Microsoft have released an arguably belated but nonetheless very welcome version of OneNote optimised for the iPad and with very good synchronisation to the PC. It’s not perfect, but it’s good enough that I’ve updated my guidance on how to make your iPad work effectively with Windows.
– Posted using BlogPress from my iPad
| Projection though a stained glass window, Basilica of the Holy Blood, Bruges | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 20-08-2010 13:17 | ISO: 800 | Exp. bias: -1 EV | Exp. Time: 1/250s | Aperture: 10.0 | Focal Length: 59.0mm (~95.6mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM | |
I’m finally processing the shots from our trip to Bruges in 2010, and I found this one I particularly liked. It’s light projected through a stained glass window at the Basilica of the Holy Blood, onto one of the internal walls.
| Tobacco farmer, Vinales | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Date: 18-11-2010 16:14 | ISO: 200 | Exp. Time: 1/250s | Aperture: 5.6 | Focal Length: 260.0mm (~421.2mm) | |
I’ve finally managed to publish my photography portfolio from Cuba. Take a look and let me know what you think…
Apologies if you use the RSS feed for my album – this will be fixed in a day or two.
If you’re one of those people who uses loads of Apple products, and is thinking of proposing Steve Jobs for canonisation, then you may be happy with how your iPad works, but if you’re trying to make it work effectively in a Windows-based environment you may have found shortcomings with the “out of the box” solutions.
It is perfectly possible to make the iPad play nicely as part of a professional Windows-based environment, but you do have to be prepared to grab the bull by the horns, dump most of the built-in apps (which are almost all pretty useless), and take control of both file management and communications via partner applications on the PC. This article presents some of my hard-won tips and recommendations on how to do this and get productive work out of the iPad’s great hardware.
| Sheltering from the elements - Vinales, Cuba, November 2010 | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 18-11-2010 21:33 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: -2/3 EV | Exp. Time: 1/250s | Aperture: 4.5 | Focal Length: 120.0mm (~194.4mm) | Lens: Canon EF 70-300mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | |
I don’t know whether anyone else has this problem, but it can take me an inordinate amount of time to process photos from larger trips and events. Today is the anniversary of my return from my Cuba trip (as I’ve just been reminded by Breakfast News – it’s also the anniversary of the start of last Winter’s harsh weather). I finally finished processing the shots – last night!
In fairness to myself, I’ve also had a number of “event” shoots such as weddings which have taken priority at various times, but basically I now have a backlog of about 18 months worth of shots to sort out. Oh well!
All I have to do now is post the best to my main portfolio. Hopefully next week! 🙂
| Restful moggie - Vinales, Cuba | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S15-85mm f/3.5-5.6 IS USM | Date: 18-11-2010 20:18 | ISO: 200 | Exp. bias: 0 EV | Exp. Time: 1/125s | Aperture: 10.0 | Focal Length: 50.0mm (~81.0mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 15-85mm f3.5-5.6 IS USM | |
After an inevitable delay while I set up my new PC, I’m finally back to sorting out some images. The new beast certainly does what I wanted it to. Processing an 18MP RAW file on the old laptop took up to 30s, now it’s less than 3!
I’m not a “cat person”. Whereas dogs are usually very docile around me cats are usually plain hostile, and even the friendlier ones usually make a bee-line for my scrotum with their claws… However, this moggie in Cuba wasn’t doing anyone any harm, and I liked both the “through the keyhole” effect and the restful colour palette in this shot. I hope it also lowers your pulse by a bpm or two.
I’m in the process of replacing my laptop, and yet again finding that the alleged miniaturisation and convergence of digital solutions is nothing more than a figment of marketeers’ fevered imaginations. I suppose that after the experience of my last desktop replacement (see here) I should have expected nothing more, but hope springs eternal…
I’ve been very happy with my 15″ Toshiba Satellite Pro, new in early 2009, but recently it’s been showing some signs of reaching the end of its economic life, plus the way I now develop my photographs is very compute-intensive, and a faster device would speed that activity up considerably. I also find that the relatively slow single 2.5″ disk leads to very slow startup times and virtual machine operations, both of which slow down my professional use.
Thus my first decision was that my new device should support an Intel Core-i7 processor and 64-bit Windows, at least 8GB RAM and ideally have solid state disks, at least for the boot drive.
The next driver was forced on me by the vagaries of the market. Prior to 2007, most laptops had a 4:3 (=16:12) aspect ratio, but suddenly the market decided that all laptops should be “widescreen”, with a 16:10 aspect ratio. This was great for viewing movies, but meant that for a given diagonal size the new devices were more than 10% smaller than before. Not much good if you’re working on text documents (usually of vertical orientation), or digital images with <3:2 aspect ratio, which is most of them… That’s one reason why my next laptop went from 12″ to 15″, just to maintain the vertical size of the display.
