Blog Category: Misc  Category: Misc

This is one which has been bugging me for a while - the post editor page on my site will readily underline incorrectly spelled words but when i right-click to get the spelling corrected in the context menu it doesn't want to show me correct spellings. It's probably a case of read the manual but I finally got round to working it out, and it's as   more »

The automated filing of your photo's into day, month and/or year folders is great for speeding up your workflow, but I just couldn't get it working under windows. There's plenty of information about it all over the internet but for me instead of putting it into the requisite YYMMDD folders it would just move everything into a folder called   more »

I'm usually rubbish at amusing inventive word-play - ask me to come up with a pub quiz name and I'm utterly stumped. This one was easy for me, though I wasn't asked to think of one, the thought just randomly came up in my   more »

Well I suppose it was inevitable, when you suddenly realise you are getting older by the things you catch yourself doing/saying thinking getting more frequent. The latest thing I've noticed is that my propensity to fart in public has increased exponentially! It used to be the case that I'd internalise the pain of holding in a ripper for hours on   more »

I love an analogy, there's nothing better than pushing your explanation across the line with an unequivocal corresponding example in everyday life. I think I've crossed the line this time though, I'd been asked to rate the presentation I'd just been given on a subject outside of my specific skill set; I responded that it was tricking given how   more »

One of the highlights of my summer was the adoption of a supplementary passtime, having recently picked up a copy of the National Trust's 50 things to do before you are 11 3/4 to inspire fun activities to be enjoyed with my niece and nephew I proceeded to introduce them to it. Unfortunately despite them falling very short of the cut-off turns out   more »

Had a right good chuckle to my self whilst on holiday in Cambodia, in the spirit of travelling light I'd left my electric toothbrush at home favoring the good ol' fashioned way of doing things. I've never been a fan of the manual way - always found it a bit too awkward and unusually for me being ambidextrous I suddenly realized that I'd never   more »

As much as I love Excel there are some circumstances where it just doesn't cut it - more than a millions rows and computer says no; some rediculouse vlookup and you could be there for hours. So step in SQL, it can do those aforementioned tasks in a matter of seconds. There are a couple of occasions though where SQL is not king, one of these is   more »

After a serious amount of pestering from Ali over the last six months it seems I have caved and bought her the camera that she's been after for a while now to pursue her newly found hobby. I'd been looking at Sony's offerings of their a5/6xxx cameras for a while and whilst I was confident the base a5000 model would more than suffice Ali's needs I   more »

We are great fans of travel games in our household, they literally travel the world with us. I'm not saying that the original casing for pass the pigs is enormous but when you are only taking a messenger sized bag for a week away every inch counts. The system we run with is to use my custom printed scorecards (see download link below) and simply   more »

Like most people nowdays in the modern technology filled society I rarely feel the need to write a letter, but on the rare occasion I do I want it to look professional. It came as a suprise to me that none of my peers shared the same passion as a quick poll showed that nobody had their own personal letterhead. As I mentioned before my snail mail   more »

I'm currently in Ghent for the famous 6 day race at the velodrome. The atmosphere is awesome the best inner circle is packed with beer drinking spectators enjoying the spectacle and dancing to the music the DJ is pumping out in time to the racing. All this beer drinking has its downside though, every toilet in Belgium seems to be chargeable, even   more »

Another 'never thought I'd say it' musing of the day, it turns out I actually found a legitimate use for facebook! It's not that I'm against faffing on the internet - hell I'm probably one of the worst proponents, it is just beyond me why you'd want to depress yourself by endlessly scrolling through facebook as the numerous studies have proven.   more »

It was whilst perusing my local Quality Save where I happened upon an old skool jam jar for sale that my mind caught upon something but I couldn't quite figure it out.... The mason jar in question was a heavy old thing which had an integrated drinking handle, it was this that provoked my attention - I am regularly in the need of on-the-go drinking   more »

