I’m not sure why – I do really like monochrome images, and it’s an instant way to make almost any shot look more ‘arty’. Maybe that’s the problem: somehow it feels as if I’m hiding something – not capturing the beauty inherent in the world sufficiently well in colour, so I have to do something artificial – turn on the ‘arty’ switch to make it a bit more pretentious…

This is, of course, rubbish. Our eyes are more sensitive, in most ways, to brightness than they are to colour, and you could argue, therefore, that you are capturing the essence of a scene with fewer distractions if you do so in monochrome. It doesn’t bother me that I’m only capturing it in 2D. Why should I hesitate when it comes to discarding another dimension? Perhaps it’s really that I’m not very good at it! I wonder, though… If Ansel Adams and Henri Cartier-Bresson could have worked in accurate colour from the start, would they have done so? And would there then be such a strong tradition of black and white in art photography?

Now, from very early on, digital cameras have had various ‘modes’ into which you can switch them to get different effects. Serious photographers avoid these, preferring to capture as pure an image as possible and do any manipulation later ‘in post’, where you have a great deal more choice and control than you do on the camera. In particular, the option to take pictures in a ‘black and white’ mode seemed very silly to me from the moment it appeared on my very first digital camera. Why throw away data as soon as you take the photo, and deny yourself the chance of changing your mind and using colour?

My main current camera is a Lumix GH2, and I’ve been enjoying combining this bit of high-tech kit, via an adaptor, with the old 50mm Olympus Zuiko lens I had as a teenager. (It’s a nice side-benefit of the micro-four-thirds format that you can find adaptors for all sorts of lenses.) Anyway, this retro, all-manual operation set me thinking about such things again today, and I realised that something fundamental had changed since my first rejection of such frivolities as black-and-white mode…

I now shoot everything in RAW.

What this means is that all the data actually captured by the sensor is saved, regardless of any manipulations the camera may have been told to make at the time. So, I tried switching on the black and white mode for the first time, and found it quite an interesting experience, because the LCD viewfinder then shows you, as you’re composing the shot, roughly what your image would look like if you chose to keep it in black and white. This makes you look at the scene in a different way, think more about contrast than colour, without committing you to B&W as the final output. (Unlike the new Leica Monocchrome: for a little over £6000 you can get a camera that only shoots black and white.) It was a grey, overcast day today, so not very exciting lighting conditions, but I may experiment more with this in future.

It is also, I think, quite fun that only digital cameras can do this: only now can you get a preview, as you’re shooting, of the results you would have had to get before there was even colour film!

Internet giant Google has teamed up with the Daily Mail to develop a unique version of the online search engine which will confirm the enquirer’s prejudices.

Another nice spoof from Newsbiscuit.

My friend Aideen has been doing fun stuff with the TP-Link micro-routers.

These things are amazingly small – note the relative size of the USB socket – and very cheap.

She’s written it up in a nice blog post here.

Under the Vesari Corridor, Florence.

I like shutters. Why do we have so few of them in Britain?

These are on the Ponte Vecchio in Florence.

Today, there’s some more good news.

Towards the end of Ndiyo’s life we started to experiment with a model we called ‘Hubster‘ – the name coming from using a USB hub as the core of a thin-client terminal, something made possible once DisplayLink’s evolution of the Ndiyo technology allowed monitors, as well as keyboards and mice, to be connected over USB. The idea is to share the power, cost, and the carbon footprint of a PC between two or more users at once, simply by plugging in enough USB peripherals to give the extra users access to it. This is important for everybody, but especially for the poorer parts of the world where the cost of owning one PC per person is prohibitive.

Well, over the last few years, Bernie Thompson at Plugable.com in Seattle has been beavering quietly away to make this more of a reality, by providing DisplayLink-based terminals at reasonable prices and by maintaining the Open Source software to drive them. There are two bits of good news coming from his recent efforts:

• First, he’s been working with RedHat to get support for USB terminals built in to the standard distribution of Fedora 17. We’re getting very close now to the ideal situation where you can turn any Linux box into a multi-user box simply by plugging in enough components for a new user, and a new login prompt will appear when you do so. Imagine, say, a disaster-relief information centre where one person with a laptop connected to a satellite link can easily provide access for half a dozen members of the team just by plugging them in. And it’s all Open Source. Zero extra software cost per user.
• Secondly, in an attempt to get the cost of these terminals down and support ongoing development of the Open Source components, he’s launched a Kickstarter project called ‘The $50 Computer‘.

