On Saturday I went for a walk from Fairholmes near Ladybower Reservoir to Alport Castles with some members of the Nottingham Flickr Group. It was pretty wet in the morning - this photo was taken just before lunch when we reached Alport Castles and despite my efforts to keep the lens free of water, I was losing the battle, so this is the result - big blurred spots where the water droplets landed.

On the plus side, it more accurately reflects the conditions!

The day was much harder work for me than normal due to the fact that I had forgotten my walking boots. The footwear I wear most of the rest of the time would have to do - they were classed as walking shoes - and while they are very comfortable for day to day use, the level of grip is tiny compared to good walking boots. As a consequence, the section of the walk that descended down the wet grass from Alport Castles to the valley bellow required a lot more effort and concentration. I’m determined never to forget them again!

More photos from me and the rest of the group here.

Both of them were big fans of having their noses stroked and showed no signs of getting bored with it - so when we left they would just have to wait for the next set of people to come along and fuss over them.

Anyway, the rest of this post is a list of some stuff that I’ve either enjoyed or found useful that I thought I’d share. It’s a right mix of stuff:

It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia

The series continues to make me laugh. Now in it’s fourth season. The main characters are all self serving and amoral and Danny DeVito is just great.

They really need to get some UK DVD’s released though.

More info at FX.

Fringe

Fringe is a TV show with hints of The X Files. In the screenshot above, some of the main characters are enjoying some food and Spongebob Squarepants on TV. The cow is called Gene. One of my favourite moments, other than the one pictured above, saw them driving across town chasing some homing pigeons that had been tuned to home in on somebody’s magnetic field. Thankfully a lot of it isn’t silly, but it’s a nice balanced mix.

World of Goo

This is just a lovely game. Very simple - get a lot of goo balls to the exit. More at 2dboy.com.

Evernote

Evernote is a great application/service. It stores notes and lets you search them. There are plenty of things that do this already, but over the years, everthing I’ve tried has just been lacking. Evernote is very good at it’s job and in all the time I have been using it, the speed of development and improvement has been quite impressive too.

I use evernote to store notes about anything and everything. I can drag PDF documents in to it, clip a section of a web page, send it a photo or recording from my mobile phone and it all goes in to the searchable pot. The windows client I use synchronises with the web so that I can get to my notes from anywhere. There is a mobile client for some mobile phone times but also a mobile version of the site for other mobile users.

There are lots of nice things about this. For example, if I take a photo of something I want to remember on my phone and send it to Evernote, when I’m searching for it later, it will recognise words inside the photos too. This means, for example, that if you snap a photo of a business card, you’ll be able to search for the person’s name or company and find the details. It’s not just nicely typed text it recognises either, it has a really good success rate with hand written stuff.

For me, it’s great for technical bits and bobs that I always used to end up searching for time after time. I also use it to store quite a large library or walking routes in PDF format. The has multiple advantages over my previous method of storing them - just in a folder on my computer with filenames that tried to explain what the walk was about.

Now that they’re inside Evernote, I can browse them visually with full previews of the map and route, I can search for phrases that are within the route description and place names too. So if I fancy a walk that takes in the village of Longnor, I can search for that and find some.

It also means that all of this stuff is backed up away from my computer in case disaster ever hits it.

Evernote has become invaluable to me. More at evernote.com.

I was very much enjoying the walk and the chat and didn’t actually take many photos at all. Luckily, the other 9 people took plenty of nice ones. There were a lot more cows than there had been when I’d done this route before - and other members of the group took some great pictures of them - parcicularly Jon’s photo which comes up first in this slideshow of event photos ordred with the most interesting photos first.

You can browse the photos if you don’t like slideshows: Tagged photos from the walk on Flickr.

So, the last audio book I wanted to listen to - I got on CD from Ebay and ripped which is slow (waiting for a parcel) - I’d have quite happily paid for it in MP3 format from a shop if that were possible.

These days, a lot of music is available in MP3 format legitimately, but considering a lot of the costs have disappeared, a lot of the shops seem to be over priced to me. However, it is the format that is most useful to me, and it is much cheaper that compact discs were at the height of the record industries taking the piss period when you’d need the best part of £20 in HMV for a single disc.

As far as I’m aware, there isn’t a way to legitimately buy DRM free films in the UK at the moment. You can buy films in digital format from iTunes, but they’re crippled with DRM. If I buy a film from iTunes, it’s tied to iTunes or one of those Apple TV boxes. I can’t for example watch it using Windows Media Centre. It’s a sad state of affairs that there aren’t any legitimate ways to buy films and watch them using a Windows Media Centre other than buying a DVD and sticking it in to watch! - Thank god for technology! You can rent short term DRM films, but buying is a no-no.

