But had cause to deploy it in anger today.  I hope they use it in the 2100s to educate children about life in Britain at the turn of the century. 

Only yesterday, Abby was a little blonde bundle of energy-excess and giggle-surfeit. If I took her to the shops, she'd coo over fluffy things, shriek at pink things and fall prostrate at the paws of dogs in the street, the smaller the better.

I took her to the shops on Saturday.  She ignored the felt-tips, turned her nose up at the pony books and threw disdainful looks at gonks on keyrings. We came home with a poster of some C-list trollop, to go next to the recently acquired poster of an (un)popular beat combo, the (un)Wanted. 

In the words of a real musician: The Times, They Are a-Changin'

Some of you may recall me moaning - a lot - about my suddenly non-functioning wireless network, back in April last year:
 
"Wireless connection dead almost everywhere. Neighbours the same. And no-one owning up to the kit that's killing it. EXTREMELY grumpy. May weep."

 I was demoing the issue to my brother-in-law yesterday - it's pretty clearly captured below:

This is ethernet connected to the router - and is at the lower end of what I typically get on the Sky ADSL, since I can almost spit out of the attic window and hit the exchange up the road. The router's in the attic, because - up until last April - this gave me 100% throughput everywhere in the house (and garden, for that matter). 802.11b, then g, then n, over the last 10 years odd.

This is by the front door - some degradation but I'd be very happy if I could always achieve this.  It can be a lot worse here, but rarely drops to the levels I routinely see - at best - at the back of the house...

In the conservatory at the back.  Where all the 'routine' internet use happens - children's homework, Spotify connected to the amp in the kitchen, general bits of work and leisure stuff. There isn't anywhere else on the ground floor that you can sit at a table and use a laptop comfortably. And this is as good as it gets. When the interference ramps up, the connection drops completely.

Which is all incredibly frustrating: I have several devices in the house which can ONLY connect via WiFi. I spent a lot of time last April working through all the possible causes but to no avail.  I even did a maildrop to my twenty nearest neighbours, which established I wasn't alone - but threw no light on the cause:

The rather obvious bank of phone-masts on the top of the nearby fire-station practice-tower - no longer used for practice, solely revenue - I'd mentally eliminated pretty early on: Mobile transmission is at 900 or 1800MHz, 3G at 2.1GHz. Neither, to my mind, should interfere with 2.4GHz WiFi. And they'd been no problem for the last 8 years in any case. There was no question that this was something other than another 802.11 network - the excellent inSSIDer will quickly show you what's operating around you and, in any case, the whole point of the protocol is to allow WiFi devices to co-exist and play nicely - sharing the same channels, you might see some reduced throughput, but not complete failure of the connection. More precise analysis needs at least a (£500-odd) spectrum analyser - and I don't know anyone who has access to one, let alone the expertise to use it. The only thing I've been able to do which has helped at all is hang a 5GHz AP off the router, which at least gives me a reasonable connection at the front of the house and enables the Apple TVs to do Airplay - prior to that, they refused completely, regardless of where they were sited. But it's no panacea - 5GHz doesn't have the range of 2.4GHz - so can't reach the conservatory - and several of the devices in the house can only operate with the latter.

And then I started thinking about the line-of-sight between the most interfered-with places in the house and the phone masts. And how there was fairly strong correlation between the likely number of walls in the way and stability of the signal. It had always bugged me that, bizarrely, the signal could drop to nothing just feet away from the router in the attic - until it occurred to me that the only obstruction between the masts and the device in that area are some rooftiles and a sheet of plasterboard... A bit of Googling turned up some articles penned since last year which leave me thinking my simplistic views about the frequencies involved may have led to me to look in the wrong places.

(If it turns out to be the phone-masts it would, of course, me more than a little ironic: There are four Apple devices here which get most of their usage in the worst-affected areas. They're sold by the mobile-phone companies on the basis that you can limit your 3G usage by connecting to Wi-Fi... but if the signal disappears, they'll use 3G. So the same companies that may well be responsible for knackering my wireless network also increase their revenues, as a result of doing so - at my expense.)