Some may, quite sensibly, ask how this compares to the RaspberryPi, which is, after all, even cheaper, and is a standalone machine. Well, this one comes with a box!

No, seriously, they are both excellent projects – I have a RaspberryPi on order, too – but they fill different roles. RaspberryPi, in the early years at least, will be about teaching people the basics of how computing works.
Bernie and the Plugable team are creating a system where providing fully-featured applications to multiple users at very low cost is something that a non-technical user can do simply by plugging in USB devices.

In some situations, perhaps in an internet cafe, you may just want to give extra users access to a Chrome browser. But with this system you also have the option of providing them with OpenOffice, with Scrivener, with Blender, with Corel Aftershot Pro, with Sublime Text, with Skype, with… well you get the idea! And, of course, with access to however many giga- or terabytes of storage you care to put in the PC.

I think the Kickstarter plan is a great one – I wish it had been around when we started Ndiyo.

Please support it if you can… Even if you don’t need more affordable computing devices, for your kids, your school, your internet cafe, your office, there are millions who do. Billions, in fact.

Every $10 we can shave off the cost of access to IT makes it accessible to many thousands of new people globally… and now you have a chance to help.

XYX has indicated you are a Friend:

Since you are a person I trust, I wanted to invite you to join my network on LinkedIn.

I guess he must just have a very positive view of mankind…

It reminds me of Zaphod Beeblebrox:

“Who are you?”

“A friend!” Shouted back the man. He ran toward Zaphod.

“Oh yeah?” said Zaphod. “Anyone’s friend in particular, or just generally well-disposed to people?”

Douglas Adams was a true visionary…

The Labour candidate’s leaflet is emphasising the number of ‘broken election promises’ from the Lib. Dems. If memory serves, they formed a coalition with a very different party and had few, if any, election pledges in common with them. And they had about one-third of the number of votes of the Tories. So, on a rather simplistic but purely statistical basis, we should expect them to have to break their election promises about three-quarters of the time, shouldn’t we, to be democratically fair?

As Churchill said, democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other ones which have been tried!

iThoughts HD

I’ve always had mixed feelings about mind-maps. They’re a great way to capture thoughts and to brainstorm, but a terrible way to communicate with others. The chief responsibility of somebody writing a paper or giving a talk, it seems to me, is to turn such a personal 2D ‘splat’ of ideas into a logically-ordered serial presentation that can be followed by others with different mental processes, and not just to serve up the splat in its unprocessed form.

Still, I do use them for my own notes, and a paper and pen has always been my medium of choice. I’ve tried several highly-regarded pieces of desktop software, but keyboards and mice just don’t seem right for doing this. iThoughts on the iPad is the first environment that feels pretty natural, especially if you use it with a stylus.

Instacast

I listen to lots of podcasts, every day, while shaving, driving, walking the dog. I always used the facilities built into the iPhone music player and iTunes, which aren’t bad, so I had never really thought about using a separate app for it. And then I tried Instacast and was an Instaconvert.

Scanner Pro

If you have a recent iPhone with a good camera, then Scanner Pro is a really useful thing to have in your pocket. In essence it’s a photo app designed for capturing documents, or parts of documents, and it makes it easy (a) to crop and de-warp the images so as to get something closer to a proper scan and (b) to capture more than one ‘page’ as a single document and then (c) to email that as a PDF to someone (or upload it to various services). While you’d never confuse the results with the output of a proper scanner, there are times when you might be browsing in a library or perusing a magazine and you don’t happen to have a flat-bed scanner in your pocket…

The dictionaries

OK, here’s where you might need to start spending some real money… but I’ve definitely found it worthwhile when travelling to have the Collins language dictionaries in my pocket. I’ve now bought the expensive versions of the German-English, French-English and Italian-English ones and, even though they’re amongst the most costly apps on my phone, have never regretted it. They cost about the same as a hardback equivalent, but are a lot easier to carry around and I find, surprisingly, that I can look things up more quickly in them than on paper.

