Technology – Page 30 – My Photo Blog

Drip, Drip – 25 July 2016

Posted on July 25, 2016July 25, 2016 by Zogman

The title refers, of course to the weather. Yet another rainy day, but as I write this in the back bedroom while Scamp watches Celebrity Masterchef (boak!), there is blue sky with some clouds of course, but blue sky nevertheless and the promise of a better day tomorrow. Hope it’s a better day for Scamp too.

Scamp’s new phone was due to arrive this morning between 9.12am and 10.12am. I just love DPD’s accurate time intervals. Anyway, it arrived just around 9.15am and as she opened the parcel and then the box the phone was in, I noticed that the seal was broken on the box, the bit that says “If the seal is broken reject the phone, blah blah”. I carefully took the phone out of the box and noticed there were finger prints on the protective plastic cover. The cover itself looked as if it had been removed and replaced. You know how it looks when that’s been done, the bubbles and the edges not quite right. Now it might be my paranoia, but in these days of heightened cyber security fears, that sort of thing shouldn’t happen. We eventually agreed that she should phone Vodafone and request a replacement in a sealed box. It took three phone calls and finally a post on Facebook to get the thing almost sorted. I say ‘almost’ because she now has to wait 48 hours to get approval to get the replacement from a Vodafone shop. Neither of us can understand why she has to wait that amount of time and neither of us is happy with the result. Customer service from Vodafone has been shocking for both of us now and I don’t think either of us will be renewing our current contracts.

I’ve been painting experimentally today, using cling film to create interesting effects in watercolour. I tried doing the same thing with acrylic, but it wasn’t as successful. The next thing is to try it on a real painting, and on a larger piece of paper.

Neither of us went to salsa tonight. Me because I couldn’t really be bothered and Scamp because her shoulder is still giving her some pain.

Did you know if you overwater a spider plant, the plant gets rid of the excess through the leaves? That’s where today’s photos come from. It’s amazing what you find out. Every day’s a school day. I never thought I’d say that again after June 2014.

Better weather forecast for tomorrow. Let’s hope they aren’t lying.

Dug wi’ a burst ba’ – 24 July 2016

Posted on July 24, 2016July 25, 2016 by Zogman

It was raining when we got up and it never stopped. Last week it was too much sun, this week it’s too little.

We sat and watched a boring Hungarian F1 GP. Most of the race was yawn-friendly, only becoming interesting in the closing stages. Best part was the after-race comment by Jenson Button about his team being ‘unfriendly’ towards him. I can’t blame him for this throw away comment after the ridiculous rule change that prevents the teams telling drivers about safety issues. F1 is becoming more regulated than the EU. Maybe Britain should opt out of it too.

I spent the rest of the afternoon ‘fiddling’ with a neat little program called Elementary OS. As the name implies, it’s not so much a program, more an Operating System. It’s based on Linux and like most Linux programs it’s free. Unlike most Linux operating systems it looks very neat an clean and almost Mac-like. After a few unsuccessful attempts to install it on my ancient HP netbook, I found that the laptop wouldn’t boot back into Windows. After dinner, I spent the rest of the evening trying to coax it back into life, unsuccessfully. It seemed like the hard disk was empty!! Oh dear.

Eventually I gave up and went out to get a PoD of raindrops on the nasturtiums at the front of the house. I did a bit of focus stacking to get the front and the back beads in focus and with the aid of Photoshop, it all came together as a whole.

After we went to bed, I couldn’t sleep. My mind was still worrying away at the netbook problem, like a “dug wi’ a burst ba’” (That’s a Scottish way of saying “a dog with a bone“). After another hour’s work using the excellent, free and dubiously sourced Hiren’s Boot Disk 15, I managed to get it going again with no loss of data. Now I could go back to sleep.

Looking for some dry weather (sun would be nice, but dry would do) tomorrow.

Homeward Bound part 2 – 21 July 2016

Posted on July 21, 2016July 21, 2016 by Zogman

After yesterday’s journey into the epicurean dungeon that is Lancashire services I decided that we wouldn’t risk salmonella, dysentery or norovirus and would leave earlier than planned hoping to find a cleaner service station.

