The power of iPhone HDR mode

HDR mode was added to the iPhone camera back with iOS 4.1 but being less tech-savvy than I would like these days, I somehow managed to overlook it until quite recently. Last week, we took a holiday in Tasmania, providing some good opportunities to put it through its paces and I must say that I am impressed!

HDR stands for High Dynamic Range and takes three photos at different exposures before intelligently combining them. Sometimes it makes no difference. (Probably often but I only use it when I think it might help.) Sometimes, though the difference is quite dramatic as the following examples show. (Left, normal; Right, HDR.)

An already impressive camera, made even better.

Good on China for going to The Moon

I woke up this morning to the news that China’s Jade Rabbit rover rolls on to Moon’s surface. It seems somewhat hard to believe but although five Mars rovers have been launched in my lifetime (of which four landed), this is the first wheeled vehicle to drive on the moon for over forty years.

I have never really understood why so much extra time and money was spent sending so many rovers to Mars when the Moon is so close and there is presumably still a lot to learn about it. I grew up with countless sci fi films and books - including the Arthur C. Clarke classic 2001 A Space Odyssey (and, of course, Airplane 2) - that featured a moon base and so it always seemed a question of when, not if. As the Millennium drew clearer, it became more and more obvious that it was not going to happen and I’ve felt a little cheated ever since.

I guess there are very good reasons but I am glad the Chinese have decided that it’s time we landed something there again. Well done. China!

Expanding Macbook Air disk space with SD cards

I’ve had my Macbook Air for over a year now (crazy how time flies) and I still love it. The only drawback really is the limited disk space - the price you pay for speedy flash storage. This would not be a problem were it not for the fact that I have accumulated a lot of photos and music over the years - far too much for the 128GB disk space.

Initially, I tried to get around this by having all my music on my MacBook but keeping photos on external media. This had two problems: (1) by the time that Apps etc. are included, iTunes was still cramping my space, and (2) it was inconvenient to keep plugging in external media every time I wanted to play with my photos, which, given their state of disorganisation at the time, was quite a lot! The problem was compounded further by iPhoto, which is an horrendous space-waster but useful with Photostream.

Plan 2 was to move my iTunes library to an external hard drive that I could plug in when syncing my iOS devices but otherwise not really worry about. This freed up lots of space for sorting out photos (though not all of them), which in turn allowed me to clean up and delete most of my iPhoto library in favour of using Picasa, which is altogether much more sensible in the way that it organises (and shares) pictures.

The problem with Plan 2, however, was that it made it really incovenient to listen to music/podcasts etc. and even to manipulate playlists and things if I was not entirely stably situated - not to mention the use of a USB port keeping the drive attached.

The obvious solution, which I had considered for a while but delayed due to cost, was to get an SD card big enough for my iTunes library and use this instead. As the picture above shows, SD cards do still stick out a little and so they do not provide the perfect permanent disk expansion that I first envisaged when I got my MacBook - I tried out a 32GB for a while - but they are considerably more securely attached than a portable hard drive, much easier to carry around and free up the USB ports for other things. I got myself a SanDisk Ultra 64GB SDXC card for about £40 and moved my iTunes library onto it. This is clearly more per GB than an external hard drive but pretty reasonable for the convenience - and it is convenient. Access times are pretty speedy and you can go for the Extreme SDXC card if such things worry you.

So far, it’s working out really well and I can heartily recommend it if you have similar Macbook Air storage issues. My only real fear is misplacing the SD card because it is so much smaller than a portable hard drive! As an added bonus, the Mac mini that I have just ordered for work has an SD slot too, so I’ll be able to take my whole library to work if I want to without having to use up valuable HD space on such frivolities! (In fact, it's worked so well that I’ve also ordered a 128GB card for working on both computers, which seems much more convenient (and faster) than using USB devices for the same purpose.)

Making your iPad a laptop with the Incase Origami Workstation

I’ve previously blogged about my frustration when trying to use a iPad for much in the way of text input, even when using an external keyboard. The problem is that even though the pairing of the iPad with the keyboard through Bluetooth works really well, you still need to physically interact with the iPad. (A wireless trackpad will not work.) I have the standard folding iPad cover, so this means that I either have to lie it down, which is not very useful/practical, or stand it up and press the screen very gently so as not to topple it. What I really needed was something that would give some back support to the iPad whilst using the keyboard.

