Year: 2012

Dumgoyne

With the weather finally taking a turn for the better it was time to get the walking books back on. I’ve not walked since November much like my walking buddies so we decided to start small and picked Dumgoyne as its close by, not too tough and the views are great.

I walked up Dumgoyne at the start of 2009 and I found it pretty tough needing lots of stops. However today felt like a hard stroll and I was surprised how quickly we got to the top. We carried on to what we thought was Earls Seat but we were one summit short of that one.

So a great day especially with the weather. Not so great was me totally fluffing most of my photos on the walk as my settings were for indoors and not the clear blue skies we had today. When will I learn! Full set of the photos that did turn out (auto FTW!) are up on Flickr.

Updates


No posts for a while but I’ve a few short bursts in me, so here goes:

  • The last couple of weeks at work were pretty busy. I was on an internal course on Lean and how it is applied to manufacturing and also to the wider business. Although that sounds pretty dry it was a fantastic course. While the Lean element was important it was the other skills covered by the course that were far more interesting. Leadership, people interaction, energy, work/life balance…the list goes on. While it was a lot for two weeks it was a real kick up the backside for me. The interaction between attendees was superb and I got loads from it. The trick will be making real permanent change based on the two weeks. Going well so far.

Avengers Assemble

  • Caught up with the new Avengers movie last weekend, or to give it it’s proper UK only title – Avengers Assemble. Spoiler free thoughts are that it’s a great popcorn film – lot’s of action, great effects and surprisingly it’s pretty funny too – and that means funny when it’s meant to be funny and not funny because it’s bad. Or cheesy. I really do recommend catching it in the cinema rather than waiting for the blu-ray, dvdv or – cough cough – some other method of watching it at home as it really is one to watch on a giant screen. I chose to go 2D rather than 3D – still not convinced about 3D as it feels like a gimmick, colours are muddy and it’s not comfortable for over two hours wearing another pair of glasses. One thing I will say – say until after the credits to see the usual Marvel extra after the ending. I don’t want to say too much more about the film…well, I lie. There’s quite a bit I want to say but that will have to wait for now. Roll on June for Prometheus and July for the big black bat.
  • What an end to the Premiership today. Drama right to the last minute but for me the best team won over the season.
  • As for Rangers…at this moment in time I’d prefer a restart in the third. Last few months have been a disgrace really. In fact last decade looks to have been a disgrace. Sad days.
  • Good to catch up with friends this weekend. Good food, good chat and a wee trip around Glasgow. Good to get the camera out again and take some pics. Good, good, good. Lots of good. Need to do more…much more.
  • Loving The Bridge on BBC4. If you’ve not watched it yet catch it on iPlayer.
  • This is some of the most miserable weather for April and May I can remember. So wet and today pretty windy. Feels like November.
  • Quietest period for games is about to come to an end. Ghost Recon is out in a couple of weeks. It’s been delayed for 2-3 years so I hope they deliver something decent although some comments on the beta don’t give me much hope.
  • So many great new iPad apps recently. I’ve been convinced that when the MacBook Airs are refreshed in the next month or so that I’d pick one up but I’m having second thoughts. Unless of course theres some crazy retina display involved. Still, those iPad apps need a whole separate post as some of them are excellent.
  • Struggling with keeping the exercise going over last few weeks. A couple of health issues and busy with work have meant getting time has been difficult. The good news is that my weight is steady so I’m really pleased although would still like to lose a few more kilograms.

Updates done so back to catching up with some TV. Or Xcode. Out of the blue I got back into developing an app and I’m enjoying it so far. Long may it continue.

Lightroom

Lightroom 4 has been out for a while but I didn’t really spend too much time tinkering with it until last weekend and a little this weekend too. While there doesn’t seem to be much new, the processing engine has seen quite a step up in performance so much so that a few of my older images really benefited from further tinkering.

Kilt

Kilt

The photo above was taken a couple of years ago at the Edinburgh festival. I always liked it but never really got the detail out of it I wanted without bringing in too much noise. The edited photo, while I’ve maybe taken it a bit far, I really like. More contrast and highlights areas like the kilt far more effectively. I don’t think I could have pushed it as far in Lightroom 3.

Squirrel

Squirrel

Similarly this shot from the Cobbler climb in 2010 was a favourite but now with some tweaking in Lightroom 4 I can get some better definition. Slightly confusing was the first time I opened an older image in Lightroom 4. The new develop settings were missing but on anything new brought into Lightroom I could see them – Highlights, Shadows, Whites and Blacks instead of Recovery, Fill Light and Brightness sliders. After a bit of searching I found you had to change the Process Version to 2012 instead of 2010. Applying that to the whole library opens up the newer develop panels for all my photo’s.

