Of interest to iPhone users?

Recently I had cause to record a meeting. I started up the Voice Memo app on my iPhone 3G and two hours later I switched it off. When I checked the phone later, there it was - a voice recording of 1h 48m 0s. But it wouldn't play. I clicked (sorry, tapped) the 'play' button, it turned into a 'pause' button and a progress bar appeared. Just as you would expect, except that the progress bar ran from 0.00 to 0.00 and no sound came out. I recorded a short memo (should have entitled it 'me coughing') and that played back fine. Off to Google, then ...

Turns out it's a common problem. The solution which worked for most people on the forum I was reading, and which worked for me, was as follows:

1. Go to http://www.macroplant.com/iexplorer/ and download the program iExplorer. This allows you to read the contents of the iPhone memory (also works for iPad and iTouch) as if it were a normal external drive, and copy, move, rename etc. files as required. There are separate versions for PC and Mac.

2. Connect the iPhone to the PC and Launch iExplorer.

3. Go to Media and then Recordings, and your files will be there. There will be two files per recording, both with the filename of the date and time, such as 20120116 184403. One will have the extension .m4a, and the other .mov. You need both of these, although I don't understand why. Don't be surprised at that. Copy them to a convenient folder on your PC.

4. For me, the .mov file (200+MB) played fine in Quicktime Player. The .m4a file, still almost 100MB, was silent in any player I tried it with. A lot of people save the .mov file as an .mp3 to make it more useable. I may do this.

No matter - I have the file I need, and I can listen to my saved copy. There are a lot of other possibilities with iExplorer, such as file management directly on the phone device, using the phone as a USB pen drive, and so on. It's free, it's a small download, and it doesn't have any annoying toolbars and popups that so much 'freeware' comes with.

Highly recommended. No connection except as a satisfied 'customer', of course.

My contribution to the revolution

I've been a bad boy. Really bad. I know I have a reputation as an easy-going, rather raffish gangster type, sort of Kray Twins with added charm and charisma, but this time I have done something really appalling. Even the criminal underworld which is my natural métier will be outraged and probably shun me for ever as an outcast, too dreadful even for their flexible morals.

If the thought of clubbing baby seals to death and raping the rain forest is too much for your sensitive Western mindset, then please unsubscribe from this blog immediately. Close this window and go to visit Casual Acquaintances Of The Earth or something.

I have purchased a product which, while not actually illegal (yet) is certainly disapproved of and deliberately unavailable through 'official' channels. Before long, buying it will be illegal and, soon afterwards, even owning one without a Government licence will bring fines and imprisonment, like firearms. It's going to make my life better, even though some will say that it will do so by making life for others far worse. All it took was a simple decision, and a visit to eBay, followed by a wait for the Christmas rush to die down and the postal service to return to normal.

Cocaine? Dynamite? Enriched plutonium? Nope. Here it is:



Genuine 100-watt light bulbs, bayonet fitting, clear, General Electric, dark spaces for the lighting of. Cheap as chips, four quid for ten plus postage. Should last me a few years.

I've had a couple of revelatory moments recently. The CFL bulb in the bathroom I use went phut (they seem to do this with depressing frequency, despite the 'long life' label) and all I had to replace it was an ancient 60W traditional bulb. The difference was astounding. Not only did it give a light you can easily read by (not that I ... never mind), but the light was instant. No more fumbling around in the semi-darkness until the bulb had reached its full, if modest, output. Just bright, cheerful light at the flick of a switch. Just how electricity ought to be, in fact.

Then the kitchen fitters smashed the 60W standard bulb that had been lighting my garage for the last ten years, and all I could find to replace it was a 100W version (amazing what you can find when you have to clear out the airing cupboard). Again, just 'wow'. All the dark and dingy corners of the garage are now lit up as if by searchlight. I have found tools I had forgotten I owned.