This week I got myself an Incase Origami Workstation, having seen it used successfully on a iPad training course. Like all the best ideas, this is a really simple but well executed piece of kit. As the name suggests, it folds out from a flat, lightweight keyboard cover to a stand that keeps the iPad and keyboard securely in place. The velcro makes the switch quick, easy and painless.

Perhaps surprisingly, it actually does a pretty decent job at turning your iPad into a literal laptop. Although the hinge of the Origami Workstation is too flexible to move it about much whilst the iPad is slotted in, once in place it is pretty stable; when using it on a table it is very sturdy and does the job superbly.

Thoroughly recommended! (Cheaper in the Apple Store than Amazon at the moment too!)

Using an iPhone for real world shopping

It’s official - I have become an Apple fanboy. Despite my irritation at their policy of charging seemingly excessive amounts for cable/adaptors to connect their devices to the rest of the world - I nearly wrote “unashamed fanboy” but I am slightly ashamed - they keep finding new ways to blow my mind. (And make me feel old at the level of excitement and amazement it stirs in me.)

Shopping on a mobile device is pretty old school and Apps for online stores abound. What got me really excited recently, though, was the ability to shop in the real world using my phone. The first step on my journey was at Starbucks. I’ve had a Starbucks card and the Starbucks App for some time and finally took the plunge a couple of weeks ago to try and pay with the App - simply tap Touch to Pay and a barcode pops up that can be scanned at the till (if you have credit on your card). No messing about with cash and wallets - indeed, no need to carry my Starbucks card in said wallet. (Not sure why I still do!)

Today, however, I experienced something beyond that, which really took things to the next level. At the iPad training day on Tuesday, the instructor had an Incase Origami Workstation, which I rather liked the look of. (I have posted before that “When it comes to writing, it’s more of an oPad than an iPad” and this could be a solution - a future post will report!)

A quick browse found it cheaper in the online Apple store that at Amazon, so I thought I’d pay the physical Apple Store in West Quay a visit and see if they had it too. They did, so I grabbed one. I wanted to ask about the pros and cons of having an iMac versus Mac mini plus external monitor, so I loitered and ogled/coveted all the beautiful things in the shop for a while. Unfortunately, all the iStaff were busy, so I gave up and brought my potential purpose up to the desk to pay.

Big mistake, really showing my ignorance, that one! You don’t pay for stuff at the desk in an Apple store - it’s just for repairs, as I was informed. I could take it to any of the roaming staff instead. I actually felt a bit annoyed at this and my face might have fallen at that point, for I had been waiting for one of the roamers to become available for a while. But then:

“Or… you could just do it yourself on your iPhone…”

What‽

But yes, it’s true. For fellow ignorami in the futuristic ways of the Apple store: you can buy things in the shop by using the Apple Store App on your phone. No need to even speak to any of the staff unless you want a bag. You just log on to the store WiFi, go to Stores in the App and pick EasyPay, then scan the barcode of your purchase. Confirm with your Apple ID password and you’re away! Your receipt appears on your phone (and gets emailed to you) and the staff get a notification of the purchase, whilst you go on your merry way. Modern technology! Mind blown.

Saving your iPad's home button with Multitasking gestures

Today, I attended an iPad training day run by Joe Moretti, which focused on using iPads in education. We explored a bunch of interesting and useful Apps, which I am sure will be the subject of few future posts. One useful thing I learnt, however, was just about the iPad itself.

I often have multiple apps open at once and copy/paste stuff between them or otherwise want to switch from one to another at reasonable frequency. Most people know that you can use double-press the Home button to reveal a bar of recently-used apps that you can swipe through. What you may not know (and I didn’t) is that you can use a single four-finger gesture to reveal this, saving time as well as wear and tear on your Home button. Likewise, a single gesture will return to the Home screen. You can even switch apps directly and bypass the Home screen or multitasking bar altogether. The gestures are in the iPad user guide:

You can use multitasking gestures on iPad to return to the Home screen, reveal the multitasking bar, or switch to another app.

