There are those who seem to take pride in slating every breath that Apple take, that Apple is the monster set on World domination, whose actions restrict and profit from everything we do.

I just enjoy the fact that the products I buy from them certainly seem to do what they propose to do and all work together without hassle. Certainly since I switched to Mac in 2005, the time I spend with IT issues now seems limited to helping out others with their PC woes rather than my own problems. If you want to spend time making products from different companies work with each other, that’s up to you. I’m happy to possibly pay a little more and have everything work well. In fact, taking into account time spent and the longevity (and resale value) of the Apple products I’ve owned, I reckon the cost of ownership is LESS than other brands.

Now we mention the word ‘brand’, I reckon therein lies one of the issues. Many people avoid major brands in the belief that they are evil or something – the recent recall announcement by MINI is a case where some have said it’s a “PR disaster” and then doubting the quality of the product. Other lesser companies seem to get less press for potentially worse issues, like the Toyota brake scare for example. At least it will be fixed with no fuss, and owners will get a coffee and a free valet clean into the bargain!

Apple just announced the new iBooks initiative, together with iBooks Author – effectively a free desktop publishing program that allows you to easily generate electronically publishable content as if it was a word processor, desktop publishing or presentation program. In reality, it’s a combination of all of those, allowing you to include interactive diagrams, video content as well as easily manageable text content.

For the last few years, I’ve kept a few recipes in a document, initially in Microsoft Word, then Apple’s Pages and now into the iBooks Author program. Moving the text into it was simple as you’d expect then tweaking the text to make it fit well was easy.

The output works straight away on the iPad – but is also exportable as a PDF if you so require.

People are complaining about the EULA that Apple operate with this program – simply put, if you want to sell books produced by iBooks Author, then you HAVE to sell them via Apple’s iBook store, where Apple take a cut.

Well, you can choose to publish your books other ways. I wrote a book a couple of years ago and it was a major process, using Adobe InDesign, ensuring that PDF output was exactly the right format and so on. For the newbie, there were many pitfalls – apart from the fact that I am typographical design challenged, so required the help of my cousin who runs a design company to guide me on page layout. iBook Author has templates ready to go, so although your book may look like many others, at least it will be readable and easy on the eye.

So, I don’t subscribe to those who say that Apple are restricting authors, they can still choose the old ways of publishing.

Electronic distribution gives more to authors, my print book would give me about 5% of the cover price as revenue. The publisher, printer and book distributor all make their margins, most at 50%. When it’s sold electronically, the cover price is about 40% of the print price – much better for the reader, and I get about 40% of the cover price as revenue – this isn’t Apple by the way setting this level, although it is available there too. So, I sell more copies and get a larger cash amount per book.

Apple are making the route for self-publishing much easier – and, if I choose to put books through the Apple iBook store, readers will get updates automatically.

If I don’t want to charge for books, I can make them available for download where I like (as I have here).

So, if you want to see my little recipe book, it’s available here for the iPad. Also here as a PDF for other systems. I don’t claim any literary prowess for this, it’s more a simple demo of what can be done quickly with iBooks Author. Both files are output from iBooks Author, but I think you’ll agree that the user interface and readability if way better using the iBooks program – and you can add notes, highlights all for review later if you like.

The book doesn’t have any fancy animations, callouts or videos yet, but it does demonstrate the concept and has been very easy to produce.

However, when you consider what this camera is intended for, it’s pretty amazing. If you want decent quality images, get something like a Canon IXUS or even use the iPhone 4S, but – if you want to stick a camera to the front of your car, skateboard, windsurfer, on your crash helmet and leap out of a plane – or even when snorkelling, then this is for you.

The camera is supplied with a waterproof housing, rated to 30 metres. This sort of add-on to a ‘normal’ compact camera would cost over £100 in addition to the camera itself, but this little camera comes complete with that, various mounts and straps for £199. Another nice touch is that Delkin – who are in the memory business after all, include a decent sized 8GB micro SD card so you can get going with the camera straight away.

