Tag Archives: iPad

The Age for iPad

John | 31 May, 2011 - 8:02 pm

One hundred years ago today, on 31st May 1911, the hull of the RMS Titanic was launched (see feature photo on home page).   And on this day in 2011 The Age, Melbourne’s daily broadsheet morning newspaper, launched its new iPad app – The Age for iPad.  A similar app for the iPad was also launched today for the Sydney Morning Herald.  The above photo of the fully fitted-out ship  is from today’s edition of The Age iPad app  in the photo section devoted to 31 May over the years.

Also in the photo section is a series of stunning HDR photos of Melbourne.  The HDR photo that follows is a view of the city by night. I’m not sure from where the photo was taken, because the twin Rialto towers are on the right – so perhaps it’s a view from the west, or the north.

Here’s another photo from the HDR series. I know from where this photo was taken, and I’m sure most Melburnians will too – and most visitors will have seen the clocks above the main entrance to Flinders Street Railway Station.   This is a view from just inside the entrance – looking out to St. Paul’s Cathedral (Anglican) on the corner of Flinders and Swanston Streets.

I’ll be following the The Age iPad edition with a great deal of interest to see if it will maintain the impressively high standard of the first edition. The app and its content are free until December.

The Age also has another iPad app which I have subscribed to since the week before Christmas last year.  It’s called The Age Newspaper App.  It’s a full replica of the printed version of  The Age, page by page, including all the magazine supplements, and masses of classified adverts in The Saturday Age issue which reaches about 460 pages most weekends.  The new app launched today is designed especially for the iPad and includes videos and great photos.

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Olive O4HD

John | 30 January, 2011 - 12:27 am

If one has been collecting CDs for as long I have (about 25 years), the collection can grow to unmanageable proportions. I have CDs in various plastic cabinets, and on shelves and in piles scattered throughout 3 rooms in my unit, and even in places I’d forgotten that I’d stored CDs – until I did a thorough search last week. My concerns over the years have been that I have no idea where to find most of the CDs if I want to play a particular one, so it’s too daunting to do a search. I find that getting up to put on a CD and changing it when it finishes, is tiresome, so I don’t do it often (and especially in the case of works that spread across several CDs. And perhaps the biggest concern of all, at my age, is that I will probably never get to hear most of my CDs again. It’s just too hard: and it’s not so easy and convenient to play them that I’ll do it because I can, and can quickly and easily explore the depths of my collection.

Enter the second exciting gadget I came across on Thursday. In this case I read about it in an article in The Age Green Guide headed “Music lovers don’t cut corners” (see featured image).  For the record, I didn’t read the article in the physical newspaper.  I read it on my iPad in the digital edition, which is a 100% facsimile of the actual newspaper.

I’ll quote parts of the article that aroused my interest:

Music lovers — those who can pick Pavarotti in 1965 from Pavarotti in 1985 — have always had a love/hate relationship with iPods and the electronic music storage they represent.  Most of them wouldn’t touch an iPod with a five-metre baton.

This is because the signal is compressed so more music can be squeezed onto the hard drive and in this compression process, much of the original signal is deleted, especially in the upper range. The music sounds similar, yet is not the same.   It sounds as if it’s all there and yet it no longer brings tears to your eyes. All the nuance has been lost.

But what music lovers secretly like about iPods is their convenience.  An album, or a particular track, can be found in seconds and played immediately.

The music is categorised and indexed automatically. And it’s all in one place.

Now those serious about their music can have it all; the music quality of a CD with the convenience of an iPod.  Modern solid-state hard drives have the capacity to make electronic music storage a viable option for people who refuse to compromise on sound quality.

The unit is shown above.  Here’s a further description:

Store up to 20,000 high-resolution HD tracks (6000 CDs) in 24-bit on this award winning music server – with more than 250 times the resolution of CDs, you’ll hear the HD difference immediately. Experience it right out of the box, the Olive O4HD includes over an hour of music with 12 of the best Chesky Records’ HD Tracks for Free!

Everything from 24-bit HD files to 16-bit converted CDs will be at your fingertips. Convenient storage, easy touchscreen access and the ability to play it all in any room of your home with the addition of an Olive 2 (see below). Now you’ll enjoy your music collection more than ever.

You can even turn your screen into an oversized color display and use the Olive remote control to see music details or select songs from across the room. It’s a great alternative to navigating with the touchscreen or our iPhone App.

Why does it sound so good?

