcasts I’m subscribed to, which episodes I’ve already heard, and to some degree, how far through them I am. So I can listen at home on the iPad’s superior speaker and then carry on using my iPhone when I’m on the move.
Very nice.
© Copyright Quentin Stafford-Fraser
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