Another wonderful treat is to have the Shorter OED on my phone, something which in dead-tree form is hard even to lift off my bookshelf! (The current edition comes in two large hardbacks of around 2000 pages each.) It’s fabulous for all those times when someone at the restaurant tables asks, “What is the origin of the word ‘poppycock’?”. Sadly, the iOS app has been discontinued, so if you haven’t already got it, you’re out of luck, but there are a lot of lesser-but-much-cheaper options available, including Chambers.

Yes, you can often find good stuff on web, but not as quickly, especially if the restaurant table is in a basement. And if it’s in a foreign basement, then looking stuff up online may be rather expensive too.

Vous êtes hereux de me voir, ou vous avez une bibliothèque dans votre poche?…

and refined…

Don’t let the guy with the broom decide how many elephants should be in the parade.

(Because he has a very limited idea of what an elephant means)

Later in the podcast he had another good quote:

You can judge a person’s power, anywhere in the world, but particularly in an organisation, not based on what they say no to, but what they have the power to say yes to.

All the best,
Quentin

which appears when I type ‘atb’ and hit space. There are many much more complex things you can do with TextExpander, which is good, because it’s a little pricey for a small utility, but in the end I realised that 35 bucks wasn’t too much for something I use dozens of times every single day.

But typing efficiency is even more important when you have a sub-optimal keyboard, like the iPhone or iPad’s. One of my favourite tips is that you can get an apostrophe or quote mark by pressing the comma or full-stop key briefly and sliding upwards; there’s no need to switch into punctuation mode. (I wrote about this before once, but I think it must have been on Twitter or Facebook, which means I can’t find it now. Note to self: always keep useful stuff on blog.)

Anyway, one of the recent iOS updates added a very handy but somewhat hidden keystroke-expansion feature, and I’ve realised that I’m using that all the time too.

Under Settings > General > Keyboard you can create shortcuts, which will let you do something similar to my ‘All the best’ trick, and can be very handy if you have a silly long name like mine: ‘qqsf’ expands into ‘Quentin Stafford-Fraser’, complete with capitals and punctuation.

But the thing I’ve found most useful is to have abbreviations for my main email addresses, since an increasing number of sites use them as login usernames. I find I’m always having to type, say, ‘quentin@mycompany.com’ on my little iPhone keyboard, and it was a real pain until I replaced it with ‘qmc’ and a space.

One small note: if you use it this particular way, there are some sites that get confused if you leave the space on the end. So I actually tend to type ‘qmc<space><backspace>’, but that’s still a great deal easier than the whole address.

Various friends have been asking just what ‘back to work’ entails for me at present, since my situation has been decidedly vague for a while. So here’s a quick personal update for those interested…

After leaving Camvine in the autumn, I had a bit of a break, and then started a new company, Telemarq Ltd. (Hans Rosling once told me that he had worked out my model: whenever I run out of money, I start a new company! That’s not the intention, but it does sometimes look like that…)

Telemarq was initially formed as a vehicle for the exploration of a new invention. I think I have a good and viable idea, but I don’t have the resources to get it very far on my own (and I haven’t yet filed the patent, which is why I’m not broadcasting the details!)

Anyway, as I was debating whether to go out looking for investors for another startup, I was approached by several different companies who wanted some consultancy work, and I thought they would all would be rather interesting/enjoyable clients. Besides which, my bank account had dwindled to a level where it needed some topping-up!

So, for the moment, Telemarq is a consultancy business through which Rose and I do our work (which means it already has a rather broad remit, since our fields are very different). I’m delighted that Richard Morrison is going to be working part-time under the Telemarq banner too, since he’s one of the nicest and smartest chaps I’ve run into in a long time.

A big part of Telemarq will be software development, but there’s some teaching, some publishing, some intellectual property stuff in the mix already, and we’re only just starting.

May need some more people soon, or some more days in the week…!

To the extent I’ve formulated a coherent plan, it’s this:

To do really good work, on interesting projects, for, and with, people we like.

Not exactly a conventional business mission statement, but I’ve seen a lot worse. It’ll do as a placeholder!