Now they’ve done it again! Almost all new laptops have a 16:9 aspect ratio, which means a further reduction of about 8% screen height for a given diagonal size. This is a right royal pain in the neck, particularly as it is typically accompanied by an increase in pixel resolution, which combine to make text and icons much smaller, just as I’m getting to that age where my eyes are starting to change, and slightly larger text would work better. There are other disadvantages too: a given laptop model is around 8% longer than it’s predecessor, so it may not even fit in the same bag.
This all appears to be driven by fashion, and targeted solely at those who watch movies on their laptops. The goal appears to be “true HD”, and hang the consequences. After some brainstorming, I can only think of three things short wide screens are good for:
On the other hand, they are much worse for:
So where does this put my laptop choice? After rather more agonising than usual, I’ve gone for a desktop, or should that just be “desk”, replacement system :), an Alienware M17x. This is very fast, has the usual stunning Alienware looks, and importantly supports dual disks, with a highly-rated quality screen. The screen is just slightly taller than the Toshiba, but the laptop is a full 5cm wider, and over 1kg heavier. It’s a good computer, but portability is definitely down a notch. The thing which makes it feasible, of course, is the iPad, which now fills the role of the portable, meeting-friendly launch to the Alienware cruiser. Admittedly carrying two devices increases the weight of my computer bag, but usually only until I have decanted the laptop into its base location for the day, and maybe it justifies the weight training…
Thus far, I’m impressed with the beast. CPU performance is certainly as expected, and I’m pleasantly surprised by battery life, at almost 5 hours in light usage. This makes up for the fact that the main power supply is about the size of a house brick, and although the laptop will run off a smaller Dell supply, it won’t charge the battery. On the disk side I’ve installed a Seagate Momentus hybrid drive as the secondary data drive, and that seems to be working well, but my first attempt to install the SSD for the boot drive didn’t work, so that’s still pending. What is annoying is that like all my previous laptops, the LCD panel is nowhere near correct colour calibration with the default profile, so I have to sort that out before serious photographic use. Further updates will follow…
To wrap up, here’s the potted history of my laptops since I started buying my own, and why:
Has anyone else noticed or suffered from this odd trend?
| "Helga", my Porsche 911, behind a tree | |
| Resolution: 1247 x 1870 | |
For the last couple of years, I’ve been working fairly regularly with a chap called Carl. The other day a group of us were chatting, and got to talking about cars we had owned. Among others, Carl had once owned a very souped-up Ford Escort. To explain how fast it was, he pointed out that he’d once “burned off a Porsche” in it.
My ears pricked up, and I interjected “You know, that once happened to me in my Porsche. I was at a set of traffic lights just outside Croydon, and some imp in a mark I Escort pulled up alongside, turned to me with a very cheeky grin, and then left me standing when the lights went green.”
And Carl said “The Sutton bypass. About 1987. Tobacco brown 911 with no rear wing.”
Yes. We were describing the same event from opposite sides of the dotted White line. It was him!
———————
We all occasionally experience odd coincidences, but this has to be a pretty wild one by any standards. It got me thinking – what are the chances of re-encountering someone from an anonymous past event like this?
I reckon that a significant part of the British population have timelines which will never intersect mine at first or even second hand. However between places I have lived and worked, places with which I have family, friend or work connections, events I attend and routes I travel the number of intersections in a lifetime (counting any individual once) must be quite large. Let’s say it’s 10 million. This includes “knows someone I know” and “in the same place at the same time” as well as more direct interactions.
Now I also reckon that I work with perhaps 20 or 30 people at any one time closely enough to have such a conversation, and that group changes at a rate of perhaps 10 people a year. Others might put the figure higher, but let’s use that for now. Therefore since 1987 maybe 250 people have added to that group.
It’s therefore very easy to come up with a crude estimate of the probability that some individual I crossed in my youth would end up working with me, at about 250 in 10,000,000, or 1 in 40,000. That’s about half the chance of winning £10 with a three number match in the British lottery.
However, that’s just the “latent coincidence probability”. You then have to factor in the chance of actually discovering it.
To come up in conversation at a range of 24 years an event has to be pretty memorable to at least one party, and recognisable to another. Trivial or indistinct events get forgotten. I suspect our traffic lights grand prix was one of many for both Carl and myself in our youth, but it’s memorable as the one in which the ancient Escort beat the (almost equally ancient) Porsche, in a way which left my friend and I in my car laughing rather than anything else. I have forgotten almost all the others, where Helga did what Porsche built her to do, and won.
There’s also an upper limit on memorability. If events are too dramatic or tragic they will also preclude conversation.