Back in April, I'd raised the issue on several web forums and usenet - and a number of people had opined that there was little else I could do: The regulatory bodies would have no interest in interference with unlicensed spectrum, so I was stuck with it. But, having thought through the issue again for the first time in months, I thought I'd give Ofcom a call and see what advice they could offer. Eventually talked to someone in 'spectrum' who asked me to lay out the issue in an email, although she didn't sound particularly interested. But, in for a penny... so I mailed them a copy of the letter I'd dropped in my neighbours' letterboxes with the following:

" I have a problem that has persisted since last April, with interference with my wireless broadband - the attached document is a letter I distributed to a number of my neighbours' houses at the time and will give you a detailed overview of the position as it was then. Since I conducted this 'survey' I have added a 5GHz Access Point to my house, but this seems to be impacted almost as badly.  The interference seemed to become less frequent over December/January, but I have twice completely lost the connection to the laptop I am typing on today. So beginning to feel 'end of my tether' abut the whole affair again...I'd be grateful for any advice you can offer on where to go next - my efforts to locate someone with spectrum analysis equipment (and the expertise to use it) have so far drawn a blank... "

And on Thursday I got a phone call from a very nice chap, who advised 'We've decided to take on your case', then laughed heartily at the extended, manic outburst of gratitude that ensued.

So - this Friday, Ofcom engineer Les is turning up at my house with his spectrum analyser, some directional antennae and a stack of clever software.  I'm trying not to be too optimistic about it: Sod's law says he'll turn up just as the interference drops. If he does detect it and it is the phone masts... well, I'm not sure whether that's actually going to help resolve it. But at least I might find out what the problem is.

Watch this space.

I bought one of these the other day. Abby needs a desk and I'm very happy to furnish her with one. I only wish that we didn't live a 10-minute drive away from IKEA, Purley Way, because it's impossible to identify any household need that IKEA won't be able to meet.  Which means that we have to go to IKEA a lot more often than I want to, my optimum frequency of visit per annum being around the NO I DO NOT WANT TO GO TO IKEA, I NEVER WANT TO GO TO IKEA, I'D RATHER SELF-CIRCUMCISE THAN GO TO IKEA EVER AGAIN mark. 

This is page 3 of the instruction manual. Apart from the rather greater number of bits of faux-wood than I expected, this simple piece of child's furniture requires 114 screws, widgets, doodabs, slightly longer screws, slightly thinner doodabs and some curly things that defy description. It's enough to bring tears to a grown man's eyes.

Still, once you've got to this point, slightly smug at the rigour with which you've approached the preparation stage, you know the actual task of construction is going to be a breeze.

This is page 37 of the instructions. PAGE THIRTY-SEVEN. PAGE THIRTY SEVEN.

No doubt in my mind. Someone, somewhere should be shot.

This house has a number of tablet devices in it. It's got more LCD screens than I care to count. I can't remember the last book I bought but, whatever it was, it would have been a rare publication that I couldn't get in an electronic format. And the attic has about 500 books in it, there are books under beds, books in boxes... something has to give.

I hate the fact that I can't lend ebooks to my friends.  I snort when I see electronic books priced higher than a pristine paper copy. I like the fact that people will understand something of me from the books on my shelves and can pick something interesting out, inspiring the sharing of some interest or passion. But this is going to change and I've run out of shelf space.

So I'm starting at the easy end. Old techy books have no value whatsoever. The Good Pub Guide 1995 is probably not going to recommend the best real ale experience in 2012. Drucker's views on management practice are from a world I can't even remember. I'm already pretty nifty with Excel 2007 and I haven't touched Vi for a decade. This pile is now in the green bin - and I reckon I can free up another 20 feet of shelf without getting too stressed about it.

