the Meccano Magazine

One of my favourite magazines as a kid was the wonderful Meccano Magazine.

… over time Meccano Magazine became a general hobby magazine aimed at “boys of all ages”. Aside from Meccano related articles, it also featured Hornby trains, Dinky Toys and other products of Meccano Ltd, plus a wide variety of general interest articles, including, engineering, aircraft, trains, modelling, camping, photography and philately. Commonwealth countries always featured strongly in articles as Meccano Ltd exported its products to these countries. (My bolding.)

The magazine was stuffed full of great stuff for growing boys, all sorts of engineering news and articles. In fact, I sometimes wonder if reading that gave me the idea to be an engineer. Certainly I was rapt each month in all the engineering stuff that I could only admire as a youngster.

For example, the contents of the June 1948 issue included:

• Mapping by Air
• A Fast Clyde Excursion Steamer
• How Does a Locomotive Safety Valve Work?
• The Little Men Who Sound the Hours (about an animated clock with figures that struck a bell)
• North Eastern 1621 (about a railway locomotive)
• Air News
• Books to Read
• Club and Branch News
• Competitions and Results
• Fireside Fun
• From our Readers
• New Meccano Models
• Model Building Competition
• On Road and Track
• Photography
• Railway Notes
• Stamp News

How’s that for a great month’s new reading for a young lad?  And the advertisements included:

• stamps, lens hoods, model yachts, bicycles, training in radar, wireless and television, toffee, bicycle gears, air guns, chemistry sets, make your own radio!, cigarette cards … all a boy could want and much much more.

What a great thing that was. Of course, we are well before computers, the Internet, mobile phones, SMS, iPods, Facebook, Twitter.  This is even before we had a TV!  I really loved the monthly read … and which boy wouldn’t?  There is no such thing today, as far as I know.  Seems a shame.

There is an awesome archive of the issues of the magazine here – whole copies in pdf form for years and years and years.

having fun with software

One of the things I like to do is play with software.

That is, I like downloading software and opening it and tweaking around with it  – all just for the fun of exploring new stuff.

I should say that I have all the software I need for what I do, which is not a lot – editing photographs, doing drawings, editing music files, drafting blogs, putting together a Web site, email, browsing, a bit of correspondence, a little spreadsheet stuff, desktop publishing, RSS feeds … and so on.

But if I come across, for example, a photo editing program I have not seen before, I will download it in a flash and see what it is all about. Now the curious thing here is that I am ultimately not all that interested in what it can do (most of the software I have is, for me, top of the line). Of course I am a little interested – there may be some feature which is interesting – it is just that I get such fun from the process of downloading and exploring software programs.

Here’s an example. The slick browser Opera, in its Beta 10 Version, has come up with a feature called Unite, whereby you can build a little Web site that sits in the browser. So, as I understand it, you can, for example, try this url and find the beginnings of my playing around with this newly discovered toy: adampc.alvason.operaunite.com/_root/content/ (Warning: I don’t think this link works yet, sorry!)  I came across this on WIRED magazine, by the way, a good place to check out regularly for new stuff.

Now that’s a bit of fun to play with and set up. Will I use it? Not likely, although if I can get it to work well, and it does what it says it does, then, well, I might.  It’s got a file, picture and music sharing feature (all pulled from my PC, you can’t add any of these), a lounge where we can chat, a fridge where you can stick notes and a place where I can build a Web site.  I think – not sure about the last or how to do it but this is where the fun comes in – playing with it. Here’s a screen shot of it in my Opera browser:

Of course I have had a go at all these “social websites” and picture sharing places, even made a book online once, but once I have tried them I never know what to do with them, not being of a generation that is into this stuff.

Other fun:

• I played with online storage (heaven knows why) at IIC Internet. I had a trial subscription then had to go to hospital and when I came out, my trial had expired and I ad paid a year’s subscription!  Now that is something I will not do again!  IIC Internet is probably fine and dandy but no use to me.  Could be if I were travelling but I am not.
• I started to set up the said IIC Internet as a drive on my PC, was working on that when I went into hospital and now I cannot remember how I was doing it. NetDrive came into it, I’ll have to look at that again …
• I’m a sucker for all these places like Google Docs and Zoho, where you can prepare and store files of various kinds online.

