Hypercard
As a man obsessed with order, data and lists I’ve always had a softspot for databases. Right from the early days using an Apple Mac one of my favourite things to do was create HyperCard stacks and little apps within Hypercard for all sorts of things. I used to make my own financial recording stacks, exercise training stacks, databases of my books and music and so on. None of it was particularly good but it worked and served a need.
Filemaker Pro
Of course, HyperCard didn’t last long and I soon moved onto FileMaker Pro. Once again, I put it to similar uses and created some nice relational databases for things I needed (wanted) to keep track of.
More recently if I needed a database I was more likely to develop a quick online one using a MySQL database and PHP, and to be honest as my “Simple Life of Luxury’ has developed I’ve had less time for cataloging things I didn’t really need to catalogue and haven’t been using databases at home.
Bespoke Apps
I hadn’t used a database application such as FileMaker Pro for a few years. In most cases if I wanted to keep track of certain things such as my bike rides or my finances I would use a bespoke application – Ascent for my bike rides and other exercise, Moneywell for my personal finances. In most cases these bespoke applications are much better and have features that wouldn’t be possible with a database.
However, with the moth season approaching I wanted a way of recording my moth counts and having heard good things about Bento I needed an excuse to satisfy my need for a database! There are bespoke biological recording applications out there such as MapMate, but nothing for a Mac so I decided to give Bento a go and build my own.
Bento
Moth Trapping Record
Bento is built by the makers of Filemaker Pro but at £29.95 is much more affordable. It isn’t a cut down version of Filemaker Pro, rather it is a completely different product with a very user-friendly approach to database design.
I downloaded the trial on Saturday and had a go at building a database without reading any of the manual! The look and feel of Bento is very Mac-like and the interface resembles that of iTunes. There is a pane to the left of the window which contains your various libraries (tables), a smaller pane below this which lists the fields (columns) used in any library and the main screen which contains the records (rows). The records can be displayed as individual cards or as a list.
Adding new fields and arranging them within a record card (form) is easy and just a case of selecting the field options and dragging the field to where you want it. I was up and running with a basic database of moths in no time.
Relationships
The next thing to try was creating some relationships. Now Bento isn’t a fully-fledged powerful relational database application. It isn’t trying to be, but it is trying to be a useful database application for personal use. I wanted to have one library that contained records of the moth species, with descriptions and photos of that moth, along with another library that contained records of the moths I collect in my trap. Of course I wanted to join these together so that any recording of a particular species in my trap was linked to the description ot the moth species.
Moth Species Record
I did have to resort to the manual a little here, but once I knew how to do it this was simple. First I created the moth species library with its various fields. Then I created a moth trapping library with its relevant fields. Linking the two was then just a matter of dragging the Moth Species library onto a form within the moth trapping library. This has the effect of creating a ‘related data’ field in the trapping form that allows me to select a record from the Moth species library. You can choose which fields from the related library are shown in this related data field.
Now, when I enter a new record to the trapping library, I enter the various details such as date, species, and the number trapped and also click in the related data field and select the relevant species from the Moth Species library. This is OK, but not actually that useful. I therefore created a relationship in the opposite direction. This time dragging the moth trapping library onto the Moth Species form. I displayed this related data field as a list showing the date and quantity of moths trapped from the trapping database. This is quite useful. Now when I look up the details of any particular moth species I can also see the days that I have seen these in the trap and in what quantities.
Of course as these records are now related, changing anything in one is reflected in the other.
OK, using such a database to keep track of simple moth records isn’t groundbreaking but it was a fun way to get to grips with Bento and as far as database applications go I have to say I’m impressed.
iApp Integration
Probably the most important aspect of Bento of most home users will be the seemless integration it has with Apples iApps. The libraries pane by default contains special libraries that link to Address Book, iCal and iPhoto meaning that databases for each of these apps are automatically created for you.
You can therefore add more information to records within these apps, contacts, calendar events and photos, or integrate them into libraries of your own. It is all very slick and I’m sure I’ll find a use for it soon.