These bulbs are the way forward. I won't be using the 100W bulbs in many places, but my next move will be to buy several boxes of 60W ones. Then, as the current crop of CFL crap fails (as it will do, and with depressing rapidity), I am going to replace them with PROPER bulbs. If it puts a couple of pence on the electricity bill I will take the hit, although with the relatively short life of CFL bulbs I am not sure that the overall effect might not be a positive one. But we are children of the post-war era, and therefore pretty good at turning things off when we don't need them, so I don't feel particularly profligate about using a product that works well instead of one that works badly.

I will never buy a CFL bulb again. Traditional lightbulbs for the win!

Is iGoogle borked?

I have iGoogle as my homepage. I rely on it for news headlines, Google Reader, bookmarks, mail headers and a whole lot more. In modern terms, it's an important part of my 'online browsing experience'. Today, I get the page top (themed currently to a Gibson SG Special as played by Slowhand, nice) and the bottom bits with half a dozen contacts, and that's it. No middle, no gadgets, no nuffin. If I reload the page, the gadgets appear briefly and then disappear again.

Is it just me, or is Google temporarily borked?

Latest Blackberry Out(r)age

From the BBC:

The "issues" left many Blackberry owners only able to text and make calls.

Er, and the problem is ... ?

Genius

Apologies for the lack of posting over the last few days. There have been many outrageous things in the news, and I have ridden the bikes quite a bit, but somehow nothing has fired me up to make me want to post anything. Meh. I've been reading a lot (both proper books and stuff on the webs) and perhaps I have just been a while in reception rather than production mode.

However, I know some readers of this blog are into ingenious technological solutions, and I just had to post this one.

Problem: a lot of bikes today are made without centre stands, so it is impossible to get the back wheel off the ground to do essential stuff like chain lubrication or tyre changing without spending lots of extra dosh on the appropriate kit. There is a simple solution, involving devices to raise the frame on the opposite side to the side stand, but these can be quite expensive. Then I saw this video, made by a member (greyplague) of the Triumph Rat forum that I belong to. It cost him next to nothing, apart from about an hour of his time and a bit of ingenuity.

I like this, and I am going to make one - when the bits come along on the flotsam-stream of life.

Scam Alert 2

I wrote recently (here) about a company in India that tried a fake tech-support call to me and wanted me to log into a website so they could "fix my computer". I gave them the bum's rush, naturally.

Tonight, I found this page, which seems to confirm that it is a common problem. I'm glad to know it wasn't just me, although I would love to know how they got my (correct) name and phone number.

Readers of this blog will be far too savvy to fall for an obvious con like this, but perhaps it might be worth passing the message on to newbie friends, parents, grandparents and so on:

• Microsoft will never make an unsolicited call offering to fix your computer.
• Anyone who calls you out of the blue and says you have a virus on your computer is lying.
• If you allow anyone to access your computer remotely, you are entering a world of pain from which your computer and your credit card may never recover.

If you do decide to spead the word, however, please PLEASE don't send an email to everyone in your address book with a header like "Latest internet virus phishing scam!!!!! MUST READ!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Do NOT ignore this!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!"

Those of your friends who are a little older and wiser than you will delete it unread, and block you so you can never email them again.

I thank you.

Pitchforking Heaven

I posted a short while ago about a tool that was excellent because it simply worked, my splitting maul. I have been doing a lot of moving leaves about recently, and another tool that shines with sheer functionality is my pitchfork. As I understand it, a pitchfork is any fork with a long plain handle and thin, widely-spearated tines or prongs. However, Anna says that what we have is known in Pembrokeshire as an 'evel' (pronounced 'evil'), which has four tines, as opposed to a hayfork or baling fork, which has only two. Since I rather like having something in the shed that I can call 'evel', that's what it is.