Even if you have a history of memorable events, they may just not come up in conversation. Carl and I have worked together for a couple of years, and not discussed old cars before. The topic could easily have come up when I was not in the room, or just not listening, and not been repeated.
These factors are more difficult to quantify, but I reckon there’s probably only a 1 in 100 to 1000 chance of discovering the co-incidence at the 24 year range of my example. So for a single event involving just one other main party we have a net probability of the order of 1 in 10 million that I’ll work with that other party, and then discover it. That’s about the same as winning the UK lottery jackpot!
Three factors make things more likely. Obviously if more than one other person was involved this increases the probability proportionately. There’s also a smaller than 10 million group of people whose paths are likely to cross several times because of location or other factors.
You also have to consider that most people have a pool of such events to draw on. We’re talking about events which would merit a special mention in the pub, a couple of paragraphs in the letter home, maybe a blog rather than just a tweet in today’s parlance. I reckon I accumulate these at the rate of one every few weeks. Therefore since my memory became really active, I have maybe 40×25 such events, a convenient 1000 to draw on.
Thus the probability for a given event is ~ 1 in 10 million, but the probability of any such coincidence drops back to ~ 1 in 10 thousand, and maybe down to 1 in a thousand for events based on a home location, a favourite sport or similar.
Now I reckon I’ve had a couple of such coincidences in my career. There are three possibilities: either my calculations are wrong, I’ve set the bar for what counts too low (increasing the number of potential events), or I’m just very lucky.
What do you think?
Stephen Hawking is not only, without question, one of our greatest surviving physicists, but also, remarkably given his disability, one of the field’s great communicators and educators. Having enjoyed his previous writing I was very much looking forward to his insights on the cosmological advances since A Brief History of Time. However, although this latest book is both entertaining and thought provoking, it ultimately left me frustrated with its failure to properly explain these new scientific concepts.
Read the full review 
This is an excellent adventure story, which quickly engages the reader and holds the attention through 500 action-packed pages. At the same time, it raises some thought-provoking observations on how Christianity has evolved, and how the dogma of major religions reflects political rather than spiritual necessities.
Read the full review
| Guests at the wedding of my friends Anna and Adam. Simply the best! | |
| Camera: Canon EOS 7D | Lens: EF-S17-85mm f/4-5.6 IS USM | Date: 24-09-2011 22:30 | ISO: 400 | Exp. bias: -2/3 EV | Exp. Time: 1/60s | Aperture: 5.6 | Focal Length: 68.0mm (~110.2mm) | Lens: Canon EF-S 17-85mm f4-5.6 IS USM | |
Not a lot to say about this one – it just made me giggle when I was reviewing the photos from a wedding I attended last weekend. Enjoy 🙂
I’m very happy when a film “does what it says on the tin”, but that can mean being badly disappointed when a film fails to live up to the hype attending a major release. After considerable expectation and many supportive interviews and reviews I was expecting rather more of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy .
I knew before going in that the film portrays espionage without action, an “inaction thriller” if you like. What I didn’t expect was that it also lacks humour, intrigue and to a surprisingly large extent, dialogue. So much time is allocated to the menacing glances and thoughtful fiddling that some sections might as well be silent. It’s as if the screenwriters and director got to points where Le Carre was describing characters’ internal thoughts, and decided that we could just be left to guess them.
What this also means is that the film lacks the complex plot twists which one might expect. If the characters don’t engage in conversation, then there’s little opportunity to dissemble. Problems like a damaged log book are resolved by simply finding the man who was on duty and asking him to recount his memories, not by any complex act of detection. When a key character who is supposedly dead resurfaces later in the film, there’s no explanation of the timeline, or how he has just been allowed to go back to his cover job with no explanation of his absence.
While the film has a stellar cast, most are sadly underused. The senior spies other than Smiley and the mole have maybe a few lines each and almost no interactions between each other – completely wasting the talents of some of our most senior actors.
The film is shot in a dull brown monotone, carefully stripped of any variation in colour, or tone, or subject, with the single exception of scenes at a key office party. The colour scheme goes well with an accurate portrayal of the dullness of ordinary lives in the 1970s. There’s one very good sequence where Benedict Cumberbatch has to exploit the weaknesses of the low tech environment to extract a key piece of evidence, but most of the period detail is treated as simple background rather than context, a crucial difference.
A spy film without explosions or chases is one thing, but when there’s no attempt to substitute intricate detection, verbal jousting or witty banter then it rapidly becomes a very dull thing indeed.
A few weeks ago the excellent Page Eight with Bill Nighy and Michael Gambon showed exactly how this sort of thing should be done. This much vaunted “film of the year” fails badly.
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