Compatibility
Import Dialogue Box
The ease of use is continued through to exporting and importing of data too. Importing data from a Numbers of Excel spreadsheet is ridiculously easy. Just drag the spreadsheet file onto the libraries pane. Bento analyses the data and up pops a diaolgue box showing you that it is going to create a new library based on the data in the spreadsheet. Bento works out that the first record in the spreadsheet contains column names so it uses these as field names in the library and then it allows you to check through the records to make sure it has everything correct. Click on the import button and Bento creates a completely new library for you containing all of the data in your spreadsheet. It couldn’t be easier.
Exporting to Excel or CSV format is just as easy meaning that Bento should be compatible with a range of other applications.
Looks
In addition to the Mac look and feel, you can customise the various forms you create in Bento using various themes that come pre-loaded. You don’t have complete control over all aspects of the form design and I found what you could do was a little limiting. You can’t change fonts for a start and there are only 5 font-sizes that you can choose from. This does of course simplify things and I guess databases are meant for storing and analysing data, not looking pretty, but a little more control would be nice. I for one don’t like the fact that I can’t make the scientific names of my moths display italicised.
Making changes to the look and layout of a form is really easy and there is enough flexibility for most users. I’d like to be able to lock the form layout though so that it couldn’t be changed. I would then be able to use it in simple data-entry and retrieval mode without the ability to accidentally edit the form. When sharing a database with others the database is ‘locked’ in this fashion meaning that users viewing your shared database can’t create or delete fields or make changes to form layouts, but they can edit, add and delete data.
Overall Bento is easy to use, works well and would suit the needs of most personal users needed a database application. I just need to find a few more uses for it now, but I think it is well worth £29.95.
As mentioned the other day, we had a Nintendo Wii for Christmas. As well as enjoying the games we’ve been using its other features too. Anna got to try out the BBC iPlayer feature last night. We’d played with this functionality before but hadn’t used it properly.
BBC iPlayer interface
Adding BBC iPlayer as a channel on the Wii was easy. Simply go to the Wii’s only shop and download it for free. It then appears as BBC iPlayer within a channel on the main Wii menu. Click on that and you enter the world of BBC iPlayer. Here you can browse through all of the BBC titles available via iPlayer either by date, genre or most popular. There is a also a search tool and access to radio stations. The BBC also provide a parental control feature for use on the Wii should you need it.
Its worth noting that this is a relatively new service as the BBC only launched a dedicated Wii Player in November. Many previous reviews of BBC iPlayer on the Nintendo Wii were written before this was launched when there was a £3.50 charge for signing up to the service and the quality wasn’t great.
For us, the new dedicated iPlayer for the Wii is great. Navigating through the programmes on offer is easy and the quality is amazing. Older reviews complain about the quality being terrible and compare it to ‘YouTube’ when seen on a large screen. On our fairly large TV it is great and no different to watching it on ‘real’ TV. Once it is playing it fills the whole screen and you wouldn’t know you were watching it on BBC iPlayer.
Apparently the quality is better than it was. The older one used video encoded at 500kbps, but thie Wii channel uses a bit rate of 820kbps to keep the quality high for use on larger screens. This does mean that a broadband line capable of sustaining 1Mbps speeds for the length of the streamed show is needed. If your broadband connection isn’t capable of this then there will be occasional buffering issues.
Unfortunately for us, living out here on the fringes of West Wales our internet connection isn’t that great. I know 1Mbps isn’t fast these days, but our connection is only around 900kbps so we did experience some buffering. It wasn’t too bad and Anna did manage to watch a whole episode of Holby City with only an occasional pause while it rebuffered. Because of this I don’t think we’ll be using it all the time, only when we’ve missed something we particularly wanted to watch, but it is definitely usable.
Another issue people have experienced is the fact that the stream doesn’t include any subtitles. Not an issue for us unless its really windy outside and we can’t hear the TV but it would be for people who need them. Apparently there are various technical reasons for this so they may appear in a future version of the Wii iPlayer. The buffering issues mentioned above are also likely to be more of an issue on the Wii than other consoles simply because the Wii doesn’t have a hard drive so it has nowhere to store large amnounts of buffered data.