Like the maul, it just works. I dump piles of leaves in a far corner of the garden and then set up the incinerator. The evel will transfer leaves from the pile to the flames most efficiently, with very little effort, and is capable of getting almost all of the leaves from the grass, leaving only a few to be picked up by rake and then by hand. The curve of the tines means that it slides under what you are picking up without digging into the ground, and their wide separation means that they don't clog up.



It's easy to use, it works brilliantly, it's effortless, and like the maul it has no moving parts. This one is a modern one, made by Bulldog, and the vibrant yellow handle makes it easy to find in a pile of garden rubbish, but one day I want a proper one. A really old one.

Old Minolta Dimage Xi -any ideas?

Anyone able to troubleshoot digital cameras?

A few years ago (about 2003, I think), I bought Anna a new digital camera, a Minolta Dimage Xi. It's a superb little thing, with 3.2MP and a 3x zoom in a tiny metal casing, and it took some superb photographs. But every so often, it would take a shot that was a completely black frame. Not severely underexposed: no data, nothing - just black. Running the image through Photoshop showed there was nothing to work with. She re-read the manual and tried all the settings. Then I re-read the manual (sorry, that should be 'read the manual') and tried all the settings. No luck. Just one black frame in every (roughly) 50 shots. The only common feature we could find was that the problems occurred only in bright conditions and when shooting without flash. That is, it never happened using forced flash, or when flash activated on the 'Auto' setting.

Eventually, and after losing some irreplaceable photos this way, Anna got fed up with it and bought a new Panasonic (which has been superb, incidentally). The Minolta ended up in a drawer.

Last night, I came across it quite by accident and wondered if I might be able to resurrect it to take with me on bike trips. It would take much better shots than the iPhone, that's for sure, and it is only as big as a packet of fags. And it uses an SD card, and there is a built-in SD reader on the netbook, so transferring images for the blog couldn't be easier. I'm never very happy about taking the DSLR on the bike - it's a Nikon that is war-zone tough, but it's like having a pillion aboard. So I charged up the Minolta's battery last night and today I took it round the garden for a few test shots. All went well until I took a couple of the bike. The raindrops on the tank looked quite pretty in the strong sunlight, so I took one. Here is the result:



I took another shot immediately afterwards from the same position, but with flash:



What's going on?

It's not a show-stopper. All I have to do is review each shot after it has been taken, and re-take if it doesn't come out. From memory, it might take three blanks in a row and then will produce a good one (and then not do it for several days). But it's irritating, and I would like to fix it if I could.

Does anyone have the faintest idea what is happening here? Because the problem occurs randomly under certain specific conditions (strong light, no flash), I assume there is some fault in the electronics, but beyond that I am as ignorant as a new-born babe.

Sharp Stuff

Today, we kicked out an old friend. This is a Sharp D6120 microwave oven. The interior light had failed, and replacing it would involve taking the casing off and grubbing about in the workings. I wouldn't have minded that, but we had a newer microwave, bought for the caravan but never used, and we decided to install that one and get rid of the old.

The Sharp pre-dated my involvement with Anna by a long way. She bought it in 1978, and it has been in constant use ever since. For a number of years, she did all the catering for a local yacht club, and took the oven in the back of her car every day during summer, to help with the preparation of meals for hordes of hungry sailors. It certainly saw some work. And, apart from the blown bulb, it has never failed.

It's quite a museum piece. It's very big and heavy, and the timer is a proper electro-mechanical device that ratchets when you turn it round, and does a nice 'ping' when the time is up. The 'ping' is a proper 'ping', too. Something hits something metallic and makes a 'ping'. It's not a bleep or a buzzer. It has seen internal fires, explosions and volcanic milk eruptions. It has never failed to do what it was asked. And now it's sitting in the trailer, waiting to go to the tip. I feel a bit guilty about this. I hate to throw away things that are in good working order. But we already had another one cluttering up another part of the house, and as new microwaves are cheap and easily available, I can't see anyone buying it or even taking it as a gift. It's old technology now - it doesn't do anything fancy, just heats things up for a specified time and then goes 'ping'. Who wants that these days?