Here’s a list of the software I have and use on my PC:

• Image editing: The Gimp and Photoshop (the latter having the excellent adaptive layers, which The GIMP has not). Photoshop is now bound into a “creative suite” well beyond my humble years-old Version 7.
• Drawing: Photoshop (bitmap) or Inkscape (vector). Inkscape is also good for illustrations.
• Music files: I slice and dice music programs with WavePad or Audacity. You pay for the first but not the second.
• Drafting and publishing blogs: I use Blogdesk, have used other programs but keep coming back to this for its simplicity.
• Hosting blogs: WordPress
• Building a Web site: HTML Kit is good.
• Email: I use Thunderbird
• Browser: I am embarrassed to say that I have no less that four on the go at the moment: Firefox, Google Chrome, Opera and Orca.  I like ‘em all in different ways.
• Correspondence and spreadsheets: Please do not go beyond OpenOffice, that wonderful free suite of software.  A big download and slow to load but well worth it.  Say NO! to MS Word!
• Desktop publishing: I use InDesign, without a doubt the top of the line, only ‘cos I was lucky enough to be able to buy it when I was running a business.  Scribus is free and looks good.  I think it was previously Mac only, but I got a Windows version today.
• RSS feeds: I haven’t bothered with this much, I just use Google Reader (free, of course).

I recommend all that software to you.  Most of it is free, so you can do pretty much everything without laying out a cent.

I sort of lost the plot with my theme of playing with software, maybe I can pick that up again some time.

Let me know what you think of my choices.

my new teeth

Got myself new teeth the other day. Well, some new teeth, a couple of top molars on each side and one on the bottom to balance them.

I blame the Scots diet for this. Until I left Scotland when I was 21, I consumed a horrifyingly sweet and bad diet (with the 20/20 vision and knowledge of the future). I have nightmare visions from my teens in Edinburgh, worthy of a Terry Gilliam film, of grey-haired dentists with bad breath and white coats, snaking stainless steel, whirling and whining drills with the impact respectively of a jack hammer and a oil-drilling bit. To this day, when dragging myself along for a routine and these days painless dental treatment, the trauma of the past comes to haunt me and anxiety mounts as the day approaches.

Notwithstanding all that, I have recently come out of a program of dental work that attended to all little bits of decay (not many or major I am happy to say) and the provision of some false gnashers.

To my immense relief, these teeth are not the cartoon image, top and bottom sets of teeth clacking away across the table. Instead, I have a modest little fitting that embeds cute little baby-like teeth onto to a seemingly space-age metal or alloy that sweeps round inside my remaining top teeth to provide for the molars now missing after 60-odd years in action. Fits well and does not change my speech more than a little. I need to slow my speech a little to enunciate (now that bon mot would be a test for them and me!) words clearly. But all is well generally.

It will take me a little time to get used to these new choppers. But the pleasing thing is that the $2,500 cost (there is a small bottom frame also) was met by a Government scheme for old codgers like me. So I am getting a little back from the astronomical amounts of tax I have paid over the years. Ha ha. A good feeling. Makes it all worthwhile.

two old churches

My wife and I have just taken a visit to an old township in rural New South Wales. Not that it is extremely rural – we went to Wollombi, just a little inland, in the foothills of the Watagan Mountains that form part of the Great Dividing Range running down eastern Australia.

Here’s a great Web site to tell you all about Wollombi and the district.

While there is a lot to talk about, one thing that struck me was the wonderful condition of two old churches (actually from the mid-late 19th century).

“Old”, that is, in the white Australian context, where Captain Cook first raised the flag in 1770, and “the first fleet” arrived in Sydney in 1788:

“Between 1788 and 1850 the English sent over 162,000 convicts to Australia in 806 ships. The first eleven of these ships are today known as the First Fleet and contained the convicts and marines that are now acknowledged as the Founders of Australia.”

(At that time, there were up to 400,000 aboriginal people, who had been here for a very long time – some say 40,000 years or more.)

So the township of Wollombi and these churches are only old in a very limited and colonial sense.

