winter tyre time

No, it's not my car, nor my wheels, but it was close to where I was sitting and waiting.

I've had the wheels swapped over to winter mode now.

I can tell the difference easily enough because the summer wheels have six spokes and the winter ones have five. My summer wheels and tyres go on holiday now, down to the seaside at Poole and will return again in the Spring.

When I lived in mainland Europe it was quite common to do this and in some places it was the law. I think it is still relatively uncommon in the UK.

I wonder if there will be a frost?

another wall

It's not that I've run out of ideas, so much that I've run out of time over the last few days to produce blog posts. So here's another wall. This one is something of a self portrait, although its somewhat difficult to discern.

Oddly enough, I quite like this, with a mix of wall, shadow, light from outdoors and some interesting textures.

orange moment

A few plans were changed at the weekend as a result of late breaking news.

Instead of a regular update, here's a picture of the still 'under development' wall in the music room at rashbre central.

It has to be orange, of course, although this picture features diamond shapes instead of the more typical triangles.

splutter

Fireworks this evening, after a day fuelled by Lemsip.

ye olde Fuji X100 gets version 2.01

A couple of days ago I mentioned twisty dial cameras and made a short reference to the Fuji X100. The Fuji uses analogue style dials and I've had one pretty much since it was launched.

It's about three years old now and has been superseded, but a couple of weeks ago a new firmware update was released by Fuji (V2.01).

I have to say, I was quite impressed.

The major niggle with the older version was a sometimes sluggish focus, particularly when in manual mode. There were ways around it, but it illustrates how software can still get in the way even on something ostensibly analogue.

This update provides a real boost to the camera, improving startup, focus speed, focus short distance range and adding a new and useful highlight function.

It is slightly intriguing that Fuji provided this level of change on what is clearly a superseded model.

My guess is that people with 'Classic' X100 wouldn't switch to the updated X100s, so this provides a decent level of comparable functionality and keeps people saying nice things about the brand.

Perhaps it's regarded as a simple engineering update, but it's a bit like getting a new camera.

will the impulse engines hold?

I published a chart on here a few days ago about the UK energy gap. Co-incidentally, the wider discussion has turned up in the news now, along the lines of whether the UK's impulse engines will hold through the winter.

There's a fancy report produced every year by UK National Statistics for the Department of Energy and Climate Change which covers the main UK Energy sources. I've pasted a couple of quick extracts from 2013.

Alongside the actual production of energy, there are various levels of inefficiencies in the subsequent transmission and distribution. I know some of this is down to physics, like power lines sag more when they are heavily loaded (because they heat up).

There's still some interesting stats though.

In the UK, the DECC charts show that for electricity, the distribution and transmission losses appear to be bigger than the actual power output available. You have to read the chart from left to right. What goes in, and what comes out...

I may be reading this wrongly, but it looks as if that 567.5TWh transmission and distribution losses is bigger than the circa 350TWh of available power?

That powerline sag and related distribution loses 5-6% of electricity. The DECC diagram seems to suggest rather more is disappearing.

Hold that thought and I'll add in the specifics of the renewables power feed. It currently looks as if its own complicated conversion processes are also rather inefficient.

I know its measured in different units (ttoe), but it also seems to show big losses.

Of course, it's great that more renewable forms are being identified, with biomass being more than 70% of the current renewables, wind about 20% and hydro about 5%. The target is to get to 15% of all power from renewables by 2020.

I'm kind of wondering how this will play out in the upcoming debates. And whether I need to buy some candles. Although, wait, they are energy inefficient too.

is a tweet like two punched cards?

I know there's actually 80 columns to an old IBM punched card, but I somehow think of a maximum tweet being like two punched cards.

On the old punched cards, columns 73-80 were for sequencing and 72 was reserved to signal that a continuation card followed. So pragmatically 70 characters per card, or half a tweet.

So I've always sort of thought that twitter has harnessed a short messaging platform for chatter using a maximum message length of two IBM cards.

So if we treat Twitter as an I.T Company, somehow it's single idea and its ramifications is today valuing the IPO capitalisation of twitter at around $30bn.

That's between a quarter and a third of the total market capitalisation of IBM ($117bn).

Or if we treat Twitter as an advertising and media organisation, its market capitalisation is about double that of BSKYB ($14bn).

Hashtag 140 character big business? Hashtag traderorinvestor?

Almost Wordless Wednesday and posted late

Trying to get out of the woods with this NaBloPoMo by back posting Wednesday.

That makes me up-to-date.

twisty dial cameras

An intriguing development on the photographic scene in the very month when I've decided (just experimentally) to take most of my photos using an iPhone.

Yes, Nikon have just introduced a new digital camera that looks very much like...an old film camera.

This Df unit looks very much like a last century Nikon Fx film camera, albeit with some fancy electronics inside. It will be interesting to see how this gets reviewed against the rest of the DSLR cameras, seeing how comprehensively it breaks the normal DSLR mould.