It was bought just when microwaves were becoming popular, and cost a lot of money - Anna thinks it was between £200 and £250 in 1978. But it was obviously built to last. 32 years of service from any machine is good going: most cars would have been scrapped long before that.

I won't shed a tear when I take it to the tip later this week, but I will give it a small and unobtrusive salute.

New friend

I mentioned that I was getting a netbook for mobile blogging (and because, to be honest, I just fancied one). It arrived today. I ordered it at the end of last week but, because of a mistake with my payment card, I didn't actually pay for it until Saturday night. So that's effectively next-working-day delivery, which is pleasant. Ordered through Amazon, and delivered from Expansys UK, problem-free.



First impressions are that it is a delight. It's tiny, a bit like My First Computer from The Early Learning Centre, but neat and jewel-like and not in the least bit tacky. It's a very attractive dark blue colour, which the photo doesn't pick up at all (thank you, Apple Corp). The beer can is there for size comparison only, but I'll have to drink it now. The sacrifices I make for my readers, eh? I'm having difficulty working the touchpad (but then I always do) and the keyboard is a bit - er - compact for my workman's fingers, but otherwise it seems pretty good. A damn sight easier to write with than the iPhone, that's for sure. Or a French keyboard, come to that.

It comes with Windows XP, which is an OS I am happy with (the alternative was Windows 7, and I wasn't prepared to risk having that after succumbing to Vista) and will dual-boot to something called Android. I have had a play with this, but I'm not impressed. It is supposedly a fast-loading OS made by Google for surfing and webmail, but I can't even get it to recognise the wi-fi connection, so my experience so far hasn't been positive. It seems very clunky.

I now have a truly portable computer. The laptop won't recognise the new router we installed last year and I have been tied by a cable to one room ever since, so it will be nice to surf the web on the bog, in the bath, or while watching Britain's Got Talent. I've been playing with it on and off all day, and I'm getting used to it.

This post is being written on the new device. But this tiny keyboard - sheesh! I've had to use the backspace key more in the last half hour than in the previous week.

For the technically-interested, it's an Acer Aspire One, with an Intel Atom processor, 1GB of RAM and a 160GB hard drive. It has a webcam, 3 USB slots and a multi-card reader built in. It should suit my limited needs.

Great idea

One of the rules of advanced riding is 'never put the bike where your head hasn't been already' - in other words, don't assume a gap will be there to pull into; see it with your own eyes and be sure you can do it before you commit yourself. So the good rider moves to the right before an overtake, sees that there is enough clear space to move back into, and only then makes his or her move.

But if it's a huge artic in the way, that isn't always possible (And I remember posting a while ago about how this caught me out). So a very large and juicy coconut to the man who invented this:



It looks like it's a dashboard cam fitted to the lorry cab, fed to a thin-film screen on the rear doors. The article I found it in here seems dubious about how it works, but there is no significant technical reason why it can't.

Of course, no-one but a complete idiot would be overtaking in that situation anyway, but being able to see round a large vehicle could be very handy. As some people round here could tell you.

Satnavs and maps

I hope nothing in the previous post gave the impression that I don't like maps, or that I am one of those muppets who relies too heavily on a shiny new satnav and ends up in a field. Nothing could be further from the truth.

I love maps, with a love that passeth understanding. I could look at them for hours, and frequently do. One of the joys of doing A-level Geography was being able to sit at the back of the room with Phillips' School Atlas on the desk in front of me and just do a world tour in between Maths and lunch. Bombhead chuntering on about the industries of the Rhine at the front of the room, and there I was piloting a steamer round the coast of Novaya Zemlya, or crossing the Nullarbor Plain on an ancient BSA. I'm sure that my fascination with place-names and my itchy feet were conceived at the back of a Geog class somewhere. I once read that a good map contains more information per square centimetre than the entire space programme, or something. I'm sure it's true. I love maps, and feel about as bad writing on them as I would about scribbling in the margin of a novel - i.e. very bad indeed.