Getting distracted by the history …

The buildings that caught my attention are the late 19th century Anglican and Catholic church buildings:

St John’s Anglican Church

Small stone church. The foundation stone was laid in 1846 and the church was consecrated in 1849 (from a notice outside the church). Architecturally it is a well built, excellently preserved stone building.

From the Heritage listing:

Simple village church; rectangular plan with projecting porch; vestry and chancel lit by single lancet windows. Gable ornamented by small belfry at one end and stone cross at the other. Built of local sandstone. Simple pitched iron roof. Internal fittings and pews of the finest cedar. Approached through a characteristic picket fence under a fine wrought iron lantern. Church is in original condition.

St Michael’s Catholic Church

Small dressed sandstone church incorporating stone from 1840-43 church on floodprone site nearby. The foundation stone of Saint Michael’s Catholic Church was laid in 1840 but was moved following damage in the 1893 flood to it’s present location. Significant for its contribution to historic character in important historic village, and for its fine modest architecture.

What struck me most about these buildings was the lovely condition they are in. They look as if they could have been built only a few years ago. Of course, as a city boy, I am more used to the stain of the city pollution spoiling the appearance of such beautiful stone buildings.

Here’s a detail of the stonework from the St John’s church:

Beautifully coloured stone, as clean as anything. I’m interested in what look like pick or chisel marks on the face of the stone but do not know how it was worked to make these marks.

Next time I am in the area, I shall see if I can get inside to have a look. For example, I would like to see “the finest cedar” in St John’s.

Here’s a link to Australia’s cedar (Wikipedia). And check this out for a history of cedar logging in this area.

trying to photograph dandelions

Having a bit of time to spare one day and, surprise, having my digicam with me, I took a walk around the little island at the south end of Lake Munmorah.

Almost immediately I spotted some dandelions that I thought would make an arty shot from ground level. So I flung myself to the ground and set to it. Here’s the best result:

Didn’t quite work out, did it? Very disappointing. You can see the main dandelion head I was aiming at – in the top left quarter of the image. But I could not get a focussed shot! Difficult to say what is in focus here – maybe the slash of bright green grass behind my intended subject.

This experience highlights some problems that I have with my camera. OK, yes, I would be happy to admit it is me – if I could get it to work. The main problems are related to seeing what I am doing:

• Difficulty in seeing the image clearly, i.e. inadequate viewfinders
• Difficulty in focussing – whose problem, mine or the camera?
• Difficulty in seeing the result

Here’s the (digicam) camera I have, an otherwise fine tool. It’s a Fujifilm Finepix s5600.

It’s what I call a faux-SLR – looks like an SLR but it isn’t.

Here’s the back of it and the confounded LCD screen:

You can see I have cunningly put my intended picture on that damned LCD screen.

So, bearing in mind that I wanted to focus on the dandelion head:

• have you ever tried to use the LCD screen when there is a bit of sun reflecting on it?
• ever tried to use a frankly quite useless optical viewfinder?
• ever tried to focus on an insubstantial dandelion head?

No? Neither had I. I tried first on normal photometry – i.e. the focus and metering was averaged over the whole area. Wrong! I then set it to spot metering and focussed carefully on the larger dandelion head. No good! I tried all sorts of combinations of things, quite without success.

Naturally, when I got home, I had a look at the manual. As one does. Well, to be frank, I just do not understand what it says on manual focussing (which is what my camera group had suggested). Could not understand one bit of it. Not a jot.

So there we are. I think my idea of the image was good but as far as I can see I am going to have to try with a genuine SLR, where you can see the thing clearly and adjust that good old split ring. I can use an old film camera I have – a Yashica from 20-odd years ago. I also have a rangefinder I could use, my good old Ricoh 500G!

The better solution is to acquire a digital SLR, so if anyone is feeling generous, feel free to contact me …

the best fruitcake ever!

I have made the best fruitcake in the world, got it right – well, nearly right, see below – first time. But then, it is an easy recipe. And it is great for diabetics, no added sugar, you don’t need it with all the fruit that is in it (there is fructose there, of course). Here’s the result, after a few days:

Doesn’t that look great? It is a very rich cake, so it is best not to eat too much at one time of the sheer mass will weigh you down for hours to come.