I woke around 5am and couldn’t get back to sleep, but I lay until almost 7am when Scamp, having been woken by me asked if I wanted to just have a cuppa and head off. I agreed with her suggestion and by 8am we were washed, dressed and on our way north again. As I expected, the traffic was much lighter today and we made good time. We stopped at Southwaite services. What a difference. Light, clean and with people who wanted to serve you. Apparently their dishwasher was working because they had proper cups, not made of cardboard. I don’t know what it is about cardboard cups I don’t like. I think it’s something to do with the feel of the cardboard against my lips. Picky? Not me. Anyway, having had a proper breakfast and a proper coffee, or peppermint tea in Scamp’s case, we journeyed on. Weather was much more Scottish as we crossed the border and we even manages a little bit of rain. Not a lot, just enough to welcome us home. It was much cooler too, around 19ºc most of the way. We turned into our street just after 11am. Last week we were just getting on the road at that time.

The rest of the day was spent lazing around, backing up computer stuff, posting photos and generally winding down. I got ready to take my bike out later in the afternoon, that was when the rain came on, so I did nothing instead. A bit of a waste, that’s the way it is.

Tomorrow, the bus will take the strain.

PS
I mentioned yesterday about the poor WiFi in the Travel Lodge. I didn’t manage to get the blog posted using it. I imagine there were too many words for it to handle 😉
What I finally did was use my iPhone which was connecting with four bars of 3G. I created a personal hotspot and used that to finally upload the blog post. Isn’t technology wonderful when it works.

Thoughts – 23 June 2016

Posted on June 23, 2016June 26, 2016 by Zogman

Not a lot I can say about today, other than it was a day recovering from an excess of eating and sunbathing. It feels like that’s all we did for the last fortnight. The experiment with the Win 10 tablet went very well. Much better than I expected. It didn’t take me long to get back to using Mickysoft Live Writer. It really is the best blogging software I’ve ever used. It hurts me to say this, but it is so much better than anything Apple has to offer. Most, if not all the blogging software for the Mac is so far out of date it’s not worth using. Really, it is. It’s as if Apple has decided that nobody is writing blogs anymore so they aren’t going to support this form of communication. That is such an ‘Apple’ point of view. Mickysoft, for once seems to be on the ball and offers Live Writer for free. OK, you have to search around a bit to find a way to install it in a 32bit Win 10 ‘puter, but it does work.

The other thing I’ve been thinking about is the proliferation of ‘free’ WiFi in mainland Europe. By ‘free’ I mean WiFi that’s available in cafes and restaurants there. There’s no such thing as ‘free’ wifi as much as there is no such thing as a free lunch. However, for the price of a cup of coffee and a cake I was given the password in all the cafes I went to. For heaven’s sake Britain, dig yourselves out of the 19th century and embrace the 20th cent (21st century may take a little longer). Even some of the ports abroad have truly free WiFi. It may be a bit slow, but it’s open access wireless. Glasgow now advertises free WiFi, but I’ve never heard of anyone getting connected to it. Advertising it is one thing, supplying it is another.

I eventually dragged myself out today to take some shots down the Luggie Water. Lovely smells from the flowers in the bushes and along the riverbank. What were bare sandy banks a month or so ago are now covered knee deep in foliage. Great time of year.

Then a strange thing happened. Scamp had been looking through my blog posts in the afternoon and I was just about to add my latest one when I couldn’t access the blog page, nor could I get any of my site based emails. Panicked a bit then phoned Hazy who knows everything there is to know about email, websites and such. She got right back to say there was a problem at the host’s end. Panic over then. It was down for about an hour then came back as right as rain. Now I’ve got a plugin configured to send me emails when the site is down. Thanks again Hazy, my web monkey!

Voted today for the EEC Referendum. Don’t know which way it will go. That’s a lie, I’m writing this on Saturday night and I now know the disaster that awaited me on Friday morning, but I’ll write about that later.