The included battery will last for 2.5 hours according to Delkin, but I don’t know if that’s continuous video (doubt that would fit on the card anyway), or normal still mode. The package strangely had a US adaptor and an EU one in the package, maybe future UK supplies will include a UK adaptor. The camera will charge from the mains adaptors, but as it charges via a USB lead, also from your computer (as I did), or an included car power adaptor. Not something I can do with my Canon cameras without spending lots of money!

As for image quality, I wouldn’t say that this would ever be your only camera – in the time I had the camera, I didn’t get to find any zoom controls – I assumed it was a fixed lens – so the images I had were very wide and showed some barrel distortion, even fish-eye effects. But, if you were to use this as an action camera, you probably won’t be using it in a viewfinder mode, so a wide angle will be very forgiving. I could correct the distortion to some extent quite easily in Lightroom anyway. The gallery below shows an original image and a corrected version.

One very nice feature for the extreme camera enthusiast is the camera’s ‘Continuous Shooting’ mode. When I first saw this, I thought it was like my cameras – hold down the shutter button, and the camera keeps shooting while the button is depressed. This one operates differently, in the menus you set the interval with a minimum of 2 seconds and (I think) maximum of 60, press the shutter button, and the camera will keep shooting at that interval until you stop it. So, start the camera running, attach it to your cycle helmet with the included brackets and off you go! Low light performance seems OK, but I only took a couple of shots under a desk, not very scientific!

Then, there’s the video mode. This camera records full HD video. A very nice touch is that there is a separate button on the top of the camera for activating video recording. So, when you have gloves on, you don’t have to fiddle with menu settings or rotating knobs to choose between video or stills. Just press the appropriate button, and away you go. In fact, these are the only two controls on the waterproof housing, that could be taken as a pro or a con, I suppose.

Delkin irritatingly don’t include a manual on their web site (a printed one IS included in the box), so now I don’t have the camera to hand, I can’t refer back, but I did use the camera without the manual. I like to keep PDF copies of my manuals in my iPhone, so I always have them to hand for obscure settings. Relying on carrying a paper manual is not very handy!

I’m hoping to get another loan of the camera for an extended period, I’d like to try some parallel shooting when shooting rugby games (using a secondary bracket on my monopod) – and, as the camera is pretty light (about 90 grammes), I’ll tie wrap it to a kite and see what I get. I can also then do some better optical performance experiments, but as I said, this is a camera for a different purpose, not to compare with optical products from Canon, Nikon and the like. I’m sure there’s also lots of features I’ve missed above – like zoom, ISO settings etc. I’ll also then be able to let you have some decent test images and videos to look at.

Delkin’s own web page is at http://delkin.com/i-7579051-wingmanhd-3oz-waterproof-action-camera.html .

It would find a place in my camera collection for sure.

Ingredients

175g Unsalted butter
200g soft brown sugar (can use caster)
3 tablespoons golden syrup
250ml milk
250g plain flour
1 tablespoon ground ginger
1 teaspoon ground cinnamon (can use allspice here)
1 teaspoon bicarbonate of soda

1. Preheat the oven to 180°C / Gas 4. Grease and flour a 20x10cm loaf tin.
2. In a small saucepan, melt the the butter, and add the sugar, golden syrup and milk. Bring to the boil, then remove from the heat and set aside.
3. Sieve the flour, bicarbonate of soda, ginger and cinnamon into a large bowl. Stir in the boiled mixture until just blended.
4. Pour the batter into the prepared tin.
5. Turn down the oven to 160°C / Gas 2 1/2 and bake for one hour or until the top of the loaf springs back when lightly touched.

Being interested in this sort of stuff, I clicked the link and found the Canvas Buddy website. (Screenshot shown here, click to see it full size) The picture is very interesting, stop for a minute and consider the sizes. How big is that sofa? How high the ceiling? If that print is 19″ x 14″, then roughly scaled up, that makes the ceiling at about 2′ 4″, so about big enough for your average action man (the doll, not Sly Stallone) to live in.

I enquired why they were using such a misleading image, and got the reply from someone called Yogi – “it has size on it not trying to mislead any1 u can call me on [number removed] thanks yogi”. He also said I could refer to a couple of other websites he has. I won’t.

I suspect many of the thousand or so people who took up the offer from the Money Supermarket will feel slightly conned by this. I have of course referred the link to the ASA, BBC Watchdog etc.