We've all done it, left a tissue or some paper in a pocket of an item of clothing and then washed it only to find all of your favourite black clothes come out covered in white flecks. Even after you've washed it again the problem persists. The timing is probably unfortunate as well - it annoyingly happened to my faithful Tour de France T-shirt   more »

I think that my work colleagues have finally worked me out! Yesterday I was quetly working away at my desk when I felt a sneeze coming on. Sure enough it arrived and was promptly followed by the usual exchange of excusses and blessing. After which I remarked about my satisfaction of the preceeding event - it was one of those sneezes that you   more »

So I got myself a new bit of tech a couple of months back, a new camcorder, primarily for our upcoming safari. This thing is genius, 50 times zoom, HD recording and a cracking optical image stabilisation. I've been putting it through it's paces in the mean time on bird watching trips with Ali and it has been a brilliant tool for post trip analysis   more »

This flight was a cracker, made extra special not only for the fact it was the first I was able to fully record on my GPX logger for later analysis - but for the added drama of the flight. First off the skies that day were a bit congested so we had to do an extra loop over Warrington whist we were waiting, but next there was great excitement. As   more »

My next blog entry from a string of flight inspired posts is another flight GPX tracklog. This time from my weekend city break in Amsterdam. I initially thought this info might be a bit unique and interesting, but in the search to find some of the other flight details I came across Flightaware.com. It has some great info there, including to my   more »

Another bug bear here, one of several about Manchester Airport! The biggest issue with them is pickups - the sheer cheek of charging for you to go and collect your friends and familys from the termial is bordering on criminal. Not content with charging an arm and a leg for airlines to use the airport they impose additional pain of 'just'   more »

I don't fly that often so it took me a while to perfect the technique of logging my aeroplane journeys, but I've now cracked it and am getting good results so long as I've got a window seat. Back in the early days of my Windows mobile powered HTC phones I had GPS available to me but unfortunately this was so early on in the smartphone era that use   more »

One of the first things I do in my photography workflow is to add a copyright to it. My favourite and easy way of doing this is with a simple self created drag and drop file. It uses Exiftool which if you haven't heard of before is a massively useful command line tool for working with the meta data of your photos. In an upcoming post I'll be   more »

Well almost.... After Ali's niece has been addicted to watching unwrapping videos on YouTube, she decided to blog her birthday presents opening. Turns out she's quite a good blogger, admittedly I'all have to up my camera skills but you can judge for yourself on   more »

So I've got myself a one of those bluetooth selfie buttons, but before you start slating me for being one of those plonkers - I am using it for other remote control purposes... The off road satnav loaded with OS Maps which I use for navigation on my MTB sits in a waterproof case attached to my stem. The whole setup is great, I don't have to faff   more »

The only real source of places to sledge I've found is this article from the Manchester Evening News. There's a couple of good spots there but there appears to be a glaring omission - there's nothing in the Peak District, but you are probably not going to find a great hill without a bit of local knowledge! Lyme Park comes close to it obviously but   more »

B&M Travel Mug Reviewed by Martin Childs B&M, £1.99 Much better tasting than your generic travel mug. This is definately one product that bucks the old saying of "Light, strong and cheap: choose two" although we'd probably have to modify it slightly for travel mugs: Easy drinking, taste free and cheap: choose two The standard travel   more »

Want to quickly and easily check if your scales are accurate it's easy, read on.... Across the whole of the cycling world everybody is obsessed with weight, it is pretty rediculous really that people stress about grams and spend a disproportionate of money trying to save it on the things. There is even a certain group of people who have it so bad   more »

Well I'd never thought I'd say it but today I was greatly tickled by an anagram - surely a sign of getting older! The amusement came as I was looking through the expenses of an operating unit at work, there was a bunch of costs to repair some damages to hire cars, each narrative had the reg. number of the car in question - one of them being: FX13   more »

After a couple of years of pestering (or as Ali would have it encouragement) I've taken up running. Having never been on a run voluntarily in my life (not sure you could class my activities during my school years as 'running') I decided to ease myself in steadily. It's when I was perusing the running asile at Decathlon when the pace started to   more »