Author Archives: Andrew

Review: All Tide Up

By Alex Cay

Posted on 25 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Another great farce

Like it’s predecessor, Man Up!, this is a knock-about farce based around the capable but somewhat cursed sports agent, Patrick Flynn. This time the key protegé is a nymphomaniac Russian tennis player, but otherwise the cast of gangsters, hit-men (& -women) and scam artists hasn’t changed much. So much the better for that. Several of the key characters miraculously make it through from the first book to the second, and if you want to understand how then you first need to read the author’s even more farcical short story Icy Hot.

This style of comedy writing is difficult to pull off, and can mis-fire, but Alex Cay seems to have it off pat. The body count continues to be high, but sometimes (not always) with a slapstick element which invokes a lighter cartoonish tone. The sex scenes are moderately graphic, but provide both the prime driver for several of the female characters and a fair element of the humour. However as long as you are comfortable with a fairly adult style then you will enjoy and frequently laugh out loud at this outlandish tale.

It’s always encouraging when someone takes note and acts on a review. The author personally asked me to review his first book, and I happily did so noting that I’d like to see a change of location, fewer detailed American sports references, and a couple of stylistic tweaks. He has delivered on all those requests, and that makes the book all the more readable. Thanks for listening, Alex!

A great holiday read. I look forward to the next instalment.

Categories: Reviews and Thoughts on the World. Content Types: Adventure, Fiction, and Humour.
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Review: The Eerie Silence

Searching for Ourselves in the Universe, By Paul Davies

Posted on 23 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Enjoyable and intriguing review of the state of SETI

This book is a review, at the 50 year point, of the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence (SETI), and a consideration of how it may evolve in the future, by the scientist who heads several of its key committees. It’s a wide-ranging discussion which provides some answers for Enrico Fermi’s great challenge (“Where is everybody?”), and prompts the reader to consider how much we really know given how much our knowledge has advanced and changed since SETI was established in the early 1960s.

The early part of the book is focused on the current evidence for other forms of intelligent life, considering what we know of its genesis, the evidence (or rather profound lack thereof) for any second start either on earth or in the solar system, and whether evolution will naturally or regularly produce intelligent, scientific and technical species. Here Davies takes a fairly negative view, although he acknowledges that we have simply failed to uncover evidence from our earth-based viewpoint, and that “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence”.

The latter part looks at the potential forms of a “galactic diaspora”, accounting for our vastly increased knowledge of alternative information carriers, information systems, machines  and engineered probes including the conventional, the biological and those based on nano-technology. Again there’s no evidence yet, but this section explains that alien signals or probes might just be too different, or too small, for us to detect. The conclusion is that we need SETI to avoid being athropocentric, and especially not “1960s radio astronomer centric”.

The final chapters explain the current state of preparation for First Contact (which seems to consist mainly of international committees sending telegrams to each other, and may not be up to the arrival of city-sized spaceships over the capital cities of the UN Security Council :)). The author also discusses what form of messages we should choose if and when we do send any ourselves. The assertion that only key mathematical and physical theorems are guaranteed to bridge all scientific species is a sound one, but maybe misses the point that the Pioneer plaques and similar are just as much an expression of our humanity to ourselves as a serious attempt to communicate with minimum ambiguity.

While the book is inspiring and thought-provoking, it’s also a bit frustrating in places. Davies asserts correctly that the Earth is progressively becoming “radio silent” to long-distance observers, but blames this entirely on the move to put major long distance communication channels into cables. A more complete explanation is that our world is full of vastly more wireless communication that 50 years ago, but as we adopt spread-spectrum and encryption technologies and get better at using low power and highly directed signals the “overspill” into space is much more difficult to detect. Similarly he presents an explanation of Galactic Inflation I haven’t read before (the absence of magnetic monopoles), but fails to present the more common justifications.