Early Morning London Eye

Early Morning London Eye

Even this shot of London taken from inside now looks better. Previously I struggled to increase the clarity and it always looked a bit washed out but I found it easier to tweak in Lightroom 4. There are other new features like book support, proofing and printing improvements, video support and a great way of geotagging photo’s but it’s the improvements in the process engine that really stands out.

Shamefully I’ve hardly been out and about this year with my camera but that will change soon. Promise.

Instapaper

Instapaper is one of my favourite iOS app’s. If you haven’t heard of it before it allows you to store articles and longer form content for reading back later on your iOS device, or on the website. It also cleans up the content, stripping out adverts, sidebars etc allowing you to focus on the content. I love it.

Instapaper newly updated for retinae iPad. Click for lots of pixels!

The app and service is produced and maintained by Marco Arment and he blogs openly and honestly about Instapaper and how it has eveolved over the last few years. Once Instapaper got some traction competitors to the service were launched. On iOS and Android you can use ReadItLater which has similar features to Instapaper but is supported across more platforms. Another service is Readability which has been around for a few years but only recently launched an iOS application. They initially were a browser plugin service that Apple also included in Safari to clean up content similarly to Instapaper. A few weeks ago they launched their own iOS app which was similar to Instapaper but without the friends and recommended reading features. However the app looked, in my opinion, gorgeous and featured some great typography to customise your reading experience. Marco blogged about it – Learning from competition.

He admitted Readability had stolen a march in the looks front and made Instapaper look tired. It also fired him up, hence the quick response with Instapaper 4.1 launching yesterday. Competition is good, certainly from a consumer perspective. Bing was good for Google, Google+ is good for Facebook. So how did Readability feel about it?

Timothy Meaney is a strategist at Arc90, the team behind Readability. While he’s every entitlement to feel a bit pissy about features being copied, it’s a font choice. Nothing more. It’s styling – nothing more. To tweet copycat is pretty childish. What’s more, looking back to 2009 when Readability first started, Arc90 had a blog post describing the service. The best part is this quote:

Our latest experiment was partly inspired by Marco Arment’s awesome Instapaper application (and equally awesome Instapaper iPhone app). We hope you enjoy this little tool. If you find any issues, feel free to comment on our blog.

So it’s OK for Readability to be inspired…but competitors are copycats. Good job guys. To be fair Meaney did apologise:

Still, Readability beaing dickish about this will live long in the memory. Looks like I’ll be sticking with Instapaper and recommending it ahead of Readability from now on.

The new iPad

The new iPad. Announced on Wednesday the first surprise was the name – iPad. In hindsight it was obvious when you look at the rest of Apples product range – iPod Touch, MacBook Air, iMac and Mac Pro. It can lead to confusion when selling on your old gear but it’s a clean way of dealing with product ranges, especially compared to the latest Galaxy Incredible Supreme IV.

Spot the model names

Standout new feature is the retina display. The display on the iPhone 4 when compared to the 3G or 3GS was such a step change and I expect the same on the new iPad. In fact it still boggles the mind that this time next week I’ll be using a 9.7 inch screen which has 2048×1536 pixels. Thats around 50% more pixels than a 1080p TV and getting close to my 27 inch iMac. Boggling.

To power that step change the quad core graphic processor got the headlines but I think the 1GB of ram will be just as important. 4G LTE got headlines but is basically pointless in the UK. We may see HSPA+ later in the year in the UK but I don’t expect much. The camera looks to be of iPhone quality and while handy to have I’m not sure how much I’ll actually use it.

Puntastic - the new iPad

With that extra screen I wondered if battery life would suffer. It’s great to get around 10 hours from one charge and if that had been impacted it would have been a real negative. However battery life is the same. How? The new iPad has a 11,666 mAh battery, 70% larger than the battery in the iPad 2.

A 70% larger battery but impressively weight has only increased by 49g. Thickness by 0.6mm. Disappointing was no Siri but a cut down version offering dictation. I’m looking forward to seeing just how successful this is with my Scottish accent. I’d also liked to have seen storage take a bump. 16gb will get used up pretty quickly with apps growing due to the retina display. How big will newsstand magazines be now – most come in around 500MB at the moment. I hope this calls for a rethink in how they are being produced and distributed. Anyway, I’d liked to have seen 32, 64 and 128GB options. Maybe next year.

