Neil Turner

New camera!

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Canon EOS 450D

I’m now the proud owner of a Canon EOS 450D (or EOS Digital Rebel XSi). Like last time, it’s my Dad’s old camera – he’s upgraded to an EOS 600D and so he’s passed his 450D to me. In turn, my old EOS 300D will be going to Christine who presently has a small Nikon point-and-shoot camera.

So far the main benefits have been higher resolution images – 11 megapixels, rather than 8 – more intuitive use of advanced features like adjusting the focal length (since it actually makes decent use of the LCD screen), larger LCD screen, lighter weight and use of the more ubiquitous SD cards rather than the big old CompactFlash cards.

I’ve taken a few photos with it but with it being winter and therefore generally rubbish weather they’re not the greatest pictures. I’ll link some tomorrow though.

A year out of the city

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Rochdale Canal

It’s now been a year since Christine and I moved in together in Sowerby Bridge. It’s also therefore a year since I moved out of Bradford, where I’d spent most of the previous 8 years. We like the town – it’s small, relatively quiet (apart from the main street) and full of interesting pubs and restaurants, of which some we still haven’t been to yet. It’s also an easy commute for both us to get to walk, and has good public transport links with regular trains and buses, so we haven’t felt isolated.

Although the first flat we moved into didn’t work out, we’ve had no problems with the second one that we moved into in April – and it ended up being cheaper, larger and generally nicer than the first one, all things considered. We’re hoping to stay in the flat for some time to come, after which we’ll probably look at buying a house rather than renting as we do at the moment.

This year has also seen us build upon our relationship, going from being 65 miles apart and generally only seeing each other at weekends, to living together and ultimately becoming engaged last month. Living together has worked well – Christine’s a great cook, and so whilst she does most of the meals I’m happy to do other bits of housework.

So here’s to another year of living together.

Movember

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I haven’t blogged about it much but I’ve decided to passively participate in Movember by growing some facial hair. Rather than settle for a simple moustache, I’m instead going for a goatee beard, and have been posting photos on Twitter every 5 days – day 15 being last night.

This is the first time I’ve ever intentionally grown a beard – in the past it’s generally been because I couldn’t be bothered to shave – and is now the longest period I’ve gone without going through the customary removal of facial hair from around my mouth. Christine was consulted on the decision to grow a beard, in case you were wondering.

While there’s still another couple of weeks to go, come December 1st it’s highly likely that the beard will come off. It’s proving to be an interesting experiment but I prefer the clean shaven look; not at least as it makes shaving easier since you can just shave right across your face and not have to avoid certain areas. There’s also the general build-up of crumbs and loose hairs in it, and the fact that the hairs get soggy when you drink.

Also, I’m not doing Movember for charity, but others are – if you know someone who is, chuck a few pennies their way, will you?

Making a Mess in the Kitchen

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Food

Christine, the amazing woman that I’m planning to marry sometime in the near future, also happens to be a very good cook, and luckily for you, she’s decided to start a recipe blog called Making a Mess in the Kitchen. I’m hosting it, and it sits in its separate installation of WordPress (I had considered enabling Network mode on WordPress, since I now have 3 WordPress installs on here, but decided it was too much effort).

There’s a few recipes, and some other general cookery-ness, on there now, and I’m sure she’ll continue adding to it as she continues to experiment new things. I’ll just keep on washing up after her.

App of the Week: Tweetbot

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Back in July, I reviewed TweetDeck, which at the time I felt was the best combined Twitter and Facebook client for iOS. But recently a degree of bitrot has infiltrated TweetDeck such that it now crashes regularly on devices running iOS 5, and so I’ve been on the look out for a replacement. Whilst Seesmic offers one client which supports both Twitter and Facebook (along with ping.fm), it doesn’t integrate them as well as TweetDeck did – the timelines are separate.

Since I have the official Facebook app on my iPhone anyway, I decided to try alternatives, and Tweetbot by Tapbots had been recommended. Unlike other Twitter apps it isn’t free – it costs £1.99 on the UK App Store, and there’s no trial version with adverts. But, having used it for a couple of days, it is worth the investment.

The interface is a little different to other apps, as it uses its own interface widgets, rather than following the same design principles as standard iOS apps. But, it is arranged in a logical way, and it shouldn’t take long to get used to. The main tabs – your timeline, mentions and direct messages – are where you’d expect, and there’s easy access to your favourite tweets, retweets and your profile. It also has very good support for Twitter’s lists feature which other clients tend to skip.