In considering alterative technologies Davies binds himself with our current science, despite the fact that there is significant evidence (the failure to unify General Relativity and Quantum Physics, the lack of any real explanation for Dark Matter and Dark Energy) that there are things about the Cosmos we just don’t understand, and which an alien civilisation (or a future humanity) may exploit. While Davies correctly advises against wishful thinking, it would be prudent to accept that just as our own understanding has changed vastly in the last 100 years, it will likely change again in the future, perhaps opening up valid options for, for example, super-light speeds.

However, those criticisms aside, this is an enjoyable, intriguing and well worth-while book. In the final few pages Davies himself observes that there is a contention between the official views of Davies the relatively cautious scientist and Davies the philosopher, human being and SETI enthusiast, and some of the challenges come from presenting and navigating those different viewpoints, which overall is done very well. I thoroughly enjoyed this book, and recommend it.

Categories: Reviews. Content Types: Book, Physics & Cosmology, and Science.
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Creating 3D Images for On-Screen Display

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Posted on 18 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

There’s a significant dearth of information on the internet regarding how to create high-resolution 3D images for display on a suitable TV. While many of us regularly enjoy watching visually stunning 3D movies both in cinemas and also on television, if you try and research creating your own 3D images you are led either into the highly technical space of professional production, or at the other extreme you end up reading a lot of rubbish about squinting at pairs of postage-stamp images to "try and get a 3D effect".

While I don’t want to be unkind, the latter is completely out of touch with our target environment, a 3D-enabled large screen television. Such devices are now relatively common, and there ought to be a recognised process for creating suitable images for them. As it turns out, it’s perfectly possible and relatively easy to create stunning 3D images which will display at the full resolution of the target television. With a little discipline and practice you can do so reliably with any camera, and even hand-held.

Read my article to learn how.

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Review: Influx

By Daniel Suarez

Posted on 15 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Enjoyable romp, but largely familiar plot

Daniel Suarez is billed as the new Michael Crichton. While a few of his novels have come onto my radar, this is the first I have read. Based on this showing there’s a great deal of promise, but the fairly derivative nature of the plot suggests that at least for now the pure inventiveness of Crichton has yet to be matched.

The basic precept is this: imagine that many of the key inventions we have been patiently awaiting for the last 50 years – controlled fusion, quantum computing, reliable cloning, a generic cure for cancer – have actually been found, but are hidden from the world at large. What warped power and societal structures would that drive? It’s a great precept, although here it’s turned into a recognisable and predictable plot, with a heroic inventor on the run, while dark forces try to suppress inventions on behalf of the status quo. In some ways it’s reminiscent of Chain Reaction, and by pure coincidence I had also just read Catalyst by Boyd Morrison, which while markedly less futuristic tells a similar tale.

My other slight gripe is that this suffers in a few places from “techno-babble”, short sections which appear to just be a dumping-ground for a large number of technical terms, which just about boil down to “magic”. I know the author is trying to establish the BTC’s technological superiority, but that’s adequately done by the more detailed examples in the main flow of the text.

That said, this is a clever piece, challenging preconceptions and frequently, even literally, turning them on their heads. As a techno-thriller it’s well written, keeping the reader’s attention fully engaged from the first page, and I will certainly be reading more of Suarez’s books.

Categories: Reviews. Content Types: Adventure, Book, Fiction, and Science Fiction.
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Review: Mother Tongue

By Bill Bryson

Posted on 13 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

Very amusing, but needs a refresh

This is an amusing and enjoyable romp through the history of the English language, and a delight for closet linguisticists like myself. Bill Bryson takes us on a fascinating and funny tour of the history of the English language, how it became a (arguably the) world language, how its usage, spelling and grammar vary with time, location and context, and how it continues to develop. However like this reader it’s older than you think…

Amazon have been pushing this book hard recently, and I downloaded the book in Kindle format in the expectation that it was a relatively new work, with an apparent publication date of 2009. However reading the opening chapter I got a strange sense of deja vu, and realised I had read it before, but evidently long before the advent of either e-reading or publishing and cataloguing my own reviews. I reckon I last read this not long after its original publication in 1990, so about a generation ago! It has rewarded a re-read, but has left me thinking how much better a book it might be for an refresh.