The upgrade for me is a no brainer. I’m still using an original iPad so the upgrades – screen, speed, camera and the joy of a smart cover are ones I can’t wait for. Amusingly the new iPad will also be thinner (3.6mm) and lighter (a whole 68g) compared to the original that I currently use. I’ve yet again went for black, 64GB and 4G. I do have a lot of apps and content so that space will be well utilised. While I could have used hotspot on the iPhone, I prefer to buy cheap Three sims from Amazon and eBay. It’s worked well for two years, I’m not tied to a contract and it keeps options open should the UK mobile speeds pick up over 2012.

The new iPad looks to be a great update for me as an original iPad user though I can understand iPad 2 owners having a harder time justifying the upgrade…until they see that screen. Roll on March 16th.

Apple Boycott

I saw a few tweets this morning mentioning the Guardian and Apple boycotts. I didn’t think too much off it until I read the article in the Observer this evening and I’m annoyed. The title of the article is Apple hit by boycott call over worker abuses in China. I do tend to keep up with tech news, especially Apple tech news and I didn’t recall any calls for a boycott. The only boycott I’d seen in the last few days was around ACTA or a misplaced boycott Twitter campaign. But Apple?

The article stems from a post at the New York Times – In China, Human Costs Are Built Into an iPad. That report looks at the issues primarily with Foxconn who manufacture the iPad and iPhone for Apple. There have been a few accidents, deaths and suicides at Foxconn and as Apple is the best known brand it makes sense for these journalists to link Foxconn with Apple. However Foxconn make products for a wide range of companies.

You hardly ever see these companies called out though – only Apple. You also rarely see corrections and updates in the mainstream press. A letter from the Business for Social Responsibilty (BSR) who were quoted in the original NY Times article was never mentioned. They blogged about it on Jan 27th – Letter to the New York Times From BSR. Of course that doesn’t get mentioned. Only the original and now slightly discredited piece from the NY Times is mentioned. Why discredit this great story of ours – the Apple boycott. The article does mention the work Apple has done to better conditions in China but calls the publication of the work ‘unusual’. Not good, or a step forward, but ‘unusual’. No other company has been as public or vocal in discussing workers rights in China. Recently Apple has published it’s full supplier list, it’s auditing process and the progress it is making year on year all at Apple.com. I’ve struggled to find similar information for any of the companies listed above that work with Foxconn.

So who was calling for this boycott? I read hundreds of tech posts each day and I hadn’t seen it mentioned? A couple of journalists were calling for the boycott, not hoards of customers, not thousands of people who joined the SOPA protests but a couple of journalists. One of the journalists was Dan Lyons. He was best known for writing the blog Fake Steve Jobs and since it’s demise he’s best known for being a dick. Or a jackass. Time and again he’s called out for his wild stories but time and again newspapers like the Guardian will quote him when it suits their articles and further legitimise his dickness. So after reading who was involved I pretty much dismissed the story.

I read on and it rambled for a bit until I came to this cracking piece of journalism.

Through the iPod, iPhone and now the iPad tablet computer, Apple has revolutionised lifestyles across the world and built up a cult of worshippers.

The Apple cult. Of course, it’s a small cult of Apple users. Thats the only reason why people will buy Apple products. As Fraser Speirs tweeted this morning:

The iPhone sold 37 million units in the last 3 months. The iPad 15.4million. Thats not a cult. Thats just throwing an old concept into an already flawed article. Really disappointed that the Guardian would even publish this as it is link bait rather than an accurate piece of journalism.

Forbes who were quoted in the Guardian piece ran an article disputing much of what has been said – The Apple Boycott: People Are Spouting Nonsense about Chinese Manufacturing. First notable point is that the suicide rate at Foxconn, mentioned by many as shocking and something that Apple has to deal with, is lower than the Chinese average. The article then disputes much of the maths behind death and pay rates in China.

Whether you like or dislike Apple, hopefully you’ll see there is far more to this story than the Guardian has made out. Indeed they don’t even link to other articles mentioned which is a real pet peeve of mine. If you are upset at the conditions in China then it’s not Apple who are to blame but the Chinese government for allowing such conditions to exist.

I’m pretty pleased I didn’t subscribe to the Guardian iPad app now. While I enjoyed the format and many of the articles, it crashed daily so I couldn’t justify spending money on it. Whether I continue to spend money on the paper version is another question. Yes thats petty, but so too was their boycott article.