This is what a 19" x 14" picture would look like in a normal sized room.

More recently however, Jessops have been in financial difficulties, going into liquidation in 2007, but the brand being rescued by HSBC so it could continue trading. Understandably, stock has noticeably reduced in the stores, from ten years ago when the shelves were crammed with cameras, to maybe 20 or so in my local store today.

So, this morning, we made a decision to buy a Canon IXUS 220 HS for my wife (plus I’d like to play with the slow motion video modes!). Going online, we found that the Jessops in Camberley had them in stock, so I used their “Collect@Store” service to reserve one. I received the email and the reservation number, and we duly jumped in the car and set off to the store.

Once in the store however, it was a different matter. It took the sales assistant a couple of minutes to find the camera – she knew of the reservation, quoting the camera model to me once I’d announced that I had reserved one.

Eventually, she discovered that the one unit in stock was the one on display. We would accept this, looking at the camera it was actually in pristine condition, so all was good. That was until her colleague pointed out to her that they would NOT sell the product because the manager (name of Paul Chapman) had dictated that it should stay on display. I explained that not only had we reserved it on the website, but had made a special journey to collect it. No change in decision. Also that I had in the past purchased a lot of goods from Jessops, but recently less, because the stock situation was so poor. No change.

“Would you like to order one?” I was asked. Frankly, if I’m going to do that, I’ll get it from Amazon, it’ll be a bit cheaper, and I won’t have to travel into Camberley to pick it up. (Also, I’m uneasy giving Jessops any cash up front, given their financial situation). So, I told them, either sell it to me now, or lose the sale. They refused.

I left the store, checked on the Comet web site, checked and reserved – bingo! £10 cheaper too. Collected and purchased, no hassle at all. Plus, by the way, oodles more cameras on display than the ‘specialist’ store called Jessops – and you can handle them all.

So, Jessops have a strange policy, the little stock they have seems to be for display. In this financial climate, surely if you let a customer leave your retail store without making a purchase, they will almost certainly get on the web and find it elsewhere. What’s the point of ordering something from a bricks and mortar store when you can have it delivered to your home for free?

I’m pretty sure I won’t deal with Jessops again. I mean what’s the point?

Jessops, you need to think about this carefully, you will surely go out of business soon if you carry on like this. Mr Chapman, think carefully about letting buying customers leave your store. You’re not only losing business, you’ll be out of a job. I’d love to hear your rationale for losing a sale and making money.

Alfie checks out the case for size...

So, I purchased a 4U 19″ 300mm sleeve Swan Flight case, some high-density closed cell foam and some screws. With a little thinking, this was what I came up with (again, under £100). Screws came from B&Q, the foam easily found on eBay.

19" rack mount flanges

First, the case is fitted with 19″ rack mounting flanges, these had been left in on the previous example, but I wanted to remove them. They are fitted with two rivets that are easily drilled out, the remaining body of the rivets drilled down flush to the edge of the inside of the case so as to leave no sharp edges.

Drill the body of the rivets down.

Detail of the captive bolt attached to plywood (unpainted)

At this point, I realised that the flanges would be useful for making a retaining ‘wall’ within the case. I found a piece of 5mm plywood and cut a piece to 245 x 187 mm to use as this. Drilling holes top and bottom, I could fix the flanges using the captive bolts and screws already supplied with the case.

I decided to paint the plywood black to match the appearance of the rest of the case.

Painted, ready for assembly

Assembled

Now, I found that the holes to retain the flanges should be drilled into the case 109mm from the edge of the aluminium frame of the case. Four screws are needed at 45mm centres. This allowed for the 10mm foam to be added left and right of the printer, but you may wish to adjust this a little. The foam allows the printer to be slid in and out of the case, although it is a snug fit. Foam 200mm x 80mm was used both left and right, held in place with double sided tape (as I use for assembling albums!).

109mm from the edge

Nuts, bolts...

Four screws were used for each flange, top and bottom. 12mm M4 screws with washers to protect the outside of the case and avoid the screw heads from splitting the case.