Testing Again – 4 June 2016

Posted on June 4, 2016 by Zogman

The new lens was due to arrive between 3pm and 4pm so we had time to kill today. The day had started with heavy cloud, bit without the rain that had been predicted. However as the day wore on, the clouds lifted and the sun shone, but there was a cool breeze, so rather than sit in the garden as we’ve been doing recently, we did our phase one packing. Just to see how much we could lob into these canvas bags. How more efficient they are than the big heavy rectangular boxes my mum and dad had to drag on holiday with them. No rolling wheels for them, no, they had to carry them. Going on holiday was a tough business in the old days.

<Technospeak>
The lens arrived on time and I took a two or three shots. They looked as good as the reviews had predicted. This lens is a 12 – 32mm zoom and this equates to a 24 – 64mm in 35mm terms. On a 35mm camera, a standard lens is anything between 35mm and 60mm, so this lens covers this with a little more on the short end. In other words, it’s a wide standard lens, a kit lens. It doesn’t do anything very special, but it does it very, very well. Those two or three shots showed that it was really sharp. It provided the sharpness of a prime lens with the versatility of a zoom. It looks like it’s going to be locked on to one of the Olys for some time to come.
</Technospeak>

All of the photos in the matrix were taken with it today.

JIC and Hazy: The one top right is all that’s left of the Adventure Playground on the path to Condorrat. They’ve taken out all the old stuff. Now we wait to see what will replace it with.

Spent the rest of the afternoon coaxing, first the Mac and then the new Linx tablet, to work properly. The Mac problem is iTunes. My least favourite Mac prog. I applied an update this morning, something I rarely do. After that I kept getting a popup telling me that something to do with the dock had crashed. After checking on the net, it turns out that everyone else who has the problem links it to the same iTunes update. Apple, I don’t expect this of you.
The Linx problem was that some of the apps wouldn’t load any more. When Control Panel failed to load with an error that looked like the progeny of half the alphabet and an international telephone number, I knew it was time to restore it. Unfortunately the restore got to 95% and got stuck. I restarted it and it worked a bit better. The apps loaded, but Control Panel still failed. I’ve downloaded the restore from the Linx site. If I have time tomorrow, I’ll install it and see if that helps. Microsoft, I do expect this of you!

Looking for warm sun tomorrow.

The Gas Man Cometh – 3 June 2016

Posted on June 3, 2016 by Zogman

The Gas Man came to fix the (Not So) Smart Meter that would not only mean no meter reading for us and no estimated bills either. The actual meters had been installed about a month ago by another Gas Man, but he couldn’t get the electricity and gas meters to talk to one another. This GM, after a couple of hours work and frustrated phone calls, got them to talk to one another, but they resolutely wouldn’t talk to the server. It wasn’t his fault. As usual with these things, it was the server that was down, so he apologised and arranged yet another appointment to (hopefully) complete the installation. We have volunteered to have these gizmos installed and it’s causing all these problems. How many more problems will rear their heads when the whole country has them fitted as the Gas and Electricity companies seem determined to do.

Once the Gas Man had gone, we went out for a run. Scamp wanted to go for coffee to her usual place at Robroyston and maybe drop in to Staples to get a memory upgrade for the Windows 10 tablet. Instead, I took her to the Tea House on the Loch in Gartcosh. Tea and Cream Scones on the veranda with a sunny view over Johnston Loch. Hopefully we’ll be back, but not until the dandelion parachutes or the willowherb fluff that was blowing in the breeze have gone.

Spotted Mr Grey waking from an afternoon roost in the trees surrounding St Mo’s pond later and got a few decent grab shots with the Nikon and the Tamron lens.

New lens on order from MPB (yes, another one!) Should arrive tomorrow. Looking forward to using it. Don’t know where we’re going tomorrow. It depends on the weather (light rain forecast!!) and when the lens arrives.

Keep taking the tablets – 30 May 2016

Posted on May 30, 2016 by Zogman

We went in to Glasgow with the stated intention of getting a tablet/laptop. Apparently what I was looking for was a “2 in 1”, which I suppose describes it quite well.