Then I'll get to fiction. And books about cricket, their pages spilling the fug of leather and beer, linseed and tweed. Books I recall as much for the sunny day in the park when I propped them up against a folded blanket as I do for the words they contained. Books with a 14-year old's scrawls of panicked revision in the margin.  Books that people returned to me many times over, with a grin or a sadness or a hysterical recollection or a recital. Spines that hold cracks I remember cursing over.

I may have to pause at that point. I'm not sure I'm ready.

I moved the blog onto this domain over a month ago - and I haven't published a single Sunday dinner picture yet.

Al's Bridge Road Classic.  Perfect Roast Chicken and four veg (I didn't have peas). And, essentially, 'incongruous' Yorkshire Puddings. Never tire of it.

Finally got round to it: Firefox has been retired in this house and the machines are now Chrome-shiny. Quite a job, given the several machines which have logins for everyone residing chez-FG. I've been using Firefox with Xmarks (since back when it was Foxmarks) for yonks, but XMarks is looking like a bit of a security-risk for password sync, Chrome does native bookmark sync and Firefox with multiple add-ons takes about an hour to spring into life. Which is a highly unsatisfactory and retrograde state of affairs for a web-browser but, of course, there's no such thing as 'just a web browser' any more.  And I haven't looked at the Chrome eco-system for a while: My biggest fear - that the extensions couldn't match what I use in Firefox - have turned out to be (almost) unfounded.

So, what have I learnt?

• The standard Chrome install works only for the user who installs it - which is a right pain to discover half-way through the process.  There is a multi-user install, but it's not exactly obvious.
  
• Google won't let you create accounts for children - so if you want Chrome to sync bookmarks across machines, you'll have to lie about their birthdate.
  
• Chrome doesn't do keywords - you have to fudge them through Search Engines

But, on the positive side... Chrome will carry everything you want across from Firefox seamlessly, which enables you to populate the Last Pass extension with saved passwords without hitch.  And the syncing of extensions almost entirely works between installations (ie one or two refuse to, but the rest were fine).  The only extension I really miss is a decent download manager - Down Them All is notably absent from the Chrome Web Store.

After some ferreting around, I think the essential extensions - for me anyway - are:

• Last Pass
  
• AdBlock
  
• IETab (for compatibility with work stuff, mostly)
  
• Shareaholic
  
• Feedly
  
• Evernote Clipper
  
• Amazon Wishlist

A bunch of others - as in the picture - are really no more than shortcuts presented in pretty fashion.  Since I keep stuff like that to hand on the bookmark bar / by keyword, I'm not sure there's a lot of point to it. Looks nice though. No doubt I'll find others with more ferreting, but that seems enough to get me up and running for the moment.

The whole process has still taken me about three hours - but it was less painful than I expected.  And I have no idea what Chrome may keep running in the background, but it's lightning quick compared with Firefox - which will save me back the lost three hours over the next decade or so... 

Or Paintshop Pro. Or Gimp. I used to spend hours teaching myself how to get the best from photo-editing software - but the utility of what's now available for the iPad and iPhone is truly startling.  And any photo-management tool - Picasa in my case - will throw in a load more options too.

None of them will really do the trick if you need layers, complex masks or fine selection control. But for the 95% of photos that I just want to tweak a bit - to change the feel, or correct some basic exposure issues - they're stunning. A few recent examples here - none of these took more than a few minutes, none of them match what I could do with a well-calibrated monitor and £'00s of 'proper' software but, really, who has the time?

So... following the revamp of timfg.com, I finally got round to doing the same for paghamcaravan.co.uk. Probably still got some rough edges, but I can't be arsed to do any more with it unless someone arrives to tell me I've made some glaring mistake.
Not much new here in terms of content - but it's all tidied up, is much easier to maintain and there are some nifty Photosynth panoramics of the insides.

Al sent me a link from the Guardian Lifestyle section earlier in the week - a subtle hint about getting away from technology and spending some quality time with the family.  All I can say is... 'Hmmmmmmm...' :

Mind you, I did have to put down my iPad and pick up the iPhone to take this picture...