...and washers

Closed cell foam, as used for garden kneelers

Two thicknesses of foam were used (200mm x 140mm) at the top of the printer. All is stuck in, carefully avoiding the vents so that the printer can remain inside the case in use. (although the front and rear covers come off of the case).

Double thickness foam used at the top of the printer

Foam is added to the front and rear lids to ensure the printer does not slide when in transit.

The front lid

Rear lid

Dividing wall installed

Screw heads for dividing wall on outside of case

The finished item, ready to go!

Storage for mains lead, USB cable and extension cable.

So there you have it, an economical case for a DNP DS40, DS80 or Mitsubishi CP3800DW printer.

First, they met at the Rushmoor Cafe in North Camp for a hearty breakfast on the chilly Saturday morning. Simon Taylor of Phooto.co.uk welcomed most of the photographers there, with people travelling from places such as central London, Southampton and even from Tubingen near Stuttgart in Germany.

German photographer Chris Marquardt produces a weekly podcast called “Tips From The Top Floor” along with an online forum to support the show. This forum is a community in itself and was responsible for a large number of the people attending.

Members of Aldershot & Farnham & Farnborough Camera Club also attended, swelling the numbers to nineteen.

After breakfast, the group moved to the FAST Museum on the Farnborough Road, where the museum manager Brian Luff and the other volunteers there welcomed the group, explaining many aspects of the exhibits and even giving some special access to the visitors to allow them the best opportunity for some unusual images. Aspects of the museum’s history, the large model aircraft display, history of the Spitfire, Hurricane and other details such as navigation systems were explained. A large attraction was of course the full-size replica of the Cody Flyer which those attending were able to ask detailed questions about, even down to details such as the spokes in the wheels used and the knots of the tension lines that support the aircraft!

Special interest was given to the darkroom at the museum, especially as Chris Marquardt was unusual in the group, being the only one to have solely film cameras, three of them, 35mm and medium format.

Cockpit of the Harrier

Vintage Road Signs from Farnborough

Photographing one of the exhibits

After the museum the group moved onto the Airship Hangar at the north of the airfield for the opportunity  to get some abstract and unusual shots. Before that, they took a small break at the Village Hotel to get a warming coffee. The airship hangar is a large structure, constructed without the skin that it would have had in use, but creates a stunning landmark in the Farnborough skyline.

A short time there, then the group moved on again to Farnborough Rugby Club for some light lunch before the main event of the day, the Farnborough First Team in league action against Southampton.

Simon got everyone in the group to pose between the posts for a “Rugby Team” style image for everyone to remember the day by.

Gary Allcock, Farnborough’s coach even welcomed the guests, suggesting some of the possible action to get pictures of. The guests even had a special mention in the match day programme from Club Chairman, Robin Moses. The Farnborough News photographer, Chris Whiteoak, even turned up, so the match would have a total of twenty photographers to cover the game!

Click image for full size or to download

Many were to find out what regular sports photographers such as Chris Whiteoak and Simon Taylor put up with. Poor light conditions that make high speed photography challenging, together with the added challenge of judging where the action will occur along with the bitter cold!

After a shaky start, Farnborough picked up in the second half and beat Southampton quite convincingly.

Everyone retired after the game to the bar, and rounded off the day with a curry at the Gurkha Palace, opposite the FAST museum where the day started in earnest.

Links to pictures :

Chris Matthews

Alan Ager

Brian Jones

Simon Taylor – GTG pictures – Rugby Pictures

Chris Marquardt – these images all on film

Perceived wisdom would say upgrade to 8GB of memory, but a new breed of disk drive has been introduced which in my opinion changes this.

Solid State Drives have been around for a while, but they are prohibitively expensive, being well over £1500 for a 500GB drive, 8GB of RAM would be about £250, but the new “hybrid” drive from Seagate is a shade under £100 for a 500GB drive. More expensive than the equivalent size in a standard hard drive, but read on…

The Seagate Momentus XT is available in 250, 320 & 500GB sizes and includes a 4GB SSD area within the unit. It uses this SSD to store the most frequently used data for super fast retrieval rather than storing it on the disk platters which are relatively slow. So, the operating system boots faster, but for me, the biggest advantages are that Photoshop, Lightroom and other programs are much faster to load and use, maybe twice as fast. Lightroom especially is now much snappier in use.

