Category: Technology

A lazier day – 22 August 2015

Posted on by Zogman

OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERAToday was not a day at the gym, or the pool, or on the bike.  Today was Saturday and a lazier day.  We went to visit a friend down in Ayrshire and had a pleasant hour or so with her and her son.  It’s a long time since we’ve seen them and it was really good to catch up.  On the way back, we decided to visit Waitrose and spent a fortune.  I think it must have been my jar of peanut butter and my slice of cheese that tipped us over the ‘expensive’ level.  Anyway, as we hadn’t had a lunch and neither us could be bothered cooking, we decided to hand the expense and get a Chinese carry-out tonight.  It was quite delicious.  I had carried a camera with me all day and hadn’t used it once, so I decided to get the ‘weemen’ to pose for me tonight.  Unfortunately I pressed the wrong button when choosing the correct mode on the camera and did a sort of ‘return to factory settings’ sort of thing and it took me over an hour to get it back working the way I had it. I won’t be making that mistake again.

I’m running a virus checker just now on my Mac.  It’s been going for almost four hours now and has found seven pieces of malware of various kinds, every one a PC virus.  Say what you like about Macs, but they don’t pick up as much malware and stuff as PCs.  It’s amazing the number of invoices I’ve been sent and CVs I’ve been asked to read by kind people who only want me to open the attachments on their emails.  I’ve got a friend who obviously did open one, because someone in Japan is now spoofing his email address.  One last thing, Windoze 10 is no longer lounging around on the netbook.  It got the bum’s rush today.  Thankfully it didn’t take long to restore normal service, only about 15 minutes. Now the netbook looks as if it’s flying by comparison.  It’s all relative in the end.

Long Live the Mac.

Strawberry Vodka – 9 August 2015

Posted on by Zogman

A day of doing lots some of the things I’d been planning to do and adding some lots more things to my to-do list.

No painting today, but I did get a painting framed. It was actually the sketch for my latest watercolour. Quite often I find that the sketches are fresher and more interesting than the finished product. That was the case here. One of my problems with framing when working from an existing picture frame is doing the calculations for positioning the aperture in the mat card. Today I spent over an hour writing spreadsheet that would solve that particular problem for me in Excel on a Mac. After it was done and shared on the excellent Dropbox, I tried loading it on to Excel on the Samsung tablet. What a surprise, Excel refused to format it properly and wouldn’t allow me to add numbers into the cells. It also wouldn’t allow me to save anything without me logging in or registering. As if I was going to do anything as stupid as that. Microsoft? Stick a fork in them, they’re done. Thankfully I managed to get a totally free app Free Office Plan Maker Mobile (you need to do something with that name folks) to load it and present it as it was on the Mac. It worked perfectly fist time. It only took me about two hours to go from opening Excel on the Mac to getting the margin sizes for the mat from the Samsung. If I’d done it with pencil and paper it would have taken me about 15 minutes max, but where’s the fun in that? Much better to use technology to simplify things … I think.

DSC_3247- blog--221Photography took a bit of a back seat, but I managed to get some shots of DSC_3254- blog--221a dunnock in the garden in the afternoon. I first saw them a couple of years ago and now they seem to be quite common visitors all year, only feeding on the ground, never attempting the bird feeders. Also started a new batch of strawberry vodka – a great summer drink. Basically it’s strawberries soaked in vodka. Keep in the fridge for three days, stirring daily. After three days, decant and drink (responsibly 😉 ) with lemonade.

Warning! DON’T ATTEMPT TO EAT THE STRAWBERRIES!!

Hopefully I’ll remember to take a photo of the finished product, DV.

The evening was spent trying to repair a dodgy old Sony camcorder with refused to accept the video cassette. Thanks Sony for a wasted evening and a realisation that your company has lost a lot of it’s reputation for solid workmanship.