I've wondered whether digital cameras could get away from complicated layered menus and back to simpler twisty dials. This seems to be a reasonable attempt to do just that. I've only seen pictures of this Df and I've a feeling that it might be lighter in the hand than expected and also missing things like split screen focus.

It's also rather expensive in its current guise, apparently costing more than Nikon's fancy D800. It also seems to come with a new 'retro lens' as the only option - albeit one without an aperture ring, which I find somewhat curious. Something of a half-way house.

Whether it is the start of a new camera line, or the end of proper mirrors in the next generation of conventional Nikon DSLRs remains to be seen.

It will also be interesting to see whether, in design terms, the old-school look really does stand up in the 21st century or if its simply a market testing experiment. I'm wondering if the next 2014-ish conventional Nikon DSLRs will start to use the dials again too?

Nikon's recent raft of announcements somehow reminds me of London buses, where there can be a long gap and then a whole load come along in one go.

Of course, it's not the first camera to go along this analogue look route; my Fuji X100 does it as a kind of 'alternative to rangefinder' camera, admittedly with some early teething troubles that took a while to fix.

My little Olympus OM-D is another camera that has taken the more twisty dials route, seen here with a few of its old-timer friends.

mashed potatoes and ailurophiles

Interesting recent developments have been the return of a couple of bloggers to the scene.

Well, one didn't really disappear, but I didn't have access for a while. That's Doris Mash.

As Doris says, Life is a bowl of mashed potato: Sometimes lumpy; sometimes smooth and creamy; and sometimes it has interesting bits in it!

And then there's Shephard Summers who took some time out to remodel the blog and returned in a blaze of new colour and style.

As Shephard says: Writer, world-traveler, foodie, music-junkie, magpie, theatre geek and ailurophile. I make my own sunshine.

Welcome back to this blog's reading list.

nano nano und Mork vom Ork

As this is a back-post, I thought a suitably retro picture would be good.

Thanks to Hannah Curious the Transatlantid I've been reminded of NaBloPoMo - which is National (sic) Blog Posting Month. I've used November a few times to take a run at various pieces of novel writing, but this year decided to give it a miss.

Yes, NaNoWriMo - National Novel Writing Month - will have to wait for another year. I'd rather spend time on sorting out the various pieces I've partly completed than start yet another one. There's The Square, The Circle and Pulse all waiting in the wings for further attention. That's surely enough?

So this time I'm going to try to do the one blog post per day in November thing. To be honest, this used to be easy, but I'm aware that my 'ten minutes a day with one photo' rule about blogging sometimes breaks down.

And yes, I know it's 'nanu-nanu' in Mork & Mindy.

dancing with the moonlit knight?

I get some of those emails from political parties most weekends. I think they mail out on Saturday expecting they have a better chance of being read. Recently they feature the countdown clock for the next election. 550 days according to the Labour Party.

Enough time for the government to sell off a few more UK assets, I suppose. We've been watching Britain's remaining industries and services drift into offshore ownership.

"Selling England by the pound" may have been coined around 40 years ago, but by now it's largely 'job done'.

The privatised world created an array of new feeding troughs for the privileged. The accompanying outsourced world created offshore opportunities by removing in-country wage packets.

Emerging companies were sold and re-sold so that BA is now Spanish, London's Arriva bus services are German, the original BT cellular network became O2 which is now Telefonica, four of the Big 6 energy providers are German, French and Spanish.

Of course, globalisation brought the service sector to prominence in the UK, with London as a financial feeding centre.

With this early countdown to the next UK general election, there's already much jostling for position, as well as chatter about the futility or otherwise of voting. An ancient lyric from the Who springs to mind: 'Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.'

The catalogue of curious situations continues to develop:

• Privatising part of the Royal Mail in a way that gave the banks advising the pricing both plenty of shares and an opportunity to sell them earlier than regular punters. Ker-ching.
• Apparently allowing the largest shareholder in the new Royal Mail to be a Cayman Island based hedge fund. Surely no spivs?
• Hiding black holes of lost money in pension funds, ultimately creating smaller incomes for those that have saved.
• Paying off cavalier captains of industry who generally escape with low reputation but lottery winner sized handouts.
• Allowing a 3rd generation EPR nuclear build to strike energy pricing at around double current rates (£48 vs £92.50). Then index linking it and making it contingent upon the UK taking a second plant somewhere else. Over a barrel perhaps?
• Watching the energy companies add 10% to their consumer bills, whilst trousering profits so large that an ex Prime Minister even comments about it across his own party.
• Running the quietly understated UK Asset Resolution bad bank (Britain's 5th largest mortgage lender with some £66bn of loans), but now adding another £38bn of bad bank assets instead into a sub component of RBS.

A bit of an energy gap?

I'm sure there's plenty more examples; I picked finance and energy as starters. We could easily add education and healthcare to the list. No, wait a minute, that's what the politicians are planning.

The thing is, unlike the Who lyrics, we will get fooled again.