The drive learns as it goes, so if you start using other programs more frequently, it will optimise those. It also includes a 32MB cache and spins at 7200RPM, so it’s already a fast hard drive in a 2.5″ laptop format (although there’s no reason why you shouldn’t use it in a desktop system too).

So, for under a hundred quid, I’ve had a more dramatic upgrade than I did when I moved from 2GB to 4GB of memory. In my case, I didn’t increase the size of the disk, just the performance – dramatically.

The Momentus XT is available from people like www.ebuyer.com, an essential upgrade for anyone working with Mac OSX or Windows. On the Mac, it was very simple to upgrade, simply using SuperDuper to clone the drive (took about 3 hours with 250GB of data on the drive), then swapping it over. No re-install, no configuration, just carry on as if nothing has happened, just a lot faster. So simple, there’s no real reason not to do it!

Nissan Leaf

While alternative fuel cars are probably the future, I have to question this one.

First, it costs £23,990. That’s about 30% more than a reasonably specified MINI Cooper D, with similar on road performance.

It does benefit from a zero road tax rating, but then, so does the MINI. But, there are some big downsides. The quoted range is about 100 miles and reviewers have had ranges of about 47 miles in city driving. So, it’s not one for the motorways, and not really one for the cities either. I live about thirty miles from the centre of London, so it would be a sixty mile round trip – and I don’t think my nerves could stand the adventure of the possibility of getting stranded on the M3.

Then, there’s the issue of a British winter. When it gets cold, ‘normal’ cars use excess engine heat to warm the cabin. This one will have to use battery power, reducing the range even further.

They say you could save about £1,500 a year on fuel. Let’s do some maths.

To save this sort of money, you’d need to do almost 14,000 miles a year. That’s 38 miles every day, quite a lot for a car with a short range. That’s an average, many people will have driving patterns that include days with no driving and others with hundreds of miles. I’ve calculated this against a car doing 40mpg, petrol at £1.20 a litre and a charge costing £2.40 (the battery is 24KW/h).

Now, the car is warranted for 3 years or 60,000 miles, and the drive train and battery for 5 years / 60,000 miles. That means if you DO use the car for 14,000 miles, the battery will be out of warranty just after four years. How much will that cost to replace I wonder? It will be in the thousands for sure.

If it’s £4,000, then your average mileage of 10,000 miles will save £1,080 miles a year, so £5,400 after five years. Murphy’s law dictates that the battery will need replacing once the warranty has expired, so that should leave you £1,400 better off than a 40mpg car.

The MINI does aver 50mpg, that will save you that extra money in the first place, and the car is cheaper to start.

So unless you are a raving ecologist and willing to pay significantly more to feel good about doing your bit, what’s the point?

Health : I recently watched a documentary covering the subject of liver disease. Most of the patients there were suffering from liver failure due to alcohol abuse. Others suffered from non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (something I was recently diagnosed with) which is equally life threatening, causing liver and other organ failure as it progresses. Both can be easily avoided and the latter cured. NAFLD can be cured by losing weight and by cutting out or avoiding alcohol. Sanctimoniously, I can announce I have done both and am clear (for now) of any problem. I just have to be careful with weight and probably avoid booze for the rest of my life.

The people in the documentary were mostly awaiting liver transplants, 900 of which are available in the UK every year at a cost of £100,000 each. 7,000 people are on the waiting list for a liver however, so I suppose 6,100 are sentenced to death as a result of not enough organs or money being available.

The attitude of some of the people who had NAFLD was shocking however. “I’ll carry on drinking, I don’t worry about my diet” an overweight twenty-something declared – “when I need one, the NHS will give me a transplant, after all that’s what my taxes pay for”. This attitude sickened me to the core of my healing liver. What if I had needed, or should need a liver, but become one of the 6,100 fated souls at the expense of this binge drinking porker? I would feel unfairly treated. After all, like famous footballers before, she would probably go on to pickle the donated one in any case. The incidence of NAFLD has increased 400% in the last ten years, and may well become a bigger killer than heart disease in the next twenty.