Return to the Home screen: Pinch four or five fingers together.

Reveal the multitasking bar: Swipe up with four or five fingers.

Switch apps: Swipe left or right with four or five fingers.

Turn multitasking gestures on or off: Go to Settings > General > Multitasking Gestures.

It makes me wonder what other useful gems I have missed!

A (gloved) thumbs up for Yaktrax

Friday's snow gave me a good excuse to try out my Yaktrax, which we had got following the last bad snow and ice a couple of years ago but had not had the chance to try out. Yaktrax are clever little grips that fit over regular shoes. Basically, they have a stretchy rubber mould with steel coils that stretch across the bottom of your shoes and give good grip on packed snow and ice.

The snow on Friday was still fresh (and still falling!) so it was not strictly Yaktrax conditions but there had been some light rain the night before that might well have formed a frozen layer underneath, so I thought I would try them out anyway. They certainly gave my footprints some extra personality!

I'm not entirely sure how much they helped as I did not do a control by walking half-way to/from work without them on but I can report that I had zero slips, including at the pretty steep entry and exit to the underpass on Southampton Common. Given how slick that bit can get, I'd be surprised if they didn't make a difference.
I also went out for a curry in the evening (the always fantastic Kali Mirchi - still great! -) and it was a bit more icy then. I'd taken my yaktrax in my bag and did end up putting them on and noticing a direct difference on the way home. They're pretty easy to put on and off (as demonstrated by the fact that I was able to put them on on an icy street) and so even though they actually make things worse on clear roads/paths, I think they are a handy piece of kit to have on you if in doubt. Now I just need it to snow some more so that I can use them a few more times!

Getting touchy but not feely with touchscreen gloves

Having a waited almost a year to blog praises of one of last year's Christmas presents (my Urban ears headphones, which (ironically) have just broken and need fixing/replacing ☹), I thought I would be a bit quicker off the mark this year!

I'd been pondering the merits of touchscreen gloves for a while, as I do use my iPhone a lot on the way too and from work and it is mildly inconvenient (and sometimes cold) to have to de-glove to change track, take a photo or read a message. I'd never actually got round to looking into them, though, and seeing if they were more than just a gimmick, or even comfortable as gloves. (I wasn't even sure what the fingers were made of, to be honest.) It was therefore great to get a pair for Christmas - along with some good opportunities to try them out straight away in a chill December Dublin.

My initial reactions are good and they work really. They're definitely not as responsive as naked flesh but then you wouldn't expect them to be. I think this is in part you cannot really feel the contact in the same way as you can with exposed fingers, so you cannot rely on touch when typing, for example, to know that your press has registered. Your fingers are also obviously fatter in gloves, so you cannot be quite so sure that you are pressing the desired buttons. As a result, you have to rely more on sight, which slows things down a bit, but I have not experienced any frustration due to my touches failing to be detected.

The drawbacks are pretty minor and I would definitely recommend them for the winter touchscreen user. For most iPhone activities when you'd be wearing gloves, it's still faster than taking regular gloves off and then putting them back on again - plus, of course, there's no need to expose your hand(s) to the cold. They function well as gloves too! Now I just need the weather in Southampton to turn cold again, so I can use them some more!

Is technology ruining the moment?

Like many people, I was at home when the New Year was rung in, so I could only watch the fireworks on TV. They were, it must be said, pretty spectacular (although I actually thought there were too many at times) and I felt a twinge of jealousy towards all those watching it live above their heads.
Jealous, that is, until the camera panned across said crowd and revealed all the upturned faces, staring into the LCD screens of their cameras and smartphones.
Is the memory of the 21st Century human really so bad that we have to try and capture every event and every moment on a digital device, however inferior that would be to the experience itself? (Even the best camera equipment is not going to have a dynamic range or field of vision to challenge the Mark I human eyeball.) I could almost understand it if the event was not being televised and recorded for prosperity anyway. (It's on BBC iPlayer, which is where the screen grabs are from, if you missed it.)

I think I'm going to add another New Year's aspiration:

☑ Enjoy the moment. Learn to recognise when the view or the moment is just too special or breathtaking to be distracted by trying to get the perfect shot for the future.

