Puffbox

With five-megapixel digital cameras slowly edging under the crucial £100 barrier, and the price of storage media in freefall, it’s suddenly possible for anyone to become a decent photographer. How?

Step one is to buy yourself a reasonable camera. There’s no point spending a fortune; they aren’t generally built to last any more, and besides, you just know a smaller and smarter model will come out as soon as you’ve spent the money. I’m a careful purchaser, and I’ve got three obsolete digital cameras sitting at home as it is (not counting cameraphones!). Amazon is always a good place to do some price research.

Around £100 will buy you the camera you need. Aim for the highest numbers of megapixels and optical (not digital!) zoom – but spare a particular thought for the type of memory card. The different manufacturers favour different formats; and if you’ve already bought into one type of card, for other devices you already own, it makes sense to stick with that.

SD cards are probably the most flexible, and are getting ridiculously cheap. Amazon has a Viking 1GB SD card for a real bargain price of £13.20 – on my 5MP camera, that’s enough for nearly 400 photos, even at top quality. And that’s the key to it, folks.

In the old days, you had maybe 24 exposures per roll of film, meaning just 24 chances to get it right. With a 1GB card on board, capacity is no longer a concern. You can take 24 pictures of the same thing, maybe on a rapid-fire function if you have one – and, unless you’re really unlucky or really incompetent, at least one of them should be half decent anyway.

The more megapixels, the more slack you have. If you’re starting with a 5 megapixel picture, you have scope to trim bits off the sides, and still have enough pixels to make a large, good-quality print. Plus you’ll have the luxury of being able to review your photos on the camera’s built-in screen, as you take them. If you can’t make something of even one of your attempts, try again.

I’m not saying you’ll be deposing the Guardian’s star snapper Dan Chung. But if there’s one thing I’ve learned from his (excellent) blog, it’s that even the pros rely to a large extent on technology and luck. Don’t be ashamed of doing likewise yourself.

Despite heroic efforts over the last few weeks, my home PC’s hard disk finally gave up the ghost this weekend. I’ve ordered a new one, but it’s going to take Amazon a week to get it to me. What to do in the meantime? Time to try Linux again.

Probably every 18 months or so, I go through a phase of wanting to try Linux. The concept of the Live CD – where you download a single file, burn it to a CD ROM, and boot your PC from it without actually installing anything – gives a no-risk way to try Linux out. And it’s the perfect solution when you don’t have a working hard disk in your PC.

The bad news, though, is that it’s taken most of my weekend, on and off, to find a Linux version which worked with all my main hardware, and saved my settings reliably. I’m still having a nightmare installing OpenOffice. And I’m supposed to be good at these sorts of things. Mere mortals have no chance.

In the end, I plumped for Puppy Linux. I’ve toyed with it before, and knew it picked up my network and sound card without much intervention. It’s a reasonable 70MB download, which shouldn’t take too long on a broadband line. Burn it, boot it, and you should have enough to get you going.

And the first extra program I downloaded: Firefox. I’m doing almost everything through it these days. It checks my Gmail accounts. It gives me one-click access to my RSS feeds on Bloglines. It lets me see my bookmarks as stored on del.icio.us. It lets me post to my blog via Deepest Sender. As I’ve said before, it’s not far off an operating system in its own right these days.

I was lucky enough last night to get a tour round the headquarters of the global technology leader based in my home town of Newbury… no, not Vodafone, the other one. You may not have heard of Quantel, but if you own a television, you’ll be familiar with their work. What do they do? An interesting question, and I suspect the answer has changed in subtle ways over the past few years.

Quantel basically invented TV graphics. Their breakthrough product was Paintbox, responsible for some of the many crimes against art witnessed on the world’s TV screens in the 80s. When you bought a Paintbox, you were buying the ability to do something you couldn’t do otherwise. Was it the hardware or the software? It didn’t really matter.

Nowadays, of course, things have changed. Any Mac or PC is able to do a startlingly good job of video editing, and the software you need is probably thrown in for nothing. So why are Quantel still here? In a word, speed.

Over the course of the evening, we were shown a few demos of what their kit can do. A lot of it was very underwhelming, for anyone familiar with Premiere, iMovie, Windows Movie Maker, or (at a push) any decent graphics package. Yes, my £1000 home PC can theoretically do that too… but not with HD-quality footage (or higher… 4K anyone?), and certainly not in a second or two. Suddenly, the capability is a commodity, and it’s all about the hardware. Again.

Are the Quantel guys losing sleep at the growth of YouTube? Hardly. The HD revolution has only just started, and higher definition TV needs beefier editing kit. That’s where Quantel come in.

Search Engine Watch gets quite excited at news that Google is now officially a verb in the English language, following its inclusion by the Oxford English Dictionary’s online edition. How cool is that? Not very, when you realise that other brand-based additions this month included Brillo, Speedo and Subbuteo. (Admittedly all as nouns, though.) Oh – and, most aptly of all, ‘anoraky’.