A lot has changed in the last 25 years which directly affects our use of language, and particularly English. Foremost in my mind are the end of the Cold War, the rise of the Asian economic powerhouses presenting relatively direct services to the rest of the world, and, above all, the development of the Internet and mobile technologies. The latter have brought the expectation that pretty much any two humans, anywhere, may have both the wish and the technical means to communicate, and across national boundaries will usually use English to do so. Technology has both led and enabled big changes to how we use language, and we increasingly design our messages and evolve our language around the constraints and possibilities of the transmission and consumption platforms. “Thanx”, “R U OK” and “GR8” don’t appear in this book, but they belong there.

It would be great to understand whether the wider use of English is driving greater homogenisation of usage and acceptance of obvious simplifications, or whether we are just further “baking in” the idiosyncrasies, and adding a new layer on top. Does the availability of online resources such as dictionaries and thesauruses drive the wider adoption of correct usage, or is this outweighed by the need for simplification of the message? Do tools such as spell checking,  predictive text and automated translation increase or decrease individual language skills?

In fairness to Bill Bryson, he does recognise some of these challenges in his final chapter, and makes many of the right calls on general direction, but the book itself is now a period piece the other side of major technological and geopolitical changes.

Despite the fact that Bryson wrote this book when he had been living in Yorkshire for many years, it has a bit of an American focus, typically assuming that the reader knows the American usage but needs the British explaining. Once you’ve tuned into this it’s fine, but it can throw British (and I suspect other) readers slightly at first. Other slight downsides are that like some of Bryson’s other books it’s arguably a bit too long, and in the last third some of the examples get a bit repetitive, and also some other reviewers suggest that the fact checking, especially around non-English languages, is perhaps a bit suspect.

Having said all that, the books remains highly readable, full of wonderful anecdotes and nuggets of knowledge, and if you accept its horizon, well fills a role which I don’t think is met by any other book which I have read. Enjoy it, but acknowledge and forgive that it’s slightly showing its age.

Categories: Reviews. Content Types: Book and Linguistics.
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Twin Tales of Sporting Daring-Do

Posted on 4 April 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

The 1988 Winter Olympics brought us not only one, but two heart-warming stories of sporting heroism by unconventional outsiders. The story of the Jamaican Bobsleigh Team was told promptly in the wonderful 1993 Disney picture Cool Runnings, but we’ve had to wait nearly 30 years to see the other tale, that of Eddie the Eagle, on the silver screen.

Part of the challenge is that the dramatic conventions of such films force their screen renderings to be quite similar. In reality the situations were somewhat different. Until the wheels (or at least the runners) literally came off the Jamaicans had built up a real prospect of a good place, powered by a team three of whom could run 100m in less than 10s. Eddie Edwards had his utter determination to take part, and had built up a decent competition record on skis, but was only ever likely to come last. The new film acknowledges this, but otherwise echoes the earlier one in many ways, with the same drunk and disgraced former athlete as coach, the condescending officials who see the outsiders as challenging the dignity of their sport, parents who are split on whether to support their sons or not, fellow athletes who are initially rude but who come to respect the outsiders’ determination, and so on.

When two films, by co-incidence , tackle the same subject at the same time it’s inevitable that they are compared and one (Deep Impact, Olympus Has Fallen) falls into the shadow of the other (Armageddon, White House Down). While I get the impression that the makers of the new film didn’t want to wait nearly a generation to make it, maybe by doing so they have both reduced this effect (except from old codgers like yours truly), and will perpetuate these great sporting tales into a new audience who might not otherwise have been aware of them.

Comparisons and conventions aside, Eddie the Eagle is an excellent film. It captures both the flights and thumps of ski jumping, and modern filming techniques allow you to be there on the skis with the jumpers. However it excels in telling the human stories, with Edward’s determination against the odds beautifully portrayed, as is the growing admiration of those who both supported and opposed him. I have two abiding memories of the Calgary Olympics. One is of four black guys carrying their broken bobsleigh over the finish line, and the other is of an interview about Eddie with the slightly cold and aloof Finnish ski-jumping champion Matti Nykänen who the reporter was expecting to be rude and dismissive. Instead the young Finn was warm and supportive of Edward’s right to be there, and pretty much put the seal of approval on his attempt at the 90m hill. In the film that same support is portrayed in an elevator conversation between the two men, and brought my memories flooding back.

