Steve Morton

Written by hand – I’ve been tagged

Robin over at ‘So very Robin‘ tagged my friend Laurie at Plannerisms, who in turn tagged loads of us… so here’s my entry in this chain.

I’ve always had problems with my handwriting and until recently I didn’t know why. But I think it’s because I don’t have stereophonic vision(I’m more or less blind in my right eye), so my ability to being able to put the point of my pen back on the page between letters/words is always a bit hit and miss.

I hate filling in forms especially those ones where you have to print in to boxes. My signature is also hardly the same twice, although it’s roughly the same each time.

Like Laurie I will spare your eyesight by supplying you the questions and answers! The following page was written Uniball Eye fine tipped pen on a sheet of fan fold tractor feed Filofax paper, yes it’s old. But without a tractor feed printer I still use the paper! Click on the picture to see it in more detail!

1. Your name/blogger name : Steve Morton aka Temps Perdu
2. Your blog name/URL: Philofaxy http://philofaxy.com as well as this blog and a few others!
3. Write “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.”
4. Favorite quote? ; The radio spectrum is already packed and unfortunately they’ve stopped making any more of it.
5. Favorite song? Peg – Steely Dan
6. Favorite band/singers? – Steely Dan amongst many others.
7. Anything else you want to say? My handwriting has got worse, but I now know why, I think…. see above!

Now it’s your turn! Post your version of this on your blog, and please post a link to it here in the comments.

iPod Touch Apps – Ones I’m using – Part 2

The following are some of my less used apps on my iPod Touch, see the rest in Part 1 of this post

Google Mobile App – Free from Google it features all the usual Google apps such as Gmail, Calendar, Search engine, Buzz etc.
iBooks – Apples own Kindle app.
Kindle – lets you read your Kindle downloads on your iPod touch useful if you don’t have a Kindle… yet! I haven’t really used this one much yet, but text is very clear on the iPod, although naturally the screen is some what smaller than a Kindle.
~~Panorama – a simple app that lets you take panorama pictures by joining together multiple pictures taken with the built in camera, and it is Free~~
Flickr – Access your Flickr account to share and view pictures
Remote – This app lets me control iTunes on my iMac from anywhere in the house, not worked out why I would want to do that yet!!
Skype – Like the desktop app it lets you have voice calls and now video calls with other Skype users on PC’s, Macs, Linux platforms.
TV Guide – A free UK TV programme guide, a miniature Radio Times if you like.. and it’s free
Wikipedia – a great free app for looking up the answers to quiz questions, or the details of an actor whilst you are watching TV!
WordPress – Useful for updating WordPress Blogs like this one, you can edit posts and create new ones.
Radio Player – a great free app for streaming UK radio stations to your iPod
~~Fon Maps – This application is supposed to indicate the location of FON WiFi hotspots, but it doesn’t appear to work – Failure~~
Heart Pal – I use this free app to track my blood pressure, it shows the highs and lows and an average figure too. I have a BP monitor that I take the readings with and then feed these in to the app.

Don’t hesitate to ask me for more information if you need it on any of the apps listed.

iPod Touch Apps – Ones I’m using – Part 1

I got my iPod Touch back in late November last year. It has proved to be a very useful bit of kit. I don’t really use all of it’s functions, but I’ve been discovering new things most days/weeks.

There is a huge variety of apps available for the iPod Touch, some of them work ok, some not so ok because they are really intended for the iPhone which has a slightly different feature set.

So here’s what I’m using, most are free unless I indicate otherwise.

BBC News – Essential for keeping up to date with World and UK news and it’s free
Camera + – A much improved camera app compared to the standard one, this one lets you do some limited editing and adjustments to the pictures before you save them, share them by email, Twitter or Facebook. Sadly the resolution of the iPod Touch camera is a little limited, I don’t use it often compared to my small compact. And for £0.59 this is a must have app.
Dropbox – I’ve been a Dropbox user now for well over a year, can’t be without it so it makes sense to have it on my Touch as well. It’s a great way to always have your files, photos etc available on all your devices and PC’s
Facetime – A great video conferencing tool, works great, better than Skype in most respects. It’s simple to use and great on the Touch because I can go walking around the house with it and show family and friends what is going on here. Free to download and free to use.
Facebook – Easy to use, although I would like to see them include some extra features in to this, such as managing friends.
Road Trip – I use this to record how much fuel we are using in the car and for our oil fired boiler!! Lots of apps available, after a lot of false starts I discovered the free Lite version of this which can cope with my requirements of entering things in litres, paying in Euros and still getting a Miles Per Gallon figure. Having satisfied myself that this app could handle my slightly unusual requirements I bought the paid version which can handle more vehicles including the boiler!! Which is just a bonus really.
~~Target Weight – Tracks my feeble attempts to loose weight, nice and simple to use, basic graphics and stats but it is free and works quite well.~~
Tumblr – I’ve only just started my Tumblr blog, but the app on the Touch makes it very easy to add posts on the move and adding pictures and quotes etc.
Twitter – Just the standard Twitter app, it works for me.
Week Cal – The standard calendar in iOS only has Day view or Month View, or a list view. Why they missed out the most obvious view… Week View I don’t know. This one is a paid for app, but it seems to do the job ok, although I still use my Filofax for everything calendar related!!!
Battery Master Free – a simple battery battery level indicator, the iPhone 4 has a simple indicator in the status bar showing the percentage, something that hasn’t been shared with the iPod Touch yet.

iOS Apps a flaw in their design

I have had an iPod Touch for a few months now. Great device and it does most things I want.