It resulted from the same source as I described in my previous post, that is, my quarterly magazine from Diabetes Australia, which I joined when I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes. Diabetes Australia is

“… the national peak body for diabetes in Australia providing a single, powerful, collective voice for people living with diabetes, their families and carers. Diabetes Australia works in partnership with diabetes health professionals, educators and researchers to minimise the impact of diabetes on the Australian community. Diabetes Australia is committed to turning diabetes around through awareness, prevention, detection, management and a cure.”

In their latest magazine, Autumn 2009, they featured what looks an excellent book, Diabetes: Kids and Teens Food, which has simple recipes for healthy living. (Here, have another bit of fruitcake.)

This cake is the easiest thing to make, you basically chuck fruit and juices together, let ‘em soak overnight then add flour and bake, too easy. The recipe for this is as follows:

1 kg sunbeam mixed fruit
1 cup pitted prunes, chopped
1 heaped tsp mixed spice
1 cup unsweetened prune juice
1/4 cup orange juice

2 cups self-raising flour

Soak all fruit and spice in fruit juices in the fridge overnight. Next morning, add flour (add more juice if too sticky). Mix with wooden spoon and pour into greased round or square cake tin 150 degrees for 2 hours. If using a metal tin, grease and line with brown paper.

Nutrition Information (per slice):

Energy 560kJ, Fat O.4g, Saturated Fat O.lg, Carbohydrate 30g, Fibre 3g, Sodium 80mg, GI Low

(Note these are metric and Australian measures.)

Try it! It is so easy and is beautifully moist and so tasty – the best fruitcake ever!

When I baked my cake, there was a small bit not completely cooked at the bottom of the centre so I dug that out. And it became a ring cake! Next time I shall use a deeper tin. Least, that is what my wife recommends.

Adam becomes a cook

When I was diagnosed with type 2 diabetes late last year, one of the first things I did was become a member of Diabetes Australia , the primary institution here for collating research, funding diabetes management programs and providing information. The fact that there were supplying a free blood glucose level monitoring device to new members at that time was, of course, quite coincidental! (And now they are offering to replace my monitor with one that has a lifetime guarantee, free of charge! Whose lifetime, I wonder?)

They have a great information bulletin, which they issue quarterly – Issues – Diabetes Management and Healthy Eating. An excellent little magazine, often these things go straight in the bin, but this one is really worth reading, packed with interesting and useful information.

The current issue (Autumn 2009), received a few days ago, is “The Food Edition”. In particular, it reviews a wonderful-looking new book, Diabetes: Kids and Teens Food. The recipes provided look so good and are so easy that I thought that I would have a go at a couple.

The first one I liked the look of was Blueberry Pikelets.

I’ve got to wonder here if everyone knows what a pikelet is. I would not have known if I had not lived here in Australia for so long. In Scotland, where I was born, it would be called a pancake:

A small, thick pancake, generally in Australia, New Zealand and parts of Britain. Also known in parts of the United Kingdom as a drop-scone or Scotch pancake.

I made them and so as you know what they are, here’s a picture of all that was left the next day:

They are yummy! My wife did not like them as she has a sweet tooth (something I used to have but trained myself out of it), there is no sugar in them, I guess you could put some artificial sweetener in if you wanted.

Here is the recipe:

1½ cups (210g / 6¾oz) self-raising flour
1 egg, lightly whisked
200g (6½oz) low-fat vanilla yoghurt
¾ cup (185ml / 6floz) low-fat milk
olive oil spray
125g (4oz) blueberries (1 punnet)

Sift the flour into a large bowl.
In a separate bowl mix the egg, yoghurt and milk.
Make a well in the centre of the dry ingredients and gradually mix in the wet ingredients, adding extra milk if required.
Heat a non-stick frypan to a moderate heat and spray lightly with oil.
Put approximately one heaped tablespoon of mixture into the pan for each pikelet.
Press 5–6 blueberries into each pikelet.
Turn when bubbles start to appear on the surface, and cook until light and fluffy.

Serves 12.

Nutrition Information (per pikelet): Energy 402kJ, Fat 1g, Saturated fat <1g, Carbohydrate 17g (1 exchange), Fibre 1g, Sodium 146mg, GI medium.

You can find more information about the cookbook here (for as long as they keep it on the website).