A single tap on a tweet produces a menu below which allows you to reply, retweet or favourite it, or open a further menu to quote, copy, email or translate it. It will also activate any links or @mentions. You can also click the ‘view detail’ button which lets you view the tweet full-screen, and click to see who has replied to, retweeted or favourited the tweet. If a link in a tweet is an image, such as on TwitPic or yFrog, TweetBot will show it full screen, and it supports a large number of services for this.

When composing tweets, you can use either Twitter’s built-in link shortener (t.co) and its own image hosting service (pic.twitter.com), or you can use one of several third-party services. Tweets can be saved as drafts and you can add a location; auto-completion of hashtags and @usernames is also supported.

What makes Tweetbot stand out is its ‘mute’ feature. You can mute users, hashtags or particular clients either indefinitely or for a short period of time. So if you don’t want to see tweets from paper.li, you can mute it across all of the people you follow, but still be able to read their other tweets. Similarly if someone is tweeting more than usual and you’re not interested, you can mute them for a few hours without unfollowing them. And you can also mute hashtags – so if you don’t care about The X-Factor you can restrict the tide of tweets from the people you follow by muting the hashtag.

Finally, unlike some other third-party Twitter clients, it supports push notifications, so that your device will alert you to any new mentions or direct messages. You can also limit push notifications of mentions to people you follow, to reduce spam.

The only real downside is that it only supports Twitter – there’s no integration of other sites like Google+ or Facebook, which is a bit of a shame. However, it does support Twitter very, very well.

I’ve been really impressed by Tweetbot. It’s quite a new client – version 1.0 was only released in April of this year – but it’s being actively improved and enhanced and deserves more attention than it gets. The price tag will put people off, but if you don’t mind spending less than £2 then you won’t be disappointed.

Changing the theme

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A screenshot of the Yoko web site, showing what the Yoko theme looks like on different screen sizes

After a few months, I’ve become bored with the ‘Atom’ theme that I’ve been using since switching to WordPress. So I’m giving the Yoko theme a try, as featured in Smashing Magazine a couple of months ago. I’ve had to customised it a bit, and so I have spent my lunch hour at work learning about WordPress Child Themes so as not to disrupt the core theme files.

To me, it feels more fresh than the previous design. Whereas Atom was a big, extensible framework plugin, this is a relatively simple one. It’s also notable for using the new HTML5 tags and is able to adapt its appearance depending on screen size. Whilst this means that the mobile version of this site, which uses the WPtouch plugin, is now theoretically unnecessary, I’ll keep it for now.

Any thoughts about the new theme are welcome. I think everything should be working correctly but let me know of any funkiness.

Foursquare Thursday – Are its competitors withering?

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A screenshot of items on Gowalla

A couple of weeks ago I focussed on the huge number of new features that Foursquare had rolled out in a four week period. Things have quietened down a bit since then – although there has been an updated Android client to include events and better photo support to match the iPhone, as well as the ability for staff to reverse venue merges, SU2s can edit venue descriptions and a new URL format for venues on the web site. But the service is still very much alive and innovating.

Alas the same cannot be said for its competitors – Gowalla, Facebook Places and Google Latitude.

A couple of weeks ago Gowalla announced the removal of some features from the platform in the next version. Items, like those shown above, will be removed completely; Notes will be removed pending a new implementation to come later, and Pins (like Foursquare’s badges) will see the ‘fat trimmed’ from them. There will be other new features introduced but the announcement doesn’t expand on what these are.

Now while I prefer Foursquare, I do use Gowalla and have cr.osspo.st configured to push my check-ins there as well, and it’s a particular shame to see Items removed. Gowalla stated that fewer than 0.5% of its users actually used items, and there seemed to be a lot of confusion about their purpose. If Gowalla made more effort to explain the role of items, how to get them and why you should drop them at spots then maybe more people would use it – it’s one of the features that makes Gowalla unique.

Foursquare had a similar problem with check-in points before Foursquare 3.0 was released – they didn’t seem to serve much of a purpose and were open to abuse. But rather than remove the feature completely, Foursquare overhauled and improved the points system and re-introduced the leaderboard to encourage competition between friends, and now it works well.

Without Items, the differences between Gowalla and Foursquare are almost minimal. Foursquare’s new Lists feature is very similar to Gowalla’s Trips, and Foursquare’s design improvements mean it’s not far behind Gowalla in terms of appearance. There’s now very little that’s unique about Gowalla and it’s a shame.