The Olive O4HD will deliver exceptional sound quality from all of your digital music sources. Maximize your signal transfer with the 24k gold RCA connectors and use the Olive O4HD as an outboard DAC. With 24-bit/192kHz oversampling, noise and distortion are ultra low resulting in incredible purity in both high frequencies and low-level detail.

A quote from a review:

Exceptional sound; approachable and easy to use; quality build and finish; sheer value…this is 21st century hi-fi: the Olive O4HD is superb to live with and listen to’ (What Hi-Fi magazine February 2010)

All this plus a free iPhone/iPod Touch/iPad app to control playback (as well as the supplied remote control).

The Olive O4HD has a wonderful final trick up it’s sleeve.  You can add a slave to every room in the house where you have a system through which you can play audio – and you can do it wirelessly with your Wifi network.  Wunderbar!

For this feature you need an Olive Melody 2 in each room where you want it.

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Jack Vettriano

John | 19 January, 2011 - 12:21 am

Over the past 9 years I’ve liked to buy cards featuring the works of Jack Vettriano to send on special occasions.   The cards are blank inside, and can therefore be used for any purpose, including short letters of thanks.  To be honest, I’d never heard of Jack Vettriano until I saw the cards with his paintings at a bookshop in Malvern, in 2002 and bought a handful of them, all with different paintings.  I remember the year because I used the cards to write thank-you letters to the Chairman of Foster’s and Deputy Chairman who had expressed special wishes when I retired in 2002 (on 1 November), when I was a young boy not yet 65.

The family name “Vettrianno” convinced me that the painter was Italian.  But the first name “Jack” lead  me to assume that he was probably American-Italian and no doubt lives in New York – or perhaps in the Windy City – Chicago (where many other Italians, such as Al Capone, have lived).

Jack Vettriano is one on the many artists whose works are featured in the iPad app called Art Authority.

By the way, what would you think the painting above is called?  If I told you, I don’t think you’d believe me.  So do a Google search for The Singing Butler and you’ll find the painting.  I now quote from Wikipedia:

On 21 April 2004 the original canvas of The Singing Butler sold at auction for £744,500 — in stark contrast to 1992 when Vettriano painted the picture and submitted it for inclusion in the Royal Academy summer show, only to be rejected.

As it turns out, Jack Vettriano is not Italian or American.  He’s not from New York, or Chicago, or even from Sicily.   He’s from Fife in Scotland.

And his title is Jack Vettrianno OBE.

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The Apple iPad

John | 26 November, 2010 - 1:16 am

The iPad is a wonderful device for those who have a use for what it can do. But the following video shows that what is better than an iPad, is lots of them working as a team, with different apps playing at the same time, in sync.  Once the video is running, do yourself a favour and click on the X at the bottom of the video, to close the advert that appears.

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The Child is father of the Man

John | 3 October, 2010 - 11:13 pm

Spring 2010 arrived in Melbourne today with the warmest day since last April. I haven’t had the heating on at all today. The winter sport AFL football 2010 season finally ended yesterday at the MCG (see above) with the “Drawn Grand Final Rematch” after the draw the previous Saturday.   They really shouldn’t call it a Grand Final. It’s more of a Potential Grand Final, or even an Alleged Grand Final (not a proven Grand Final until the game provides a winner).

Now that the footy season is over, the MCG (Melbourne Cricket Ground) shown above, will no longer be given over to AFL games and Grand Finals this year, but to its namesake summer sport – cricket.  This year, cricket fans will have the excitement of the Ashes – the cricket competition between Australia and England.

Sadly, the Ashes tour this year won’t have Andrew “Freddie” Flintoff (above) as the captain of the English team.  After suffering various injuries and surgery over the years, a few weeks ago, on medical advice,  he announced his retirement from all forms of cricket.

When asked about the Ashes this season he insisted (according to The Sunday Times (of London) today, he would be emotionally detached. “I’ll be on Jumeirah Beach with the kids and Rachel,” said the Dubai-based veteran of 79 Tests. “And I’m not going to be sat there beating myself up, thinking, ‘I wish I was in Australia’.”

The photo of the MCG shown above is from the free iPad app Go Ashes.  I strongly recommend it for all cricket fans with an iPad.  There’s also an iPhone app.