The film is also very funny, and that triggered another personal element. We went to see it yesterday in Guildford, and a large extended family had clearly block-booked the central seats next to ourselves. I noticed that when the same writer’s name was shown twice in the credits, there was a little Mexican wave by the kids, and thought "oh, that Simon Kelton must have someone in", but then sat down to enjoy the film and laughed as loud as I normally do when so entertained. Afterwards, one of the family group came up to me and asked "was it you who was laughing so loudly?" I confirmed that it was, and he introduced himself as the writer. It’s not often I can personally express my thanks to an entertainer, and it was great on this occasion to get the chance.

It’s a good film. Go and see it. And afterwards, try and catch up with Cool Runnings.

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Does a Photograph Portray the Subject, or the Photographer?

Posted on 28 March 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Three youngsters in Cienfuegos
Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 20-11-2010 18:54 | ISO: 200 | Exp. Time: 1/400s | Aperture: 11.0 | Focal Length: 15.0mm (~24.3mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM

Mike Johnston (no relation) over at The Online Photographer has recently run a number of articles discussing the extent to which the photographer adjusts the “look” of a photograph (see What Should a Photo Look Like?) His primary examples were a set from a recent New York Times online photo essay, Cuba on the Edge of Change.

While it’s a fine article, the photos, with one slight exception showing a bride on the way to her wedding, all portray a dark, crumbling, slightly grim Cuba. The following is a good example:

Image from New York Times, photographer not identified

There’s nothing wrong with this photo. Some might say it’s a very good image. However it has been deliberately selected, as have all the others in the article, to show and reinforce the image of a struggling, poor, backward Cuba which is the common American image of the country. The low-key lighting is part of this “story”, and the look of the photos has been adjusted to enhance that.

I went to Cuba in 2010. Yes, I saw decay, old buildings which had not been well repaired, and I certainly saw poverty. I did see a few, not many, people surviving by begging. But that’s not my enduring memory of the country, and doesn’t fit the best of my images. I saw a country full of happy, reasonably healthy and well fed people who were managing to stay cheerful in a difficult economic situation. My pictures are full of smiles, kids running around, and, yes, lots of bright colours and a high key look. That reflected the Cuba I wanted to portray.

The picture at the top more accurately portrays the Cuba I saw than the NYT one, but I’m a positive sort of chap, and I was on a very enjoyable holiday. I don’t know whether the NYT journalist and photographer (or photographers, it’s not clear) had had a worse experience, or were just trying to illustrate a narrative that was already in their minds, but I’m willing to bet the latter.

So to my mind the question is not “what sort of look do you want in your photos”? Your photos will reflect a composite of the subject, true, but also the photographer’s own outlook. Inevitably the photographs will be both taken and prepared coloured with the effects of that outlook just as much as, maybe even more than, the original beams of light.

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My Travel Page

Posted on 10 March 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
The Devil's Garden, near Escalante, Utah
Camera: Canon EOS 350D DIGITAL | Date: 13-10-2007 15:08 | Resolution: 3468 x 2308 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 11.0 | Focal Length: 38.0mm | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM

Some things don’t scale. You start off doing something, but before you know it it’s outgrown its usefulness and needs to change. So it is with website design…

I started off with lists in a couple of places on this site of blogs or albums related to trips I’ve done. However as the list has grown they were getting a bit unwieldy  and out of step with one another. I have therefore practiced what I preach, and "re-factored" them to a new "index" page, at www.andrewj.com/travel

Take a look, and let me know what you think.