Hmmm. That's two rants in a row. Must make the next one a positive post!

Urban Ears Headphones, one year on and still great

Last Christmas, I received a pair of Urban Ears headphones for a present. Now, almost a year on, I thought they were long overdue a review because they are great!

There are loads of features that I like about these headphones. First, as seen in the picture, they pack down nice and small for easy transport. Unlike my JVC noise-cancelling travel headphones, the folding mechanism is really robust. The headphones stay packed down really well and also feel stable when folded out and on my head. (They do not have a centre hinge like my JVC ones, the ear individually fold inside instead.)

Another thing that I really like is the durable, tangle-free cable, which is wrapped in braided fabric. Genius! Wrapping the cable around the headphones when packed down also stops tangles but the worst entropy-induced knotting I have got with these headphones has been a couple of gentle tugs away from tangle-free audio pleasure. The braided fabric also gives the cable a more robust feel and despite being in my bag most days over the past few months there is no sign as yet of the cable damage that has afflicted my Apple inner-ear earphones.

Which brings me nicely to the next feature... I stuck with the Apple earphones that came with my iPhone for a long time because of the "remote control" on the cable, complete with mic and volume control. The urban ears model I have does not have the volume control (although I believe that others do) but it does feature a handsfree mic and remote control button that will start/stop/skip tracks and answer/end calls. It works so well that these headphones are now my Skype headphones of choice. (I tend to Skype on my iPad.)

There's obviously one key trait of headphones that I am yet to mention: the sound quality. Like the build quality, the sound quality is excellent. I am not an audio snob - I am happy with MP3 versus vinyl, for example - but I do like listening to music and I like to hear the full range of sound that my mortal ears can distinguish. The Urban Ears deliver across the board and certainly match the audio quality of my iTunes recordings. Being headphones rather than earphones, they do a good job of cutting out external noise too. This helps a lot, especially when it's a bit windy outside, although it obviously has a slight downside of reducing peripheral awareness when out and about. (I only use them in safe places.) The snugness of fit also means that they can be a bit uncomfortable after a couple of hours. That's about the only bad thing I can really think to say about them, though, and it's probably not that good to be listening to music for that long without a break anyway. (They are also adjustable, so they're comfortable for regular use.)

It's probably a bit late for Christmas presents but if you are looking for something to spend Christmas money on and you need new headphones, I highly recommend them. (The "Plattan" ones I've linked to are slightly different to mine, whose name I forget, and have an additional "ZoundPlug" for a friend to plug in and share the music. Otherwise, they look essentially identical.)

Surprisingly impressed with Siri

This week, after over five years on the same network, I left O2 and switched to Vodafone. This was purely motivated by money - I wanted to upgrade to an iPhone 4S and the Car Phone Warehouse had a ridiculously good online deal. (Essentially a free phone and a lower monthly tariff that my old one. O2 have always been pretty good to me and, a little ironically, the customer service people you deal with when leaving the network are some of the nicest and most helpful people I've ever dealt with!)

I'd pondered going all out and going for an iPhone 5 but figured that if I did that I might as well upgrade from 32Gb to 64Gb and then we're talking £400 for the phone. Plus, of course, all my iPhone 4 adaptors etc. would cease working and I'd have to get a new case and all the rest. So, I opted for the more thrifty choice.

The new phone itself was transferred to my old number yesterday and so far, so good. Apart from being generally faster, I've not yet done enough to really notice the difference yet but I have given Siri a little road test.

Having last played with voice recognition software when at Uni in the 90's, my expectations were very low and I've actually been very impressed. My first task for him was to give me 1/2lb in kg. (I thought one 250g block of butter would be ok but wanted to check.) The request was understood and the right answer provided. Today, I've tried his DJ capabilities: this morning, he correctly interpreted my request for some Avenged Sevenfold and put their albums on shuffle for me. This afternoon, en route to getting our Christmas tree following a work Christmas social, he correctly understood my wife's request for the Christmas playlist.

I still can't decide whether Siri is purely a gimmick (for most people at least) or whether it will prove to be useful (can operate with gloves!) but these early successes mean that I feel more inclined to find out.