I also mentioned that Facebook Places. A recent Business Insider article suggests that Facebook is scaling back its Places feature, and so rather than you checking in you would simply add a location to your status updates and have a choice of venues to do so. Facebook updated its iOS app this week and whilst the standalone checkin feature is there, you can also attach a location to a status update. Facebook also recently discontinued its Deals feature in the UK (not sure about the US) which competed against Foursquare’s Specials, where businesses could offer special deals to those who checked in.

And finally Google Latitude. Earlier in the year an update allowed users to check into anywhere that existed on Google Places, rather than just updating their location co-ordinates, but there hasn’t been any changes since. With the advent of Google+, it may be that Google decides to focus on the location-based elements of that instead, similar to what Facebook is doing.

Bingley Music Live 2011

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Jon Fratelli

Having enjoyed it last year, when we heard that acts such as Feeder and Eliza Doolittle would be playing Bingley Music Live Christine and I snapped up tickets a few months back. The festival was last weekend and, like last year, we had a good time. Though the price of a weekend ticket has gone up by a fiver, there were some bigger acts this year, as well as a smaller, second stage designed around kids and families. Also changed from last year were the toilets; thankfully, the toilet area hadn’t turned into a smelly quagmire by Sunday unlike in 2010. Unchanged were the astronomical drinks prices but I guess that’s par for the course for most festivals.

This was also the first time we went to all three days – last year we skipped the free Friday night events but we made it this year to see the Young Guns. Sadly they’d arrived late and their set was cut to 20 minutes; plus, there appeared to be some technical problems making them sound very flat. A shame because they’re one of my favourite up and coming bands.

I won’t do a full review as my friend Phil has done a much better job at his blog .wav Goodbye – read his reviews of Friday, Saturday and Sunday. Some of the sets from the likes of Feeder, Athlete and Eliza Doolittle were excellent, and worth the ticket price on their own merits – seeing the other acts just added to the value.

As it sold out a few weeks ago (the first time it’s sold out in advance in the five years it’s been running), plans are already afoot for 2012 and tickets went on sale today. I think we’ll wait to see which acts are confirmed first though – whilst the line-up has been good these past few years, I’m not willing to gamble £40. Even if the tickets being sold now are ‘limited edition’ – whatever that implies.

Hopefully next year we’ll be able to make some other festivals – Sonisphere in particular could be good if the right bands are playing. We’ll see.

Neil and Christine’s Geocaching Adventure

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Geocache

This weekend Christine and I went Geocaching for the first time. It’s something I’d considered doing ever since I got my iPhone, almost a year ago (seriously, it does not feel like a year already…), but I never got around to it. Anyhow, a colleague at work had mentioned some of her friends had got into it, and several of my blogger friends like Andy and Firda do it, so I looked for caches near where we live and found 5 within a one mile radius.

With it being a bank holiday yesterday, it meant we both had the afternoon free, so I bought the iPhone app (which I’ll review tomorrow) and we set off. The first one we found is shown above – it’s a ‘micro’ cache which is the second-smallest size of cache, and is about the size of a matchbox. Inside every geocache is a piece of paper to write your name and the date to log your visit. Finding the cache took a little longer than expected, although the hint for the cache was spot on when we finally worked it out. This was also perhaps our punishment for choosing the nearest cache rather than going a little bit further to one recommended for newbies.

We continued on to find three further caches – the next two being the fiendish ‘nano’ caches which are the smallest, and usually magnetic. In fact, when I first found it I thought it was the magnet to hold the cache onto something, not the cache itself – it wasn’t until I twisted it that it opened to reveal the log inside. The last one for the day, alongside the canal, was inside a 35mm film canister, and required a little scrambling down a bank to get to.

So, four caches down. There are obviously many more to find – after all, if there are four in a small town like ours, then the must be thousands in the UK alone, nevermind overseas. Of course, we’ll now have to go a bit further to look for them but it’s possible to do a spot of geocaching whilst doing other activities. There’s two on campus at work to find during a lunch break and I might have a look for some in Huddersfield as I’m there on Thursday. Still, we may go out specifically to find geocaches – after all, we’ll probably be walking between them so it’s good exercise.

I’m under the impression that smartphones are making geocaching more accessible; in the past, if you wanted to find a geocache you would have needed to buy a GPS receiver, which for those not interested in outdoor pursuits isn’t so useful when not geocaching. Smartphones have brought GPS to the masses, and phones with always-on internet bring dynamic maps and access to the Geocaching community whilst on the go, so there’s no need to plan geocaching trips ahead of time. The Geocaching web site could do with some improvements – it’s a bit cluttered and the design feels rather dated.

Tomorrow, I’ll do an App of the Week review of the Geocaching iPhone app. I may blog again about my Geocaching exploits later on, as and when I find more.