All of this is crap frankly and means that doing things the illegal way is far easier than trying to do it legally. The reason illegal music sharing became so popular in the first place was because it was made so difficult to get music legitimately. The same is true of films now.

Magazines are another area where DRM ruins the experience. I had an article published in a camera magazine some time ago, and I noticed that the magazine was for sale from Zinio. Zinio distribute magazines digitally, so in theory, when a new magazine in your subscription becomes available, you get notified, it downloads and you can read it.

In practice this is another DRM crippled file that you can do next to nothing with. Their DRM kept breaking and their support pages on their web site tells you to go wandering in the file system to delete files and uninstall their software before installing it again. This works but when it goes wrong, it’s a pain to go through these steps to get the DRM working again. This has happened several times during the year long subscription. That experience means I won’t use them again.

What’s wrong with using a PDF file that can be indexed by desktop indexing so it’s easy to find articles within the magazines. The Zinio distribution method has no advantages over the paper version. Indeed,  the magazine I subscribed to was often available in the shops before my digital copy arrived. Because of the DRM, it wasn’t going to be use-able anywhere but on the computer it was locked to.

So, in summary, all of this DRM crap makes using modern technology a pain in the arse to use. You pay for crippled services that drive you mad and drive people to doing things the illegal way because it’s more convenient and doesn’t put you at risk of your purchases becomming unusable later.

Rufus, what on earth do you keep doing to those tags?

Sunbathing

On Friday I went to West Midlands Safari Park. I had a few very enjoyable hours there and took a number of photos. As well as the few posted here, there is a set on Flickr. Lots of the animals were very aware that passing cards are a source of food and would move from window to window to see what was forthcoming. The photo at the top shows one such animal - these window visits provide an opportunity to take a photo - but no food, and they’re off as soon as they realise.

Some of sections require the car windows to be wound up - this was also recommended around the camels, but i didn’t realise that until afterwards. A camel did lean in towards me when my car window was open, providing me with this odd photo:

Note to self: Wind window back up when camel approaches to prevent french kiss attempt

A number of animals I have photographed have at various times either steamed up my fisheye lens or licked it - the camel is the first one that I think would have actually eaten in - and without too much of a problem too! Having said that, it was friendly enough and and after a few experimental sniffs here and there, it realised food wasn’t forthcoming and disappeared off.

I think of all the animals, the camel and the deer were my favourites - mainly due to their inquisitive nature - even if it was fuelled by food lust.

This final shot is of a Giraffe leaning in to shot - you can just see it on the edge of the frame ;)

I’ll just lean in to shot - can you see me? Yes - yes I can.

The Phantom Raspberry Blower of Braymor Dairy

Curiosity

After the Sheep Fair in Masham, we stopped off at Braymor Dairy - and right next to the ice cream shop is the cow shed. All of the adults were out in the fields, but the young ones remained indoors and seemed very happy for a bit of attention and fussing over.

The calf pictured above was in the best spot for getting attention - right in the corner near the door where people walked in. It’s handy that cows seem to love cameras - I had to clean mine up again after it got licked - but that curiousity also meant that in the two shots above, the cows were really trying to get the camera which I was holding a little further down the wall.

A day at the sheep races

I went to Masham on Sunday. It was the second day of their Sheep Fair. I had heard from a friend that there was sheep racing which was the thing that really piqued my interest! The day was great though, and not just because of the sheep racing. There were sheep everywhere, I learnt a lot about sheep and saw a number of them whist airborne travelling at impressive speed in the hurdle races - they really can move - especially when encouraged by food!

It was quite difficult to get a shot of them during the races due to the combination of the sheer number of racing fans picking the best spots and the speed with which these babies thundered past. I don’t know what kind of food they had to tempt them to the finish line, but whatever it was, they really wanted it!

Wooly jumper

The sport of kings

The circle closes on the imposter

Over Stepped

It’s behind you

The next photo was at the Think Tank. I took a number of photos there, but this is my favourite, and it’s just the back of a notice board - I liked the patterns in the dirty metal plates.

Finally, I couldn’t really leave this post without adding a photo like this could I! …

The Bull Ring’s Protector

Photos taken by visitors to the Dustboat Geocache

For those unfamilar with what this is, a single use camera is placed in a geocache and visitors take a photo when they find it. Periodically, when a visitors lets me know that the camera is full, I walk up there and collect it, get it developed and post the photos.

This new set is black and white, and the camera that is currently sat inside the cache is black and white too. I think when that one needs replacing, it ought to be swapped for a colour one, just for a change!

Related: Dustboat Geocache (http://www.geocaching.com/seek/cache_details.aspx?guid=bf98868d-f621-452c-b622-5a713e87336c)