An interesting posting from Forrester researcher Charlene Li rates the various blogging platforms out there, and identifies ‘three clear leaders’ – Movable Type, WordPress and iUpload. The first two were pretty obvious choices, but I confess, iUpload is a new name to me.

Charlene includes one line from her full report which rings many bells: ‘a company just dipping its toes into the blogging waters may want to start with Typepad with the goal of transitioning to a more robust, software-based platform in the future.’ Certainly that’s what I’ve been encouraging people to do… and you don’t have to look too hard to find plenty of big names, especially in the media business, doing likewise. Here’s a few to get you started: the Daily Mail group, The Times, Sky News… and until recently, the BBC. Oh yeah… and Charlene herself.

Is it worth mentioning that that Six Apart has an affiliate scheme, where people can earn $3 for every subscriber they pass on to Typepad? 😉

Few technologies have changed my life the way Sky+ has. It’s now extremely rare that we ever watch anything at the time of its original broadcast… and not just because we have a baby daughter to contend with. (The one exception, though, is live sport; there’s just no fun in fast-forwarding through it.)

Something in this month’s Sky magazine caught my attention en route to the recycling bin – the ability to set your Sky+ via mobile phone. I’m quite excited about this… but as a Windows Mobile smartphone fan, it’s very disappointing to see that the Sky By Mobile system isn’t compatible with my own pocket. 🙁

But salvation is at hand: according to Media Guardian, ‘By the end of July the service will also be made available on Sky.com.’ If anything, the web seems the more logical place to use such a service. How many people will browse through the hundreds of digital TV channels on their mobile phone’s tiny screen, to see what’s available?

I have a nasty feeling I’ll start setting the (downstairs) Sky+ box from the (upstairs) PC. Just because I can.

A minor detail, but I notice that Robert Scoble’s blog has already been renamed. It’s now ‘Scobleizer – Tech Geek Blogger’, with no hint at his Microsoft connection… which ends this week. Wow. I really need a new case study to quote. Urgently. Anyone got any suggestions?

I guess something like this was inevitable: the Guardian has announced plans for a downloadable PDF edition, with updates – presumably based on its website CMS – every 15 minutes.

Users log onto Guardian Unlimited and download an eight to twelve page A4 pdf featuring the latest news. They can select any of five news-streams: general news, international, economics, sport and media stories. (It) is likely to appeal to a lunchtime and evening commuter market wanting a live print-based update. It will be launched later in the summer with BT as the launch sponsor.

I’m only surprised it has taken so long. I remember, at the end of the last century, as I boarded an internal flight in the US, being given a rather crudely printed-and-stapled ‘newssheet’ of the latest headlines. It didn’t feel especially cutting-edge at the time, but maybe it was.

Inexplicably, the Guardian’s press release doesn’t include the accompanying visual; thankfully, the Press Gazette‘s virtual reprint of it does. It’s interesting to see the Guardian newspaper identity coming across so strongly; and highlights the fact that the Guardian Unlimited sites are now lagging very sadly behind in the design stakes. The Berliner edition, complete with new masthead, made its debut on 12 September 2005. That’s a heck of a long time ago.

I’ve managed to get myself involved in a long-term government website project, with very grand ambitions for personalisation. Registered users will be able to ‘save stories’ to a personalised area; request notification when an article changes; etc etc. All sounds great in principle.

Yet each time I look at the personalisation options, I can’t help feeling it’s the old way of doing things. Another website to register for; another page demanding to be my default hompage; another password to remember; another place I have to remember to visit.

I can’t help reaching the conclusion that ‘personalisation’ is a concept whose time has passed. And in truth, despite all the promises, it never truly happened in the first place.

Personalisation, for me, is the ability to get the information I want, in the place I want. And in the 2.0 world, that place is my RSS consumption tool. I’m currently reading 78 different RSS feeds, from 78 different websites. It is my personal selection of what I consider important – from everywhere. And given the simplicity of the RSS format, there are countless different methods and tools for consuming that information – a web service like Bloglines, a personalised homepage, a desktop tool, a plugin to my browser or email client, an email service. I can choose the one which suits me personally.

I was told yesterday that RSS feeds of content from this big government website are not in scope. The important word I wish to add is – ‘yet’. 🙂 With RSS becoming omnipresent, not least given its status within Windows Vista (if that ever arrives), I’m worried that our efforts to build a personalised area will be wasted.

The Guardian should know better. A story today claims ‘UK mobile phone users can now access Google news and email’. Well, can someone tell me what service I’ve been happily using for the past six months or more? And why Richard Wray’s piece reads more like a Google press release? How can a respected news source make comments like:

‘Google News looks set to become the de facto news site for most mobile internet users.’

Er, leaving aside the speculative nature of that comment… allow me a moment of pedantry. What exactly is a ‘de facto’ news site? Terrible.