University of Southampton builds world's first Raspberry Pi supercomputer

It's a bit of a busy time of year, so blogging is on the back burner for a bit (and I'm accumulating half-written posts for later!) but this was just so weird and fun that I had to write a quick post. If you haven't heard of a raspberry pi computer before, you can find out all about them here. Basically, they are a very small, very cheap ($25) "credit-card sized computer that plugs into your TV and a keyboard".



According to the FAQ:

It’s a capable little PC which can be used for many of the things that your desktop PC does, like spreadsheets, word-processing and games. It also plays high-definition video. We want to see it being used by kids all over the world to learn programming.

Well, Prof Simon Cox (and colleagues) of the University of Southampton decided to go one better and used a bunch of them to teach his kid how to build a supercomputer! You can read about it on the Computational Modelling Group website.



What can it do? Well, according to Prof Cox:

“The first test we ran – well obviously we calculated Pi on the Raspberry Pi using MPI, which is a well-known first test for any new supercomputer.”

I suspect it can do a bit more than that: the 64 processor system has 1Tb of memory! Not bad for £2500 (plus switches and, possibly, lego).

Putting Greenwich at the centre of the World

If, whilst watching the Equestrian events at Greenwich Park, you wonder how Greenwich got to be home to the Prime Meridian Line - and thereby determine both world time and world longitude - you could do much worse than Episode 91 of A History of the World in 100 Objects, which features the ship's chronometer from HMS Beagle.

It represents technological advancement that didn't get a mention in the opening ceremonies but was arguably much more important than putting men on the moon (as Steve Jones did argue) or robots on Mars. (As undeniably cool as those things are!)

I've been slowly working my way through the episodes of this great series over the past few months - there are a lot of them! - and was particularly pleased to listen to this one yesterday as Darwin and Deep Time both get a mention. (I'd just been updating the MapTime Organic Evolution TimeLine and Keywords.)

So, if you are in London and looking to kill some time between events, download the podcast (or read the transcript) and then visit the British Museum!

Mac Links and Shortcuts

The biggest problem of moving from PC to Mac is that all the shortcuts are different. Maybe it's just because I have been a PC user for so many years but, generally, I find the PC shortcuts to be much more intuitive. For example, to take a screen grab to the clipboard on a PC you hit "Print Screen", on a Mac you press Command+Control+Shift+3. (Obviously, duh!)

The flip-spide is that hunting down the basic shortcuts reveals a host of other shortcuts of related functions. I am not sure if PCs have so many or not but here are the screen grab options from MacRumors:

• Command-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it as a file on the desktop
  
• Command-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it as a file on the desktop
  
• Command-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it as a file on the desktop
  
• Command-Control-Shift-3: Take a screenshot of the screen, and save it to the clipboard
  
• Command-Control-Shift-4, then select an area: Take a screenshot of an area and save it to the clipboard
  
• Command-Control-Shift-4, then space, then click a window: Take a screenshot of a window and save it to the clipboard
  

In Leopard and later, the following keys can be held down while selecting an area (via Command-Shift-4 or Command-Control-Shift-4):

• Space, to lock the size of the selected region and instead move it when the mouse moves
  
• Shift, to resize only one edge of the selected region
  
• Option (Alt), to resize the selected region with its center as the anchor point

I've decided to start keeping track of the shortcuts (and links to lists of shortcuts) useful to me personally here. Although Google works pretty well, suggestions of good resources are welcome. Now, if only we could convince Apple and PC laptop manufacturers to come up with a universal standard for where to put the shift, function, control, alt and command keys, life for the shortcut-user would be good. (Of course, you would want the Apple command key where the windows control key lives.)

iPlan with Onzo revisited (and not recommended)

I've blogged before about our iPlan energy kit and now that another few months have passed, it's time for an update. Sadly, it's not a good one this time.

Back in April, our receiver died. Opening up the panel, we found that the rechargeable battery had all corroded. When I contacted Southern Electric, they were happy to replace to unit. Good. What was not so good, they informed me that they were aware of the design fault and, as a result, no longer shipped the kits with rechargeable batteries. Perhaps they could have warned users?