Frequent use will of course use up quite a bit of your monthly Broadband bandwidth as well, but having seen the quality and the ease of use, it isn’t going to be long before all of our media is delivered in such a way allowing us to pick and choose exactly what we watch and when we watch it. I wonder if I can speed up my Broadband connection?
Overall, it is very impressive and certainly better than using the PC to catch up with programmes on BBC iPlayer.
It’s not often that I do ‘book reviews’ here, but last Christmas I bought Anna what was then the latest of Jamie Oliver’s books, ‘Ministry of Food‘. Anna wasn’t sure if she wanted it as the TV series that accompanied the book was all about getting people who had never cooked before to start cooking. Some of them didn’t even now how to boil a pan of water, so seeing as we do normally cook, we thought it might all be a little too simplistic. I bought it anyway despite these fears.
I’m glad I did, as it is actually a book full of recipes that we cook all of the time. We don’t follow them to the letter, but the general idea is there and the results are delicious.
The recipes that we cook regularly include ‘Good Old Chilli Con Carne’, many of the curries, especially the Korma and Rogan Josh (although we thoroughly combine and adjust these to suit our needs!), Creamy bacon and pea pasta, Fajitas, Black Bean stir fry and last might we tried the Moroccan Lamb with couscous.
One thing I will say about the recipes in ‘Ministry of Food‘ is that they don’t seem to have much in the way of vegetables in them. Certianly not as many as I would normally add to such dishes. Maybe this was deliberate in an attempt to make the recipes as simple as possible for newbies, but we always end up adding extra.
I usually add some potatoes to the curries, and carrots to almost every dish. Yesterdays dish, the Morrocan Lamb was supposed to have dried apricots in it, but we didn’t have any so instead I adding some carrots and red pepper. Not quite true to the dish, but delicious all the same.
As a recipe book to give you some ideas and the basics of some tasty meals then its perfect and we use it all the time.
I just hope that his next book ‘Jamie’s America‘ is just as good. (And my stomach agrees!)
I haven’t had it long so this isn’t a full review, but my new digital camera arrived the other day so here are my first impressions.
After some deliberation over which waterproof digital camera to get I chose a Pentax Optio W60 as a second, go anywhere camera to compliment my Canon EOS 450D SLR camera. It looks nice, its just the right size to slip into your pocket, but isn’t so small that it is difficult to handle and the buttons become too fiddly. It doesn’t look waterproof which is nice, the styling is just like that of any other compact digital camera, and although I haven’t tested its waterproof capabilities yet, it is supposed to be fully waterproof. I shall be out snorkelling with it if its nice at the weekend.
The LCD on the back is large and bright and easy to view, even in bright sunlight and the operation is simple. As a man I played around with it before reading the manual and managed to work out all of the options and settings without having to revert to the manual once. I did subsequently read the manual and find a few little features that I had overlooked, but nothing major.
Photo quality is good too. It does suffer from a fair bit of noise at high ISO, but so do most cameras and it tends to up the ISO quite quickly in low light when in automatic modes, but this could be over-ridden if needed. I shall have to investigate the best modes to use for keeping the sensitivity low and adjusting the shutter speed / aperture first. Talking of modes, it has loads of them! All the normal presets modes such as full auto, program, portrait, sports, night are available and a host of others such as underwater, pets (you even have to tell it the colour of your pet!), food and text! It also has a built in panoramic mode that allows you to take three photos and the it stitches them together for you within the camera. I’ve tried this out and it seems to work pretty well and saves time in Photoshop later.
Panoramic photo stitched in camera
It also has face recognition, smile capture and blink detection. All of which are very clever, although once again I only played with these and haven’t used them in earnest yet. Other things to play with will be the high speed continuous shooting and the time lapse photography feature. It does of course record video as well.
So far so good, I don’t have anything bad to say about it. As a 2nd camera to compliment my SLR then it is ideal. Small, rugged and versatile, just what you need from a camera that can go everywhere with you and with a little bit of experimentation it will produce high quality images as well.