However, this morning I discovered a flaw in the way some of the apps interface with the basic settings. I was looking for a simple app to log my car fuel consumption, what could be more difficult than that? Plenty of apps to choose from in the app store. But so far I’ve not found one that does exactly what I want… and here’s why.

I’m English, but I live in France. So I prefer my language settings on my iPod to be in English, but I also set my regional settings to UK, otherwise the calendar is in French….
I buy fuel in litres, but I like to know what my car is doing in Miles per Gallon, but set some of the apps to MPG and they ask for the cost of fuel per gallon.
Living in France I’m paying in Euros, but most of the apps, are using the regional setting to display my costs in GB pounds.

What I need is an app that has currency, quantity, cost, and units etc independent of the device settings. Anyone know of such an app?

In the mean time I will stick to my own spreadsheet, it copes with all these different units, language demands very easily!

Amazon Kindle 3G

The new Kindle 3G has been around now for a few weeks and I recently bought one for my wife Alison’s birthday. I’ve recently seen a couple of people asking about the Kindle, so here is my take on it.

Firstly purchasing the Kindle… should be easy shouldn’t it… Well if you are in UK and you are receiving your Kindle at a UK address then yes… anywhere else and you will be purchasing it from the US via Amazon.com. Which at first I thought was going to be quite a task, but in the end it proved just as simple as any Amazon purchase. Delivery was no different to ordering from UK and waiting for delivery here in France, if anything I would say it was about a day quicker! Once ordered you receive a tracking number and the link on the Amazon site shows you exactly where your Kindle is zooming its way to you.

It comes in two models. Wi-Fi only and Free 3G + Wi-Fi. Wifi is fine if you are mainly going to use it at home but the 3G option only increases the price slightly and there are no monthly charges for the use of 3G where ever you are in the world… so it make sense. How does this work? Well they are obviously including something in the cost of the books to pay for the communications between yourself and Amazon I suspect.

So out of the box you have your Kindle and a USB lead, although this is only for charging the Kindle. I’ve also ordered a mains charger. In fact apart from charging the Kindle, you don’t actually need a PC to use the Kindle. Unlike say an iPod where you download files to the PC and then sync the PC and iPod, the Kindle talks directly to Amazon and files are sent over Wifi or 3G direct to the Kindle.

You can turn off the Wireless connection at any time and just use the device as a reader, this will save you some battery life of course but it claims a fairly long battery life anyway.

The display like other ereaders of this type is an eink type display, it flickers during page turning, and then displays a very clear page of text, you can move the Kindle around and there is no dimming of the display or loss of contrast. This type of display only consumes power when the display is changed from one page to another. So even when turned off it still displays the last page.

The display surface is a matt surface, so there are no reflections when you are viewing it in full sunlight and the display is fully readable in full sunlight too.

One disadvantage of course is this type of display can’t really cope with moving images. Also being black on white any photographs will be in a grey-scale but still recognisable. There is no back light, some of the cases you can buy include a light so you can read it in the dark, but a normal bedside light isn’t normally going to be a problem for most people. Try the Kindle without it first and see how you get on.

Amazon have built in some neat features, for instance if you are also using the Kindle App for your PC, Mac, iPhone, iPod Touch etc and you get to say page 10 before your eyes get heavy and you switch off for the night. When you say pick up your Kindle on the bus or train going to work the following day, if it has network connectivity it will go to the same page you left off at.

You can email your own content to the Kindle using an email address that you set up on your user page on the Amazon site. If the content is a PDF file then the file will be transferred more or less straight away to your Kindle. Amazon however do charge for this facility full details are on the Amazon site.

As an ebook reader I can’t fault it. To quote a well known phrase… ‘It does exactly what it says on the tin’ It’s slim, compact, easy to use, ideal for holidays when you might get through several books and with budget airline baggage restrictions it would be ideal as a travel companion.

So what else can it do…. This was the bit I was interested in! It has a good text display, a keyboard and a means to connect to the internet, it’s not expensive… so could it become a simple internet browser I wondered, well almost. If you click on Home and then tab down to Experimental you will find a Web Browser, and an MP3 player as well as Text to Speech. There is a pair of speakers on the back of the Kindle and also a headphone socket and microphone built in to it.

The web browser has been criticised in several reviews I’ve read for being difficult to navigate around. Well Amazon should have included some bookmarks to some ‘text only’ type sites rather than the fully blown normal sites. For instance instead of http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/ I’ve tried using the mobile site http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/mobile/ this reduces the graphics content and the layout is more suited to the Kindle display. There is a mouse cursor, but you have to use the navipad to navigate your way around a page. This when you first try it can be a little slow but it works. The keyboard is also a little slow but works fine for short messages.

It is possible that in future there will be other applications for the Kindle, ones that work within it’s constraints, which will be great to see. For insistence today I saw an announcement for Scrabble for Kindle.

As an ebook reader I don’t think you will be disappointed. If you think this however going to be as good as an iPad for stuff other than reading ebooks then I think you would be disappointed, but there is a huge difference in the price. To get started download the Kindle App for your computer or mobile device and take a look at the content that is available via the Kindle Store. If you like what you see then a Kindle might be just the thing for you.