The next problem was that, although they did send out a replacement, they did not do it particularly speedily. Judging by the material that came with the replacement kit, which had no mention of being a replacement, I was just added to the new customer schedule and, as such, had to wait a few weeks for it to arrive. As a result, we now have a nice big gap in our usage stats, which is not that great for trying to look at annual consumption as it clearly changes with season. It also neglected to point out that, even though only the receiver was broken, the sensor also needed to be replaced.

This was only a minor irritation and sorted out eventually through trial and error. The major irritation is that, now that it is all set up, the new receiver does not display the current power use properly. There is a obviously a loose connection or something, as squeezing the top a little sort out the problem (temporarily). It does not affect the uploading of data but it does limit the utility of the unit - as does keeping it plugged in to avoid using up the non-rechargable batteries it now needs.

Although I know that two faulty units might just have been bad luck but it doesn't exactly inspire confidence in the design or build quality of Onzo energy kits.

Turning to the Dark Side

So, I have finally joined the Dark Side and bought myself an Apple computer. One of the new MacBook Air laptops in fact. And it's lovely! (Hello!) I know that not everyone will agree with my casting of Apple as the Dark Side. For years, Microsoft seemed to be the corporation that everybody loved to hate.

Microsoft never achieved the monopoly of Apple, though. With a PC, you could change components yourself, therefore benefiting from a free market. The same even applies to operating systems - if you really hate Microsoft, put Linux on your PC. (I did recently on my little Dell netbook after the upgrade to Windows 7 at work made it utterly useless.) Different hardware. Different software. Different strokes for different folks. PCs were the computers for the real geeks.

Apple, on the other hand, made pretty gadgets but always seemed greedy. Oh, you want to connect one of our devices to the rest of the world, not to another one of our devices? That'll be another £15 for a special adaptor, please. Want to upgrade your memory? Well, you'll have to get that from us too. Etc.

On the other hand, there is something to be said for a monopoly. Apple control their products. There's none of the PC irritation of buying a game only to find that the two hundred different graphics cards supported does not include the one you have or that, for unknown reasons, your particular motherboard/memory/hard drive combination just doesn't seem to work together as well as the individual numbers would suggest. Then there are all the things claiming to speed up your system, or clean your registry, or check for viruses and spyware and yadayadayada. When I was young, I enjoyed finding out about this stuff but it doesn't seem like such fun anymore. An Apple, in contrast, just works. And if it doesn't, there is one person to blame: Apple.

Luke: Is the dark side stronger?

Yoda: No. Quicker. Easier. More seductive.

I still think I am a geek but maybe I am getting old, or computers are just a lot more complicated than they used to be, but these I want something where everything just works! And boy, does the new MacBook Air work! Everything about it is a joy. Lovely to look at, lovely to use. I'm still getting used to the different short-cuts and the like, and no delete key (only a backspace - Fn+BACKSPACE is the PC "delete", by the way) but, on the whole, I am really liking what I see. Best of all, there's no stupid Windows compatibility or performance issues. So far, at least. (I am still in the Honeymoon period and even Windows 7 takes a while before it seems to grind the whole system to a halt at random.)

Someone accused me recently of becoming an Apple advert (I'm already in the iPhone and iPad fan clubs) and I think I may be just about there! My only real criticism (other than dark rumours about the usual shenanigans of a multinational giant that is bigger than many countries) is the usual cable nonsense. Happily, I don't really intend to plug my MacBook into anything other than USB devices - this is for play, not work, so no projector connection or PowerPoint issues for me!

Will I ever go back to a PC, now I have tasted the Apple? It's early days. I am yet to try any programming on it, or see if MS Office works (including Excel Macros) but early indications are probably not. They say that "once you go Mac you can't go back".

Once you start down the Dark path, forever will it dominate your destiny.

Putting photos on Picasa with an iPad

Recently, I posted about the short-comings of the iPad for certain input-intensive activities. The focus of the post was writing. Until recently, I would also have included digital photos in this category.

