Posts filed under the 'Blog' category


Back in the day: a PC Card adapter for USB 2.0

Time for a quick giggle as I look at some old hardware I used to use, some 14 years ago, before I take it off to recycling. This past weekend, in a box at the back of the cupboard, I found this: […]

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Another chapter from the “Don’t be clever” coding style

A short and quick example of some baffling coding today. It so happens this past weekend I was updating some HTML and CSS and JavaScript on this site. One of the JavaScript source files (luckily not written by me) had this: […]

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Installing Yosemite like a pro

Way back when, I bought a black MacBook and an iPod Touch. I was – har, har – going to learn how to write Objective-C and earn millions selling apps. You know the kind of thing: […]

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The Talented Mr Steve

So this happened… […]

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Cloud, cloud, everywhere

So I got an iPhone 6 the other day. Bully for me, I can hear you say, but this isn’t about that. It’s about the fact that Apple, in preparation for iOS 8, changed the limits and functionality on their cloud storage offering, iCloud. With all the iOS devices in the house, a while back I had to pay for extra storage to enable backups for them all. That storage was just upgraded at no extra cost to 20GB. Time, I thought to myself, to check on all the cloud storage subscriptions I actually have and, presumably, use. […]

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Saying goodbye to Eurydice

A couple of weeks ago, just before we disappeared off on vacation, Eury crashed. Before you start imagining car wrecks and the like, let me explain that Eury was our oldest cat. He was 18 years and 4 months old, which, for a cat, is way up there in terms of age. And by crashed I mean that, finally, all of his ailments – and let me tell you this cat had them all, pretty much – caught up with him and there was nothing more we could do. […]

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Restoring old negatives: the bad and the not quite so bad.

As hinted a couple of blog posts ago (From ‘57 to 57), I’ve been resurrecting a stash of old film negatives from those halcyon days when I first started learning about photography after I’d bought an SLR. And by “resurrecting” I mean separating them from the stuck-together block some of them had become. A couple of people have asked me what I did, so a quick post is in order. […]

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Amsterdam canal houses

Back in April this year, we went and stayed in Amsterdam for a few days. We were at the Hotel Pulitzer on Prinsengracht – although our room overlooked Keizersgracht at the rear of the hotel – and one of our pastimes was to look at the canal houses, which ones we liked, which ones not so much. On the last day we were there, I suddenly decided that I should photograph a whole bunch of them as we walked around, and create a collage of the best houses. Of course, it was that day it decided to rain. […]

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From ’57 to 57

A couple of months ago I celebrated my birthday; it happens every year. This is not about that event particularly, but more about changes over time and how I’ve almost become inured to the wonder embodied in those changes. […]

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The rise and fall of my Jungle Disk

Quite a while ago (I was surprised when I looked it up: 2008) I subscribed to a backup app called Jungle Disk. The interesting thing about it was (a) it used Amazon S3 (then relatively new) as a backup store, and (b) you subscribed to it at a rate of a mere $1 per month. So, in essence, it’s an online backup program and it allowed me to keep documents and photos – about 6 folder trees in all – somewhere else than a local backup drive. It was the “house burns down” option: in the event of a catastrophe (like, say, if the Black Forest fire last year had been a little more ferocious and the wind from the north-east a little stronger) I’d have our decade’s worth of photos still around once we’d rebuilt. […]

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