One of the great things about going up town first thing in the morning to review the papers for Radio Humberside is that you can get some great pictures.
Just to the right of the centre of the frame you can see the BBC offices.
Hull centre Looking good.
Take a look at the original sized image on Flickr. And then reflect that I took this with a phone camera.
Say what you like about the snowy weather, it does make for some nice photo opportunities. Although it also means I’m presently wearing two pairs of socks, two jumpers and a bright red nose.
Some years ago we were helping dad move house. Having loaded up we headed onto the road. As we rounded our first corner we heard a horrible sliding noise from the contents of the van followed by an enormous crash. Tim, who was riding shotgun next to me, said “Ah well. You get the help you pay for”. Of course none of us were professional house movers, we were just helping dad out. And it turned out that the enormous crash was caused by a box of cutlery, so no harm was done. But the remark has stuck with me.
I was reminded of it when the terms and conditions for Instragram were changed recently, and people suddenly found that things they thought they owned (i.e. the pictures they had taken) were now ripe for exploitation by the company that was storing them. Instagram decided that they could use any of the pictures held on their servers for profit and advertising. There has been something of a backlash against this, and as a result some back tracking on the part of the company, but I think it has opened up a useful debate. Perhaps, as a result of it, paying for things will come back into fashion.
I’ve always been deeply suspicious of free services. For a start they can vanish or change at any moment, taking with them stuff that might be important to you. And of course, as the saying goes, if you are not paying for the service, you are the product. Facebook sells its ability to target you with custom ads. Google surrounds your Gmail inbox with links to “related services”. And if you ever search for anything (for example my quest for an oven) you will find yourself haunted by matching adverts in every web page you visit for a while.
If something is important to me I’ll pay for it. I put my pictures on Flickr and have done for ages. It costs me around 24 dollars a year to do this, but I can now complain to the site if they ever get lost, and Flickr don’t have to sell my photographs to stay in business.
Maybe in the long term the price of service provision will drop to the point where companies will be able to provide the service for a small fee, rather than have to hawk around personal data for profit. Flickr are obviously keen to cash in on this, and have just launched an offer of three months free hosting to try and tempt people away from “free” sites.
I took this picture with my Lumia 920, fiddled with it a bit and then posted it onto Flickr, all from the phone. Not bad eh?
I spent a reasonable sized chunk of today wrapping presents. I’m rubbish at this. Firebox used to have this “crap-wrap” service where they’d wrap something badly for you, to save you working at being awful. I could give them tips. My Auntie Julie once spent a while working in a store in York wrapping presents for customers. She got really good at it. You could always spot her presents because of the neat edges and perfect corners.
I notice that some wrapping paper you can buy has a grid printed on the back so that you can cut things squarely. Of course the stuff I got didn’t have that. However, after spending the morning sticking tape to myself and cutting things the wrong size I have learnt one thing from the whole experience:
“Always start wrapping the biggest thing first. Then, when it turns out that you have cut the paper too small for it, you can use the resulting piece to wrap the next one down in size”.
I’ve been playing with some of the Lens programs that you can get for Windows Phone 8. These application sit on the front of the camera application (a bit like a lens does I suppose) and do things with the image. The Face Lens program puts things onto the faces that it sees. The application is free, but you can buy extra bits and bobs to add to images. Above you can see what it does to the face of a well known local newsreader. Quite fun.
Cottingham has really good Christmas Lights. So tonight I took the big camera out for a walk and tried to capture them. Next time I’ll take the tripod too.
This is the middle of the village
And this is Santa.
Not a bad rainbow. Well worth stopping the car and jumping out with the camera.
Not much to say today, but we did get some nice pictures
Rob Miles is technology author and educator who spent many years as a lecturer in Computer Science at the University of Hull. He is also a Microsoft Developer Technologies MVP. He is into technology, teaching and photography. He is the author of the World Famous C# Yellow Book and almost as handsome as he thinks he is.