Of course, when I say I made them, that ain’t to say I made a really good job of them. My pikelets have a freeform shape as you can see, not the nice round ones that a practised cook (or someone with an egg-ring) would produce. Also, the pressing in of the blueberries was a bit of a messy business. The worst thing was that my mixture, although to the recipe above, was a bit thick, I should have added more milk, so they were a teeny bit solid in the middle, ahem.

But I am definitely going to make them again, I recommend them to anyone as a light snack (limit yourself to one or two at most!). We have a light lunch and I tend to get a bit hungry late afternoon, so one of these with a cup of tea is going to be just right!

No, no cream, jam or any addition, this is designed for diabetics. But of course you can use these additions if you want to. Me, I find them good by themselves.

There is another recipe, for a fruitcake, that I am trying – I’ll let you know how I get on.

Please check out these websites if you have diabetes and even if you haven’t got it as the recipes are excellent and the site is centred on healthy living.

making my Book of Trees

One of my posts from last year talked about how I prefer to use Adobe InDesign to create a photo-book, rather than online resources. Well, that made me think of actually doing one, about trees, so that’s what I am doing now.

A bit of other stuff has been happening, that’s why it has taken me a bit of time to get round to it.

I am only just getting into it. The hard work is done, in that I have selected the images I want to use – meaning going through a few thousand pictures from the last 3 1/2 years! And I have designed the layout.

So now I am feeding the images into the book and adding comments as I see fit.

I have uploaded an early version of this, in pdf format, so you can see how I am going. Now I have the layout worked out, it is now just a matter of dropping in the images and adding text. Like making sausages. Have a look at the pdf of the first few pages. You will need a pdf reader to look at it, and it’s a big file so it will be a little slow to load, have to see what I can do about that. [Edited 17 April 2009: now a much smaller file!]

Note: the early pages are blank – I will do something with them, some sort of title, maybe a map, that would be good. The text is not checked or spell-checked yet! So do not freak out over errors.

Of course this is only a beginning, a lot can change before I am finished. I have chosen 200 images … may be too many?

Let me know what you think.

the CDs from the glove box

Before I go any further – “glove box“? Is that what they still call it? When did anybody last put gloves in their glove box? Or is it just us down here in Australia, where, for the most part it is not cold enough, we would not have gloves to put in there. Quaint.

But to press on: I thought it would be an interesting thing to do, to list the CDs I carry in the – ha ha – glove box. Note that in our car, they slop around in there, we do not have a CD-stacker player thing. We have a player, one at a time. And they don’t actually slop around because there are too many for that now but don’t be pedantic, you know what I mean.

The car manual is in there, taking up space. After years of having the car, I had to consult it recently to see how to reset the clock, half way through our summer time. I was waiting in the car, bored a bit, thought I would reset it and could not work out how to do it. So, after dragging the manual out of the glove box, with an accompanying cascade of CDs, I worked that out. Now I will have to change it back to normal time next weekend.

The car manual – I had a flat battery when the car was a few years old. Took me a bit of time to work out how to open the bonnet, something I had not done before. Then, when we decided (I called a friend who is a mechanic) that the battery was dead, and I got it replaced, I did not know how to close the bonnet. Or hood. There are these little obviously hydraulic ram things either side, I could see that much. You release the catch – I found that! – and the hood slowly opens (a bit creepy, that). But how to close it. I was deeply embarrassed when my pal give me a look and just pushed it down. Well, how was I to know?

Where was I? Oh yes, CDs. It is very annoying that, when I burn CDs from music I download from … errr … well, they won’t play in all our devices. This is supremely annoying. But they do play in the car, thank god.

To the list:

Bach: Goldberg Variations Best by Glenn Gould if you can get that version, he’s the acknowledged maestro of these variations. Good to listen to, track how the theme is, well, varied. I do have his playing of them on my computer somewhere but oddly the CD I have in the car I downloaded from the Piano Society. Loads of piano stuff there if you want it, although I prefer the violin.

Prokofiev: Piano Sonatas 7 & 8; Liszt: Mephisto Waltz Vladimir Ashkenazy. Some of the Prokofiev is hard to take – pounding away on the piano – but overall worth it for the rest of the CD.