2012 Resolutions

2011 – your dead to me. Around a year ago I made some 2011 resolutions so before tackling 2012’s goals, how did I do on last years? (spoiler – not too well!)

  1. Lose another 5kg – SUCCESS. This time last year I was 95.8kg. Today I’m 89.2kg. I peaked in January at 97.8kg but my lowest was 86.6kg so I’ve gained a couple of kg’s in the last 6 weeks. Primarily this is due to my sciatica returning meaning no walking, bike or running in the last 7 weeks and a couple of slow and painful badminton sessions. Festive eating hasn’t helped either. So while a success it’s a bit disappointing to gain in the last couple of months.
  2. Publish my own iPhone app – hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha – FAIL.
  3. Climb at least 6 munro’s – FAIL. Four munro’s and the longest leg of the West Highland Way. Weather, illness (me and my walking buddies all had issues throughout the year) meant far less walking than I’d hoped for.
  4. Improve the podcast – FAIL. I was going to say partial fail but that would be pussying out. I’d hoped we’d have refreshed the website and the podcast by year end but instead that will be 2012’s goal. We did however get to episode 100. Nice. The website refresh has already started too, so hopefully that will be in place by mid January. Then it will be time to focus on the podcast (and website) content which won’t be so easy.
  5. Drink more water – SUCCESS. Not majorly, but I have been drinking more water and less diet Irn-Bru which can only be a good thing. Right?
  6. Cycle > 2000 miles – FAIL. So annoying! Total distance for 2011 was 1629.9 miles but the total at end of June was 1117 miles. What happened? Hill walking, illness in Nov and December and also a mad notion to start running all impacted in the last half of the year.
  7. Reduce migraines – SUCCESS. I’ve never got to the bottom of my migraines. They are mostly clustered around May and September with a few sporadic bouts in between but this year there been less, partly due to a dizzy spell at work, a trip to the doctors and more effective (more powerful) drugs. Whether this has helped reduce them overall, or it’s just coincidence I’ll never know but there’s been less actual migraines this year than the last 3 years which is a GREAT thing. Long may it continue.
  8. Read at least one book a month – FAIL. I really struggle to read books. I read a lot online and in magazines but I tend to start books and never finish. Total for this year is two books read, 5 others started but not finished. Out of all the resolutions made last year, this was the one I knew I wouldn’t manage. Idiot.
  9. Be shapeless – WTF? No idea why I added this…I think it was some Bruce Lee reference? Ah yes – it was. Anyway, FAIL. I have not become water.

Now that I’ve reviewed the list 2011 doesn’t seem that bad, but I saw too many friends suffering this year for it to be classed ‘a good year’ and certain aspects of my life didn’t exactly go well either. It’s at this point I want to mouth off about certain people and some work stuff too…but I won’t. Must resist.

I did enjoy some new toys this year – the new iMac is working a treat as is the Civic. Great to drive and a nice step up from the Focus. I picked up an Airport Extreme which has been 100% reliable and something I should have done a couple of years ago. I also enjoyed in no particular order Game of Thrones, Fifa 2012, Uncharted 3, Angles, Words with Friends, The Killing, Halo Reach, The Trip, Forza 4, Drive, Mission Impossible 4, No More Idols, The Shadow Line, Instapaper, Reeder, 21, Rev, This Is England, Portal 2, Senna, The Walking Dead and 5by5.

It was also notable for the toys I didn’t get, namely the iPad 2 and iPhone 4S. I’m still amazed that I managed to resist, but resist I did. I can see an new iPad in the next few moths though as new app’s are a tad sluggish on the old girl.

So what about 2012? Despite research saying you shouldn’t tell anyone what your goals are here’s what I’d like to achieve this year.

  1. Lose another 5kg. Actually, get under 82.5kg. I got under 14 stones in 2011, so under 13 stones (or 82.5kg in new money) in 2012 would be very nice. Bloody hard but very very nice.
  2. Climb at least 6 munro’s
  3. Cycle > 2000 miles
  4. Run a 10k
  5. Photography – get out and actually use my camera

I’ve a few work related goals as well but thats not for the blog. Key to the fitness related goals are getting into a more regular schedule to fit everything in – time will tell if that will be achievable but key is staying healthy. There’s a nice podcast on resolutions that might help you achieve them over the next 12 months – Back to Work #47: Utter Failure & Hotel Steak. Well worth a listen.

Ultimately though, I’m looking forward to a healthy and happy year for myself and family/friends…and of course you too whoever you are. Happy 2012!