Commencal Meta 5.5.1
Before I start I should point out that I’m an enthusiastic amateur so this is by no means a professional test or review. Also, this is my first full-suspension mountain bike so I’m not making comparisons to any other models here.
My previous mountain bike was a hardtail, a Specialized Rockhopper, so I will be making a few comparisons with this and telling you about the transition from hardtail to full-suspension.
It took me a while to decide which new mountain bike to get. As always, I was after the holy grail that doesn’t exist of a well-specced, light-weight, do it all machine that wasn’t far too expensive. Rather than repeat my decision making process here, you can read my blog-post about which full-suspension mountain bike to get. I had planned on having some fun testing as many different bikes as possible but in the end a bargain came along that was too good to miss so I ended up with a Commencal Meta 5.5.1
Specs-wise it was perfect, SRAM X-0 rear derailleur, SRAM x-9 shifters, Race Face cranks and BB, some nice finishing kit, Formula ORO K24 brakes and Fox TALAS forks. The rear tyre was a Maxxis Larsen TT which wasn’t much good in the mud and dampness of Wales so I changed that for a Continental Mountain King and went Ghetto Tubeless at the same time. The front tyre was a Maxxis High Roller which I have left. I will convert this to the Ghetto Tubless system soon as well.
5.5 inches of front and rear travel was perfect for the trail riding and longer XC rides that I do. The overall weight (quoted by Commencal at 27.9lbs) was OK. Although a little lighter would of course have been nice I’d probably have to sacrifice on build quality and durability a little to get this, or spend a lot more money. It certainly doesn’t feel heavy and it looks and feels as though it is built to last.
So, how does it ride? I’ve now had a few rides on it and love it. With the pro-pedal on there is no obvious pedal bob when climbing fire roads. Climbing however doesn’t feel quite as easy (if it was ever easy!) as on the hardtail. I think there are a number of possible reasons for this, the first and probably most significant is that the rear hub may be a little too tight and doesn’t spin as easily as it could do. This should be easy to adjust though and if I get time I shall tinker with it today. Secondly, the bike is slightly heavier than my hardtail. Thirdly, the geometry is a little more relaxed than on my hardtail. Although the TALAS forks allow me to adjust this to a certain extent, the shorter top tube does means that I am sat upright a little more than on the stretched out Rockhopper which issn’t quite such a good climbing position for me. I’m sure I’ll get used to it though.
Once onto single track or downhill though it is just so much better than my hardtail. On flowing singletrack I have much more control, espeically in the corners. I’m able to enter them quicker, maintain my speed and exit quicker, keeping my momentum going into the next section. In some places I found myself pedalling through sections that I would normally be braking over. I also don’t have to pick my line quite so carefully as rocks and rougher bits don’t phase the bike or me at all. It takes it all in its stride, inspiring confidence and it is surprising how quickly you adapt to this new found ability. I was soon taking lines I wouldn’t normally contemplate, hitting things harder and faster and getting more air and all with more poise and control.
This confidence carried through to bigger, more technical descents too. The bike feels in control and planted to the trail, allowing me to hit things with more speed and simply float over rocks and drops that would have previously had me reaching for the brakes and teetering over them.
The extra control was especially noticeable on fast, loose sections where I was particularly slow before and always felt ‘on the edge’! With the suspension of the Commencal Meta 5.5 and the more relaxed geometry providing more control I was able to go much faster over the loose ground, which in turn smoothed out the terrain even more and made it even easier. I’ve always known that speed is your friend in such circumstances, but you need some control in the first place in order to feel safe at speed. Once you have both it becomes easy.
All in all it seems to be just right and I can now see what all the fuss about full-suspension was for. It certainly makes the fun bits easier, faster and more exciting and the slight loss of climbing performance is barely noticeable when you finish the day with a big grin on your face. There may be slightly more maintenance than with a hardtail and it is a little more difficult to clean but the advantages on the trail more than make up for that. The only other issue is that the extra speed on the trail is going to mean that it is going to hurt more when it does all go wrong!