Foreign Affairs & Heartache and Vine: Tom Waits. Everything from Tom Waits gets a big thumbs up from me, although I don’t think these two are his best. I have both of them on one CD and cannot remember how that happened. Or how it could happen – two CDs on one? Bizarre. You can get a taste of it here .

Ella Fitzgerald: i want to be happy This is a compilation of her songs, recorded mostly when she was quite young. Her voice is notably higher than it became later. I bought this for about $6, when I was at a cafe waiting for an order of hamburgers and chips. Saw it in a rack of stuff offered for the music-starved traveller. It’s a lovely CD, her singing is just great and she is accompanied by old style jazz bands that now sound a bit quaint in one way but so strong in another way.

Reality: David Bowie I have been an ardent fan of David Bowie for nearly forty years (wow are we both that old! I know he is now sixty-one.) Space Oddity was what grabbed me first, oddly enough when we were in darkest Africa (Zambia). I say “oddly enough” because not much filtered through, the only newspaper and the TV station were both a bit thin. In fact, the latter was so starved for material that I once appeared on it in a current affairs program, much to the amusement of my friends and colleagues. I like Reality a lot although there is one track I cannot stand and I also skip that one, it gets on my nerves, grates horribly. Disco King from the Reality album is a good contrast to Space Oddity. Check ‘em out.

Mercy Now: Mary Gauthier Mary is a Southern country & western/goth/blues singer (my description) whom I discovered only recently. Mercy Now was widely acclaimed when it was released in 2005.

Listen to a track – Falling Out Of Love. (A live recording so the sound is not too good but its got the live energy.) It’s a worthwhile experience to get to know Mary’s troubled life and how she got to where she is now – go explore!

Venice Before Vivaldi: El Mundo This is a CD of some of the work of Giovanni Legrenzi (lovely-sounding surname!) Lovely light mostly string music from one of the most prominent composers in Venice in the late 17th century. Strongly recommended, except for track four where a counter tenor gives me the creeps so I skip that one.

Nine Inch Nails: Ghosts I-IV Ghastly. You can see and explore this group’s Website here, get a generous taste of their music.

Nine Inch Nails is an American industrial rock music group, founded in 1988 by Trent Reznor in Cleveland, Ohio. As its main producer, singer, songwriter, and instrumentalist, Reznor is the only official member of Nine Inch Nails and remains solely responsible for its direction. NIN’s music straddles a wide range of genres, while retaining a characteristic sound using electronic instruments and processing. After recording a new album, Reznor usually assembles a live band to perform with him. The touring band features a revolving lineup that often rearranges songs to fit a live setting. On stage, NIN often employ spectacular visual elements to accompany performances, which frequently culminate with the band destroying their instruments. (Wikipedia)

I love ‘em/him! Also unusual for giving stuff away so if you like them, watch or get a feed from their Web site. So I fantasise about being at the lights and turning this heavy industrial rock stuff up full blast, while staring placidly forward, see the reaction from adjacent cars.

Mary Gauthier: Between The Daylight and Dark Another one by Mary.One track on it, Can’t Find The Way, was written about the devastation of New Orleans and other areas by Hurricane Katrina. There is a moving pairing of images with this song that you really should watch, although the quality is not good.

Solar Shears: Shooglenifty Shooglenifty is an Edinburgh-based six-piece Celtic fusion band that tours internationally. The band blends Scottish traditional music with influences ranging from electronica to alternative rock. This CD has an amusing number – MaryAnn from Clachnabrochan or some such place is fun.

Here they are having a bit of fun.

Raindogs: Tom Waits Mainstream Waits and one of his most popular releases.

Starting off with a fine shanty, Raindogs has got to be my favourite on this CD. You can listen to a whole concert here. Please explore Tom Waits’ music. Start with the early stuff.

That’s it.

Now I have to shove them all back in there but maybe it’s time to take some different ones …

playing around with Photoshop

Here’s what I came up with when I thought of a way of using Photoshop to give me a more creative image.

A failure, I am sorry to say. But I think the idea is there and now I need to try again with this experience.

What I am trying to do is make a picture, or part of it, blurred and dreamy, with selective bits in focus. Back to the computer to try again.