But a satellite navigator, well, that's something else. The fact that I can hold in my hand something which receives signals from satellites in orbit above the earth and, using the vanishingly small differences in the time signals from several of them, can calculate my position on the earth's surface to within a few yards, is a source of complete amazement to me. And that's only the GPS part. For the same device to have every significant road, path and track in Western Europe in its memory, and to be able to calculate the best/quickest/shortest route between any two points in a matter of seconds is just wonderful. And then to read the route out to you, step by step, and even draw you a map that changes as you move - well, it's almost sorcery. And it's only as big as a packet of fags. I mean, how clever is that?

(Anna and I were in Italy a couple of years ago, in the wine country just South of Florence. One day, tiring of the main road loop to get us to the village we used for shopping, we just set the village name into 'Jane' and asked for the shortest route. We were taken through farms and down unpaved lanes - places where, without the satnav, we would have backed out of long before. But it got us there. We were on a tiny road between fields, miles from anywhere, and came across a track - no, a path - which crossed our route. A dusty, white path about six feet wide, with no signs of recent use by foot or car. And I looked on the satnav and there it was. And I thought this thing knows.)

The problem with satnav is the same as with any technology. Brilliant in the hands of experts, when the price comes down and less - how shall I say? - competent people get their hands on it, it is almost too good at what it does. A decent satnav will navigate so well that it is very tempting to leave all the decisions up to the unit, and abrogate all responsibility for your journey to a chunk of silicon. So the average Joe gets his £99 satnav and sets off, marvelling at its efficiency and sheer cleverness, and he leaves his common sense at home. And when it tells him to go down a road which is clearly unsuitable, he does as he is told and ends up in The Sun with his Rover up to its windows in a lake, or hanging off the edge of a cliff. Note to Average Joe: Technology isn't perfect. It's just there to help.

There is a kind of de-skilling going on in the modern world which is very worrying, and satnavs are part of it. People don't know how to cook any more, or light a real fire in a grate, or do complex mental arithmetic, or read a map and use a compass. Why would they? It's all done for us now. And when there's too much snow to get to Tesco, or there's a power cut, or the calculator battery runs out, or the satnav freezes, we're stuffed. We literally don't know what to do any more.

Satnavs are 99% brilliant and 1% stupid. If you understand this, and use them accordingly, they are completely wonderful pieces of kit. I feel much safer finding my way in an unfamiliar city with 'Jane' telling me where and when to turn, with my hands on the wheel and my eyes on the road, than if had to keep consulting a street map on the passenger seat every 50 yards. And they make long journeys much more relaxing, with warnings of motorway junctions in good time, and something that tells you how far you have to go and an estimated time to get there (not to mention the bing! that tells you when a speed camera is coming up).

But you can't sit on the loo and dream with a satnav.

Another reason for reading proper books

E-book readers - never used one, never wanted to. I like paper books - ones you can hold, take to bed, read on the bog, even scribble on. Books don't freeze and need a hard reset, and don't suffer from power failures. Most of all, print on paper is much easier to read than characters on a screen.

And now, here's another reason to stick with Dead Tree Literature:

This morning, hundreds of Amazon Kindle owners awoke to discover that books by a certain famous author had mysteriously disappeared from their e-book readers. These were books that they had bought and paid for—thought they owned.

But no, apparently the publisher changed its mind about offering an electronic edition, and apparently Amazon, whose business lives and dies by publisher happiness, caved. It electronically deleted all books by this author from people’s Kindles and credited their accounts for the price.

At least when you buy a book (even from Amazon) they don't come round in the night and nick it from your bedside table. Well, they haven't so far, anyway.

Let 'em try.

(The massive irony here, and one which has probably escaped Amazon, is that one of the books in question was ... drum roll ... Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.)