My real point? We treat the NHS as a crutch for our unhealthy lifestyle. Taxes on cigarettes and booze pay for healthcare as if it’s a justified vice and the tax is some form of life insurance policy.

Welfare : We have gone far too soft on those who choose not to work and subsequently not contribute to our country and state. You can now leave school, even leave it early, have children and get housing, even without getting a job or earning a penny. Young, single parent families seem to have priority over council housing, making cheap housing inaccessible for those who choose to work and pursue a career. Ironically, buying a house is now even more out of reach than it has ever been in modern times for our hard working young people. So, those who are low-achievers will often take the easy way out, relying on the state for housing and handouts.

Diet : This has to be the biggest contributor to the decline of the modern Western World. As our lives become busier, our demand for fast food becomes more. We buy ready meals, eat take away food or dine on burgers and pizzas. Foods that are high in carbohydrates and sugars, direct contributors to weight gain – either very visible, or as in my case mostly fat on the liver. The human body is simply not designed to deal with the vast volumes of sugars and refined foods we attempt to pass through it nowadays, meat and vegetables are what we are intended to eat, but we supplement our Kentucky Fried Chicken with chocolates, cakes and sweets between meals. Gastric bands, once treated like cosmetic surgery, is often now available via the NHS as reducing weight itself will cause less of a burden on the service in the future as weight gain causes not just liver disease, but is better known for causing heart attacks and other coronary killers.

This is where I return to what I have realised on holiday. Watching hordes of fat Germans, Italians and English queue for the hotel buffet, loading up and overloading plates with pizza, chips and pasta, it’s not going to get any better. A large number are little older than me, but already walking with sticks and looking, well frankly, fit for nothing. OK, I managed to lose weight, so I’m a reformed fatty, probably worse than a reformed smoker, but I now enjoy salads and high protein foods like chicken and fish and while I don’t abstain totally, I avoid high carbohydrate foods like potato and pasta.

Defence : This is where this story unfolds. With current constraints on public spending, the UK government is considering suspending or scrapping the building of two new aircraft carriers, reducing the size of the armed forces – even the Territorial Army is set to be reduced by 60%, and even scrapping our nuclear deterrent is a possibility. At a time when our already reduced armed forces are horribly stretched in foreign wars, we have to ask if our defence is adequate given new risks we may face. Possibly not Russia any more, the real cold war is largely over, but there are new risks out there, very different from the last World Wars.

The Middle East is where everyone focusses, obviously because of the region’s significance in oil, but there are massive continents with millions of healthy, young people who could fight for their cause wether a common or a dictated one.

Many don’t have a welfare system like ours, but in their own way encourage child birth and population growth exactly because they don’t. Take Pakistan and many African countries as examples. These countries have growing populations, and populations that are getting younger as a result, not older like ours. The reason? Probably mainly because a family’s legacy is the home and farm associated with it. There are no employees, just the family to tend the fields, so to have more workers on the farm and produce more, it’s simple. Have more children. There’s also no infrastructure with towns having the odd McDonald’s or Pizza Hut, the food eaten is by necessity as high protein as possible, but in any case, very low in fat and sugars. Cynically, I wonder if this is why Africa produces so many World class athletes?

North Korea has a highly controlled population, fiercely loyal (maybe through fear) and again, none of our western afflictions. China is similar, although they have had a one family/one child rule for nearly twenty five years now and now have a declining and ageing population, which will give them a new set of problems in years to come. However, at the moment, they are a significant force to be reckoned with, if only for sheer numbers. Japan, although it has bee infected with our culture, largely does not have the health problems of the West.

Just a few countries who arguably are in better condition than ours. While financially, maybe not, but in terms of health and certainly attitude and loyalty. What would happen if they just got organised and mobilised against us? How many of our fat, dole taking, NHS draining layabouts would willingly join up and fight to support the way of life that they are accustomed to?

God forbid that the African & Eastern nations should join forces, we may think that our technology and nuclear arms are all we need to be safe, but modern terrorism has shown that it’s people on the ground that are what really counts. Make that huge numbers of fit, fanatical people against apathetic, artery clogged populations and I think there’s no match.