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Camera History Update

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Posted on 16 February 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
My camera fleet in early 2016 - note how the GX7 has gone from "almost smallest" to second largest
Resolution: 19440 x 3391

As part of a general tidy-up, I’ve updated my camera history page, with a new photo of the "fleet". It may amuse you, especially as the count has crept back up again! "Photography" is a combination of many separate hobbies, and I’m definitely engaged in the "buying and selling cameras" sub-division.

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Backing Up

Posted on 4 February 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
On the caldera path, Firostephani, Santorini
Camera: Panasonic DMC-GX8 | Date: 04-10-2015 18:45 | Resolution: 4963 x 3722 | ISO: 500 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 7.1 | Focal Length: 15.0mm | Location: Santorini | State/Province: South Aegean | See map | Lens: LUMIX G VARIO 12-35/F2.8

Coming up with a reliable backup policy is a challenge as data volumes grow. My approach is as follows. On a weekly basis I do a full backup of the system disk of the more "volatile" PCs in our collection, plus a differential backup of the other disks. The best tool for full backups appears to be Acronis, but it has a brain-dead approach to partial backups, which cannot always be restored if you don’t have every file in the chain, and it’s just not reliable enough. I therefore also continue to use the venerable Windows ntbackup, even under Windows 10, as I still haven’t found a better option which supports a true "differential" model.

Every three or four months I then do a full backup of every disk in every PC, and re-set the baseline for the differential backups. That’s due for this weekend, and as a result I’m trying to finish processing images from some previous trips, so they will be fully backed up in their complete form. I have about 100 images from Santorini to process today, and then I get to a very neat breakpoint. I’m not sure whether such a deadline really helps, but at least it drives me to keep my photography backlog under control.

The picture above is mainly just to provide a bit of colourful cheer on a damp and windy February morning. Enjoy it!

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Posted in PCs/Laptops, Photography, Santorini, Thoughts on the World | Leave a comment

Snap!

Posted on 28 January 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google
Echoes: screenshot from my Android tablet
Resolution: 1600 x 2249

As you know, I enjoy looking for patterns and coincidences. One potential source is the various ways I display my photo portfolios, and I occasionally spot the screensavers on two devices, for example, showing related images. This is interesting, but essentially fleeting – a moment to be enjoyed before the randomisers roll on.

However, last night I spotted one which I not only could, but thought I should share. On one page of my Android tablet I display two randomly selected images, and when I flicked through it I spotted this combination. The top image is from Antelope Canyon in Arizona, the bottom is a shepherdess in Morocco. Not only are the colour palettes almost identical, but in some ways the woman’s body position echoes the curves of the rock. Intriguing.

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Weinberg’s New Law, and the Upgrade Cascade

Posted on 22 January 2016 by Andrew - Please share: All Addthis servicesTweet thisFacebook thisLink thisYam thisShare on Google

When I started the experiment of running Windows on a MacBook (continued here and here), I really expected it to just be a "travel" laptop, continuing with something like my Alienware R17X as primary machine. That changed rapidly when I got addicted to the MacBook’s better weight, format, screen and, it must be admitted, style. However originally I had purchased a relatively low spec second-hand MacBook, in particular without a Retina screen, and I promised myself an upgrade at some point. On the Bhutan trip I got to play with the newer, lighter, MacBooks some of the others were using, and with the end of my financial year approaching, over Christmas I decided to go for it.

The purchase process was "non-trivial" (polite version). To get the performance improvement I wanted, I was attracted to the top-spec model of the latest MacBook Pro. A bit of research also established that I didn’t have much choice: the new MacBooks use a new SSD technology which is not yet fully supported by the parts market, and only the higher spec machines have a 1TB disk to match my older machine. Purchasing a brand new MacBook is not for the faint hearted: full price from Apple they are bloody expensive. Even allowing for inflation the MacBook is about 35% more than my Alienware laptop (itself a custom-built machine of then-equivalent spec) was in late 2011. And this is supposed to be a market with downwards price pressure!