Much as I am increasingly becoming an Apple convert, I still despair of their odd (or, perhaps, cynical) business decision to equip with their products with a bunch of IO ports that are incompatible with the rest of the world and then fleece their customers for more money, buying cables that overcome this apparent design flaw. I guess it's good business: unlike PCs, they have a clear monopoly on their products and can get away with such behaviour because their customers - myself included - are willing to fork out the extra cash when needed. It doesn't win any friends but I guess they can just buy friends with all their billions. (Apparently Apple is worth more than all the tea in China and has an annual turnover greater than the GDP of 160 nations, including Syria and New Zealand.) As a result, it came as no surprise that, using only what comes in the box, it is impossible to connect a digital camera to an iPad and upload pictures.

The technology does exist, though, and I recently invested in a 5-in-1 iPad Connection Kit, which I tried out following the recent kite festival. Beyond the irritation of the need to invest in such a piece of kit for what should surely be a basic and obvious function for any tablet or notebook, I am happy to report that this item works really well and conveniently solves my iPad digital photography woes. It's plug-and-play, and you simply attach your camera as normal, select which photos you want to upload (and, in usual iPad fashion, the interface for this is great) and away you go. As with any normal import tool, you are then given the option to delete the uploaded photos from the device.

Once on your iPad, the photos are helpfully collated in an Album called "Last Import" with all imported photos in another album imaginatively called "All Imported". These are then available for all your usual iPad activities, such as blogging. You also then have the option of saving the photos individually to your camera roll, which will make them appear on your Photostream and thus available for other devices (if you have iCloud enabled). Happily, they do not all automatically appear in your Photostream - I was worried about filling up my iPhone the first time I tried this.

Of course, once you have your photos on your iPad, you need to do something with them. In the past, I have had to go via a PC with the good ones (essentially relegating the iPad to a viewing device (oPad!)) but now I use the Best Album App to put them up on Picasa. For some reason - competition, maybe? - Google websites like Picasa do not seem to work very well on iPhones and iPads, in my hands. I've tried a few apps claiming to work well with Picasa in the past and found them disappointing. This might be because I have stuck to the free ones. For a couple of quid, Best Album is well worth it. It just works really well. (So far, at least.)

Once logged on to your Picasa account, you can view, edit and create galleries easily and then uploading photos is a simple as picking the photos you want from the Photo Library and then uploading. My only real gripe was that I did not find it easy at first to work out the size at which my photos would be uploaded to the website. I cannot remember now whether the default was too big (I don't have unlimited space on Picasa) or too small but it was easy enough to remedy in the Settings once I realised.

Once up, album details can be altered and the cover art set. Individual photos are also really easy to add captions to, and the like. My kite photos are here and the whole process of uploading them, flicking through to find the ones I liked, creating a Picasa album and uploading them, only took a few minutes and gained a bit of the iPad feeling of fun into the bargain. If you own an iPad and like digital photography then I can heartily recommend this combination of kit and app.

(I haven't gone into editing photos at all here because I don't do a lot of it. The main thing that I do is to re-crop photos, and the crop tool in the standard iPad Picture Gallery is perfectly adequate for that.)

When it comes to writing, it's more of an oPad than an iPad

This is my 200th blog post and I've had my iPad for around a year now, so it seemed like a good time to reflect on using the iPad for writing in general, and blogging in particular.

I'll start by saying that I really love my iPad and it's great for the main things that I had in mind when I bought it. It's handy for conferences, makes email feel like fun rather than a chore, and is a joy for web surfing - as long as you don't need flash of course! Reading PDFs is good with iBooks and better still if you need to annotate them and invest in the iAnnotate App. With ArtStudio and a stylus, it's great for drawing too. I love the way it's so easy to share and access files between my iPad and other devices using Dropbox, and the way that pictures taken with my iPhone are almost instantly available on my iPad through Photostream.

But... there are situations in which the iPad is not great, which are basically any situations in which a lot of typing is needed. For text-rich output, the iPad is fantastic but text-rich input just isn't its thing.

The problem is not a software issue. The OfficeHD App that I invested in early on is rather rubbish and buggy, to be honest, but the later Apple offering, Pages, works really well (even if it is one of the more expensive Apps out there). The problem is just that, even with the big touchscreen keyboard, you just can't type so quickly and instinctively as with a "real" keyboard.