The arrival of Spring weather always fills my heart and spirit with renewed joy, and revives my enthusiasm and appreciation of the simpler things in life, and just being alive.  William Wordsworth expressed it better than I can when he wrote his ode to nature:

My heart leaps up when I behold

My heart leaps up when I behold
A rainbow in the sky:
So was it when my life began;
So is it now I am a man;
So be it when I shall grow old,
Or let me die!
The Child is father of the Man;
I could wish my days to be
Bound each to each by natural piety.

William Wordsworth – 1802.

A Google search for “The Child is father of the Man” will find many discussions about the meaning of those words, and also about what Wordsworth might have meant when he wrote “natural piety”.  One of the most interesting articles can be found at http://www.answersingenesis.org/creation/v20/i3/child.asp

The article was written by Graham Fisher, B.A. (Hons), Dip.Ed., M.Ed.  He clearly agrees that childhood is a vital element in a person’s development.  He goes on to apply this observation to what he has read of the attitudes of Charles Darwin (author of  On the Origin of Species) in Darwin’s childhood.

I’ll quote from the article:

In their excellent biography of Darwin, Desmond and Moore quote from contemporary sources about him [Darwin] thus:

‘Inventing deliberate falsehoods became a regular method of seeking the spotlight … He would still do anything at school “for the pure pleasure of exciting attention and surprise,” and his cultivated “lies … gave [him] pleasure, like a tragedy.” He told tall tales about natural history, reported strange birds, and boasted of being able to change the colour of flowers. Once he invented an elaborate story designed to show how fond he was of telling the truth. It was a boy’s way of manipulating the world.’

Graham Fisher then goes on to make some very interesting  observations about Darwin and his theory of evolution.

If you read the article you will see that Graham Fisher has a religious belief, and therefore perhaps has a vested point of view.  So what do I think of his article?

I think the article is thought provoking, but over-simplifies the theory of evolution.  When it comes down to the bottom line, the theory of evolution can explain many things, but it doesn’t explain it all.

Scientists still have many unanswered questions about the beginning of  life on Earth – let alone why it began on this particular planet in all the universe – or why and how the almighty universe exists at all, with or without life.

As regards Evolution or Genesis, Occam’s Razor comes to mind.

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A New Interest – but for how long?

John | 1 September, 2010 - 12:54 am

Late Sunday night, for some unknown reason, I bought a crossword puzzle app for my iPad.  I’ve no idea what brought this on, because I’ve always been hopeless at doing crossword puzzles and I’ve therefore had no interest in them.

The thing is that I’m having a fresh look at crosswords now that I have an iPad and iPhone that have apps that can help solve clues – such as dictionaries that can do wild card searches, Google and Wikipedia apps.

I’m only one day into this new interest and I’m not sure how long it will last, or how long I’ll let it last.  I spent a large part of today involved doing crosswords in three trial apps, instead of spending the day as planned.   The New York Times app puzzle for yesterday is shown above.  This is a free app, but after 7 days you have to subscribe to get puzzles for the app.  This is typical of all newspaper crosswords to access them online.

In the past I’ve never been able to do crossword puzzles, probably because I’d never thought about why they are called puzzles and why the Across and Down clues are called “clues”.   I think I’d assumed the clues were just a list of general knowledge questions to which I had to provide answers, if I knew them.

No wonder I had so much trouble trying to solve them.  I could only do the entries which were fairly straight questions.

I’m now starting to get the hang of the general idea, but I have lots to learn, and I’ve fund that as with playing Hangman, I have to become more lateral in my thinking.  For example, one clue I encountered today was “Editor’s strikes (5)”.  My initial thoughts were that it might have something to do with an editors strike in the USA.  Then I decided it was more likely to be marks that an editor makes on drafts.  But I had no idea what any such marks were called.  After a time, I completed adjoining parts of the puzzle (on my iPhone) that gave me the last 3 letters of the word – ..UTS – so I did lots of wild card searches and couldn’t come up with a word that worked.  Later on I’d narrowed it to – .OUTS – but my many wild card searches still didn’t come up with a word that worked with the clue.   I should have paid more attention to the clue, and the word “strikes”.

Just imagine an editor reading a draft article and he makes a strike.  It’s not a small correction or change, but a strike with his pen.   Try it.  You are the editor and your left hand’s palm is the page, and your right hand holds the pen.  Make an editing strike to a paragraph on the page.   How would you describe it?  You crossed something out.   The plural form is cross outs.  And how do you mark a cross on a voting paper, survey etc.  With and X.   The answer:  XOUTS

As I said, I’ve got lots to learn about crossword puzzles and lateral  thinking; let alone even thinking of trying a cryptic crossword puzzle.

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