I decided to look for alternative options. At first I thought I’d cracked it with someone selling a refurbished item via Amazon, but when it turned up it was completely the wrong spec, including a Spanish keyboard. Amazon and the vendor were both very helpful and a refund was arranged promptly, but neither could help regarding providing the item I actually wanted, so that was a dead end. On eBay there are few options, but making enquiries they are mainly "grey market" imports which are just dodging the VAT, which doesn’t help me. However persistence paid off and I finally found an affordable deal for a brand new MacBook which came with a proper VAT receipt, bringing the effective price nearer what I’ve normally paid. I would happily recommend the very helpful suppliers, TRDuk Ltd.

Then the "fun" started!  The famous American consulting guru, Gerald Weinberg, wrote his advice in terms of a number of "laws". The shortest and simplest is The New Law, which simply states "Nothing new works". Unfortunately, as many of us know, he’s right. There’s an inevitable bedding-in period with most new technology, during which we get to know and understand it, and get it set up correctly. So it was with the laptop.

I lost a couple of days trying to find a short-cut to the set-up/rebuild process. Although the new machine has no DVD drive, I managed to find an old USB one, plus there are some fairly well-established routines for building bootable memory sticks. However Apple have changed the architecture of the 2014+ MacBooks so much they won’t boot natively from a Windows installer or Acronis backup disk, and in El Capitan they have removed the ability to build native Windows boot installer media under BootCamp. That eventually put paid to any attempt to restore a copy of my installation on the older MacBook, or to install Windows onto a blank disk. It also become apparent that Apple no longer provide driver support for Windows 7, so I was going to have to bite the bullet and install Windows 10, and under a BootCamp installation. When I tried that on the older MacBook it left the disk in a very inflexible state, but somewhere between Apple and Microsoft the former problems had gone away, and Windows 10 and appropriate hardware drivers installed very nicely. The only side-effect is that there’s a 40GB OSX partition (which for some reason is now unbootable) stealing a bit of disk space, but I can live with that for now.

This is the point to introduce Johnston’s Even Shorter Corollary to Weinberg’s New Law: "Upgrades Cascade". We’ve all see this, a new X means upgrading Y, which means upgrading Z. In addition, Microsoft’s core products are definitely now on the Slippery Slope of Unnecessary Enhancement of the Software Utility Curve. Windows 10 has a number of definite capability reductions compared with Windows 7, and so far I’m really struggling to find any real "Wow, that’s a definite improvement" to compensate.

The rot set in quite early in the process. All versions of Windows since 2000 have included a version of the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard (it’s had a few different names). By Windows 7 this was quite powerful, and, for example, successfully transferred all my Office add-ins to the first MacBook without problems. However, when I say "all versions", I mean "all versions except Windows 10". For reasons which are not explained, Microsoft have dropped this essential utility, replacing it with a free subscription to a Laplink service which just isn’t as good. Not only does it ignore anything which looks like it might be program-related (unless you are prepared to pay them extra money), it also missed a few files and settings which I’m sure transferred without problems in earlier moves. To add annoyance it only works over the network, which is both slow (especially as I was only able to use WiFi at this stage), and wouldn’t work in all environments.

Although Windows 10 is massively better than the almost-unusable Windows 8.x, it still has some user interface oddities which are a definite downgrade from earlier versions. The most annoying of these relate to the settings functionality, which is doubly troublesome as this is something you need to work cleanly and reliably early in the cycle of setting up an operating system. The preferred settings architecture consists of a series of allegedly touch-friendly "overlays" on a sort of "web page" paradigm. However, it doesn’t work very well. Key settings are buried in illogical places, and there’s no clear way to confirm/cancel/reset changes, which I would have thought is fundamental. The worst aspect is the "brain dead" implementation of Windows Update, which loses its context if you switch away to inspect another setting while it’s running, and has to start again. There’s also no way to download updates but install them at a convenient time, or any of the other management features of the Windows 7 system. Worse, in an effort to provide a "cool" interface this page has no scroll bars on the update list, so unless you deliberately try and navigate with the mouse you have no way to see whether there are just 5 updates waiting, or you are just looking at the top 5 of 100!

