ignore
Tags: ignore
One thing I hate doing when taking pictures is taking notes. Notepads are bulky, pens dry up, and I can never read my writing properly, so I attempted a two-pronged approach to digital note-taking when I was doing pictures and video at Belladrum music festival.
With two electronic note-taking devices in hand, I deliberately left my pen and pad at home. The iPod and iPhone are decidedly easier to pocket, to handle and, best of all, you can write on them with your finger.
I used the Voice Memo app to record general information for quotes, and I used the Notes app for taking names.
And it worked surprisingly well. In fact it worked brilliantly, and I doubt I will use my notepad again for such tasks
I followed it up a few days later when I covered a vintage car rally at Brodie. The organisers kindly read out all the prizewinners through a PA system, and I just recorded the whole speech and picked up a programme to check names.
Simple. I might even put the audio clip up with the photos.
Tags: apps, iPhone, iPod Touch
It’s got to be the cheapest Autocue this side of a sheet of paper, but the amazing little iPhone app Autocue does the job brilliantlly. It also runs on the iPod Touch, which means I can have two autocues running with two cams, neat.
Setting them off together might be a tad tricky though. And must remember to sync the speeds!
The amazing thing about it is the way your upload your scripts. Browse to a port on the IP address of the Iphone or Ipod and write directly onto the device over wifi. How cool is that?
Tags: Autocue, iPhone, iPod Touch
For reasons too numerous to mention, I have finally given in and bought an iPhone. 3GS.
One of the reasons I have NOT bought an iPhone till now, apart from being halfway through a Vodafone contract, is that it just didn’t beat my Nokia N95 at anything apart from streetcred. In fact, the N95 is still giving it a run for its money, and will do some things better than the iPhone, so I’m keeping it.
It’s the apps you see. Having an iPod Touch means I have access to the App Store, but it’s limited and NOT being able to use applications such as AudioBoo was a big let-down. The N95 8Gb records audio well, the iPod Classic does it even better, but neither publish straight to the web,
And that’s just one app. There are 40,000 or someting like that. That’s what I wanted to buy into.
Tags: iPhone, iPod Touch, Nokia N95
Lothian and Borders Police have lost a memory stick containing the details of hundreds of their investigations: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/scotland/edinburgh_and_east/7932228.stm
Let them take note from a small IT company in the north of Scotland. Our Ironkey USB memory sticks are so secure, that it doesn’t matter if you lose them. Apart from being encrypted so they won’t work without the military-grade encryption key, known only to the owner.
But their greatest feature is their ability to self-destruct. After ten incorrect password attempts, the security chip inside them will literally self-destruct and permanently be rendered useless, even to their original owner or the manufacturer.
Ah, but a determined hacker will desolder the chip and gain entry from inside the drive, I hear you say. Not on the Ironkey. It is filled with epoxy resin, so it cannot be cut into or dismantled with breaking it.
They’re under £50 and a small price to pay for a police force which holds sensitive data.
I’m expecting a phone call any day.
Leader of the pack?
Being a regular visitor to Thunder in the Glens, where hundreds of Harley-Davidson owners gather to show off their shiny bikes, I was quietly looking forward to my return this year at the end of July when I got a call from the assistant director of the Dunedin chapter, which organises the event.
One of my pictures from last year’s event, which admittedly I stumbled upon rather than planned (the event that is, not the picture!), has taken their fancy and will adorn this year’s rally t-shirt.
Until recently, the kitchen laptop was a lovely little black number, an Asus Eee pC 701. A marvel of design, packing a near full-size keyboard, a 7-inch screen and built-in wifi into a tiny well-made case.
Built-in wifi. Hmm. That was the #1 selling point for me, although I have to say, it was a lovely surprise gift from my wife.
It certainly does have wifi built in, but can it connect to WPA. NO!
It, I’ve now discovered, is a well-documented problem with the 701’s that it won’t connect properly to a WPA network. I’ve tried three documented fixes which haven’t worked and I can’t be bothered phoning tech support, as no-one seems to have had any success going down that route.
It connects OK to WEP, but that means lowering my guard on wireless security, AND changing every other wireless device in the house and office, just to make one little stubborn PC get on the net.
I use it almost exclusively on a Vodafone wireless modem, which connects flawlessly.
The irony here is that I would have expected the WPA to work, but not the dongle. But nothing ever happens the way you expect it to with computers does it?
I have two other option. One is to install Windows, but with only a 4Gb disk, it’s going to be a tight squeeze; or add another acess point to the network and configure it to accept WEP connections.
The access point is the easiest route to go down, becuase, a) I know it works with WEP, and, b) i happen to have a spare AP that needs to get out more. I also like having a Linux OS on the network to check cross-platform issues.
But I’m tempted to go down the WIndows route. Every netbook I’ve seen with XP on it seems to fly.
Hmm. I wonder if it will dual boot if I put a big enough flash hrive in.
The Nintendo DS produced a modicum of excitement for the birthday boy and his siblings. Once he’d raked through the selection of games he got with it, he settled on one in which he could complete without being thumped, de-biked or thrown into an abyss (virtually of course).
And while he covered the piano black case in chocolately thumb and fingerprints, I was doing teh same to the instruction book, trying to see if I could network it.
It is possible to play wirelessly against other DSers, but could it find a WPA hotspot and run a browser?.
Watch this space!
My reputation as an international secret agent has become a bit of an ongoing joke amongst my colleagues, and even my wife thinks my notes are coded messages.
She has sought an explanation for the mysterious (to her) bleep, which comes from the shed on a regular basis. Unable to get a satisfactory answer, she wanted to know how I’d explain it to the police.
Indeed, the proliferation of narrow guage wires and half-mended timers in the said shed would not help my case, nor would the copy of Frank Barnaby’s How to Build a Nuclear Bomb, which, I hasten to add was given to me to review by a newspaper many years ago. While it is simply a layman’s guide to the means in which evildoers make their deadly weapons, its presence on my bookshelf continues to fuel my reputation. I gave away more incriminating publications, including a KGB handbook, years ago.
Oh yes, the bleep! I don’t actually know what it is, although I suspect it is one of the many electronic reminders my father used before he died. No doubt I collected in a box of his belongings, and it remains an ever-faithful reminder of something he was supposed to do at a certain time.
Ahh, bless him.
Tags: bleep, nuclear bomb, secret agent, spy, timer
Licking for lunch?
It was only a few weeks since I took the family on the annual visit to the Highland Wildlife Park when they announced free entry to celebrate St Andrew’s Day, but I was pretty keen on seeing the Amur tigers that have recently moved in, so we made the trip again. These are the beautiful beasts we’ve called Siberians for years, but which apparently don’t ive in Siberia at all, so now we must call them Amur tigers.
There are only around 400 of these big cats in the wild, so they’re pretty rare, and usually so bound up in anti-escape fencing that getting pictures is never easy.
The tigers at Blair Drummond are impossible to photograph due to the chain link fencing surrounding their enclosure, and you can’t close enough to it to throw it out of focus as you have to stay in your car.
But at Kincraig, not only can you see over the fence directly into the enclosure, there are big glass windows, which are clean enough to photograph through. In fact the windows doubled up as a lens support. The dull weather and shady position proved very dark for a long lens, and even at ISO1600, it was difficult to keep a 400mm lens steady, but rested against the frame of the window, I was able to get a sharpish headshot of the biggest cat in the world.