Note to JIC.
Please feel free to ignore this part as it’s almost all technospeak.
First stop was Staples where I saw the cheapo looking Linx 10.1″ tablet with a clamshell keyboard/lid. Cheapo maybe, but it had 2 x USB3 ports and 1 x micro USB for power and doubling as a port if you have an OTG (On The Go) cable. Even better, it was at a bargain price of £149.99. Ok, one possible.
Ok, JIC, Technospeak over.

Next stop was John Lewis who on paper had a load of these 2 in 1s. Unfortunately, if we ignore the very expensive Mickysoft offerings, there were only two. One was an Acer with no price on it and no power in the battery, the other was an HP at £80 more than the cheapo Linx. The spec appeared to be almost the same, in fact it only had 1 x USB port and 1 x micro USB. So it looks like it’s back to Staples.

Before that, Scamp decided that lunch at Patisserie Valerie was in order. Since she prefers to eat inside, we got a table no bother because everyone wanted to sit outside in the sun. Had our order taken: Crayfish Salad for both of us and Apple Pie for after for Scamp, Pecan Pie for me. Tea for both.
The tea arrived, and so did the manager to apologise, but there was no Pecan Pie. No problem, I’d just have the Apple Pie. A little later he arrived back to say that sorry, there was no Crayfish Salad. He did offer alternatives. Scamp went for Chicken Caesar and I chose Chicken Brochette. We’d been sitting for 20 minutes by this time. Half an hour later and still nothing had arrived although the manager had floated past about 15 minutes before to say that my chicken was just going on the grill. I’d had enough. We offered to pay for the two teas, but the girl on the till would have nothing of it and told us the manager “should have been dealing with it.” If I’d had to speak to the manager himself, Begbie would have come out of the box again.

Back at Staples, I bought the Linx. Unfortunately, when I got it home, I found that it looked nothing like what I’d seen in the shop. Quick phone call and was told to bring it back and they’d exchange it for the correct one. I did, they did and this time I checked it before I left the shop. So far, it’s doing everything I expected it to do. Pity the same can’t be said for Patisserie Valerie.

More sun promised for tomorrow. Bring it on!

When is a laptop not a laptop – 28 May 2016

Posted on May 28, 2016May 28, 2016 by Zogman

We drove into Stirling today for lunch at the Indian and not a lot else. The lunch was good and instead of nan bread we had chapatis. Scamp and I don’t like this new idea of chopping up a nan bread and serving it in a basket. I suspected that unscrupulous restaurants could be collecting uneaten nan pieces from previous diners baskets and using them to pad out new ones. Just a suspicion, but Scamp agreed that it was an unsavoury possibility, so we decided it would be better to get chapatis which are served whole.

On the way to the restaurant, I dallied in Stirling’s computer shop. I’d been looking for a laptop to take on holiday and I’d had a few bargains in the past from Computer Depot. Years ago, Ali, the owner, sold me a little MP3 music player that has a massive 64MB memory and also took extra memory in the form of SmartMedia cards. This probably means nothing to most people these days, but back at the turn of the century (that sounds such a long time ago, doesn’t it) they were very high tech and could be had in sizes up to 128MB. With a 128MB card in the player, you could have almost 3 hours of music at your disposal. I still have the Diamond Rio music player, and occasionally it will work. Anyway, there were no laptops that were in my price range. What they did have was one of the new (well, new to me) 2 in 1 tablets with a clip on keyboard.

<TechnoSpeak>
It only 32GB storage and 2GB RAM, but the processor was a quad 1.33Mhz with the ability to run at 1.83Mhz in burst mode. It had one USB 3 port and a micro USB 2 which, as well as being used as a charging port, could double as an import/outport device with an On The Go (OTG) cable. It was running 32bit Windows 10 which is a lot better than I thought, now that I know how to ‘refresh’ the install. The 32 GB wouldn’t be nearly enough storage for holiday photos, but if I used the USB port to connect an external hard drive it would be a neat solution to the problem. Almost as neat as the old HP netbook but much faster. Certainly worth considering. I didn’t dive in and buy the one he had on offer, mainly because I couldn’t find any reviews of it on the net, but I’m looking at alternative versions. In the words of Facebook, “A lot has changed in laptops since you last looked.”
</TechnoSpeak>

Today was a good day weather-wise and tomorrow is meant to be even better. We’ll see.