What I discovered fairly quickly, however, is that Control Panel, and most if not all of the applets, are still present and work well. They are well hidden, but if you type the appropriate name into Cortana you can get a shortcut and put it on the desktop (or into XStart, which still, thankfully, works well under Windows 10, unifying launch across all my PCs). That doesn’t help where Microsoft have fundamentally redesigned the settings architecture, such as with language and keyboard management, and there’s no "Windows Update" fix, but otherwise it’s much better. It’s also a nuisance that Microsoft have removed the straightforward one-click on the desktop way to change screen resolution, but a shortcut to the "Display" control panel is a reasonable fix and much better than trying to use the appalling standard settings page.

Remote desktop, of which I make extensive use, doesn’t work as well with a Windows 10 target as with older versions, with much more limited functionality around display and power management. There are some usable work-arounds on the web, but like the loss of the one click to change display resolution, this is a case of breaking something which previously worked fine.

In fairness to Microsoft, beyond the settings the software annoyances have been relatively few. I use the excellent Windows Live Writer for blogging, and was disappointed to find initially that I could no longer download it, having to settle for a currently inferior open source version. However today I’ve resolved that and got Live Writer running again. I had to upgrade a couple of small applications, and install others in compatibility mode, but no major problems. The one application which seems less tractable is Apache, which was a pig to install even under 64 bit Windows 7. My solution there is to run it in a Windows XP VM, but taking the content files from the disk of the main machine, which is what I’ve done with some other legacy apps. There are a couple of wrinkles to iron out, but essentially it works.

There were a few annoyances in terms of the hardware and drivers, but nothing insuperable. The native resolution of the MacBook Retina screen, 2880×1800, is unusable under Windows, and I expected that I’d probably run most of the time at exactly half that, 1440×900, which would be the same as native on the older machine. It was a good plan, let down by the completely inexplicable absence of built-in support for 1440×900 in the AMD drivers! Fortunately they support "custom resolutions" (although it’s by no means obvious how), and after a little bit of googling and registry editing 1440×900 was duly added to the list and works exactly as expected. Now we just need to shoot the 16 year old with hawk eyes who doesn’t get the requirement… The lack of built in ethernet support is also a pain, especially as due to a separate minor procurement problem my thunderbolt to ethernet adapter didn’t turn up on time and I had to do all the main set up using WiFi. Now I appreciate that the MacBook is so thin that it cannot support a full-sized RJ45 port, but at the price you pay why can’t Apple include a thunderbolt adapter in the box?

Minor annoyances aside, the good news is that I really like the Mac hardware. It’s very fast, with Windows boot to login taking no more than 10s and login processing not much more again. Battery life is excellent at 5-6 hours of office work. The keyboard is identical to its predecessor, and accepted the same bodges to make it work well with Windows without problems. The real gain however is the Retina display, which is brilliant in terms of colour consistency, and viewing angle tolerance. Why have only Apple cracked this? It’s arguably not quite as sharp or bright as the non-Retina display of the older machine at its native 1440×900, but the difference is negligible and the improved colour accuracy more than makes up for it.

So where does this leave us? The MacBook is still a great, and improved "PC", but so it should be at the price, and that’s despite Apple trying hard to make it more difficult to run Windows than it used to be. Windows 10 is OK, but that’s damning with faint praise, with no real improvement that I’ve yet spotted, and some things definitely downgraded. A former senior designer at Apple and usability guru, Bruce Tognazzini, recently wrote a piece blasting  current Apple design for prioritising "beauty" over utility (How Apple Is Giving Design A Bad Name), and there’s obviously more than an element of the same in Microsoft’s copy-cat actions. Can we have a bit more focus on "easy to use professionally (by users of all ages and physical abilities)" and a bit less "make it look pretty to appeal to teenagers" from both companies, please?

Oh, and the best news? The big Alien is going on eBay, and early indications suggest that it’s worth more than half what I paid for it. Not bad for a machine more than 4 years old, and a challenge for the new MacBook to live up to…

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