I did invest in a wireless keyboard when I bought my iPad and, as a piece of kit, it works really well. It pairs cleanly and easily via bluetooth and has the usual delightful Apple keyboard feel that makes it a pleasure to type with. The problem is that it is just not that practical to use it with a iPad. You cannot easily, for example, balance both the iPad and the keyboard on your lap, as you can with a laptop. (It's called a laptop for a reason!) Although you can set up the iPad on a desk and sit the keyboard in front of it, this solution only really works if you only want to type. Without a mouse as well, it is a real pain whenever you want to use any of the functions that require touching the screen.

This is a particular problem when blogging, possibly due to my choice of blogger as host. In my hands, the WYSIWYG "Compose" mode does not really work on an iP* device and, even on Windows, it tends to add lots of unwanted HTML. (Too many divs!) For this reason, and being a bit of an HTML purest (hence my (X)HTML ASCII code cribsheet), I do my blog writing through the "HTML" mode. Writing HTML is especially bad on an iPad because of the need to toggle between letters, numbers and symbols. For blogging, my current solution is therefore to email blogger the subject and photos for a blog post from my iPad (or iPhone), and often the core text (if it's short) without any links or formatting, and then use a laptop (or my little netbook, on which I put Linux after Windows 7 killed it), to tidy up, format and/or add to the text/images.

It works but it's a bit clunky. And progess on "Mystic Mog and the Exploding Tortoise" has slowed to, well, tortoise pace. Happily, the answer might be in hand. Having stalked Mac Rumors for several months awaiting the new MacBook Air - and saving up my pennies - the new version was released last week and mine should be winging its way to me before the end of the month. My website might get some much-needed attention too! ☺

A month (or so) with iPlan

At the end of November, our iPlan energy kit arrived. With one full month under our belt, I thought it timely to give an update.

Initial experiences were a bit mixed as the website was done for quite a while but, right from the outset, the ability to monitor energy usage was really useful and reminded me to switch off lighs etc. It was also interesting to see how much energy some of our light use. (Not surprisingly (but still disappointing), the worst offenders were the brightest, most useful ones!)

Less useful at this stage is the daily target. This started off at a fairly reasonable 8.0 kWh per day (although I'm not sure how this was determined) but went down dramatically when I switched to our predicted usage from Scottish & Southern Electric (SSE). You can see this on our monthly usage chart for December, below, where the target line drops sharply on the fourth:

This is clearly nonsense, as the only days that we meet are target are those that either or both of us are away and thus (practically) nothing is being used. (The big spikes caused by extra laundry each side of trips is also clearly visible!) Having contacted SSE, I have learnt that this prediction is based on meter readings and because our reading-before-last was a massive over-estimate, our last period's usage was practically nothing. It should, I am told, sort itself out with our next meter reading later this month. Time will tell. (I still think it is a bit silly that you cannot over-ride their estimate and set your own target; you can set it for a percentage under their prediction but not over.)

Fortunately, even though we can't set a sensible target, we can still feel good about ourselves with some of the other comparisons available, such as the "LikeMe" comparison with "similar homes". It's not clear how a "similar home" is defined but I suspect, given how well we appear to be doing, it does not include a comparison of the number of occupants. (Either that, or the average couple out there are big consumers!)

You can also compare your usage with all iPlan users, although I'm not really sure how much this tells you:

Still, it makes electricity billing more interesting!

Go go gadget milk jug!

Every now and then, I come across an invention so simple and yet effective that I think: "Why didn't I think of that?" (Of course, my history of exactly zero inventions gives some indication.) One such device is the "Jug-It" milk jug.

I'd seen this bad boy in the supermarket but was rather skeptical, thinking that it would involve a lot of rinsing out of jugs and messy refills. How wrong I was!

One day, the regular milk was out and there was a jug-it offer too good to be true (3 for 2 on refills with a free jug, I think) so I took the plunge. Turns out, it's great! Simple too.

You just clip the bag in position, it's pierced automatically as you close the lid, and then it's ready to pour. Once the bag is empty, whip it out and bin it. Only the spout needs cleaning. No mess. No fuss. Great! Added to that, the bags are usually cheaper than regular milk and you cut down on waste by 75%. What more can you want from you milk delivery device?