Flooers – 3 May 2016

Posted on May 3, 2016 by Zogman

Flooers is a sign that I didn’t find my muse today.

The morning was a bit frantic waiting for the lady to come to give us a quote for a new boiler. The final figure was a bit more than Scamp or I had anticipated, but we knew it was going to be the most expensive. We were quite intrigued with the amount that heating technology has advanced in the fifteen odd years since we had our present boiler installed. Then, smart phones were an inventor’s dream. Today you can control your boiler remotely from anywhere in the world with a smart phone. Whether we can do that control, in fact whether we will need to perform that degree of control will depend on the final cost. Another quote coming tomorrow.

I finished an acrylic painting today. Not finished to my satisfaction, but like Whistler allegedly said, “I intend to do no more to it.” I think it’s already about an inch thick in paint in some places. Later, after dinner, I did a few wee delicate (for me) watercolours, teeny wee things, but I like them. Something I saw in a gallery in Stirling.

Photographs were hard to come by today, or to be more exact, subjects were. I’ve watched Scamp’s Forest Flame gaining in colour day by day and now the flowers are out, they’ve almost reached their maximum colour intensity. The flowers are quite insignificant compared to the bright red of the sprouting leaves. Dandelions are a favourite of mine. I like the ragged looking yellow head and when the time comes, I love the dandelion clock with the little ‘ballerinas’.

Early rise tomorrow to take Scamp’s car in for MOT, then more technology overload with another quote for a new boiler. Oh what fun!

Just another Saturday – 23 April 2016

Posted on April 23, 2016 by Zogman

After yesterday’s biz, today was just another Saturday.

We went to Stirling and bumped into Scamp’s sister and her daughter (the same ones from yesterday) in our favourite curry shop. I wouldn’t have bothered going back there after the disappointments of our last two visits, but I’m glad we did. The menu, if more expensive, had gone back to its previous old faithfuls and I’m guessing the chef was back from his/her sabbatical because the food tasted like it used to. The only stumbling block was the nan bread which we both agreed was too soft and doughy. We’ll let them work on it.

Walked round Stirling shopping centre. That didn’t take very long. Stirling, apart from the castle and the old buildings leading up to it, isn’t all that interesting. More and more shops closed in the shopping mall it’s a sign of the times. Not as bad as Dunfermline the other day. Things are getting bad when the Cash Converter shop closes down. Anyway, we didn’t linger long in Stirling and drove home empty handed apart from a Thunderball ticket that proved not even worth the paper it was printed on. Oh well.

Today’s photo is the final one in the series of Shug and Tam meet the Queen. By the way, just in case you were wondering, it has nothing to do with Mrs McQueen turning 90. It’s just such a nice wee minifig, I thought I’d like to do something with it. I’m done with Comic Life for a while. I’d forgotten just how irritating it was to work with. Until you’ve experienced it, it’s difficult to explain just how badly coded it is. Even the version 1 as its flaws, the most annoying is when it loses focus on the object being edited. Leave it for a while to get its wind back and focus returns. Not something you want to happen when you are working to a deadline, so I doubt if you’d use this on a commercial basis. However, it cost me nothing so I shouldn’t complain, but I always do 😉

To those who read my blog posts, I apologise for the number of updates to it recently as I struggled to add two short videos. I finally worked out today that the only video format that WordPress would abide was MP4. I was sure I’d added a MOV once, but I was wrong. It was only when I was checking the HTML code today that I realised my error. I may not embed any more videos for some time, but hopefully I’ll remember that I wrote this explanation – partly to you and partly to myself!