David Allen Wizardgold's Posts

Now it is not me talking in a camp way. Just chatting about the goings on at the campsite where I work and also about my latest writing project.

The campsite is heaving this evening with loads arriving from Barcelona. There are people leaving and people arriving and it is the height of the season. I talk about apps I have been putting on my iPad and iPhone. Molto - An email client that is a bit different and Overcast - A podcast player that is kind of innovative. I don't go into a lot of detail but give a bit of an overview

I like to make recordings for the Audioboo while I am sitting in my car or maybe on one of the park benches having a break from work at the campsite by the beach. It can be quite interesting at times to sit there and watch the world go by, including some of our guests at the campsite. Today I talk about an old lady at the campsite who has a boyfriend who is actually ancient. He always looks completely unsteady on his feet and he looks like he might get blown over by the smallest gust of a wind. As I record this podcast they are out walking their dog called Boira which is the word in Catalan for fog. There are groups of kids walking around on the beach and I talk about how I find it interesting to watch how individuals operate within a group of people. I prefer to interact in smaller groups of people rather than larger groups were I find that nobody really gets to do anything that they want to do. To a certain extent people in large groups are like sheep that will follow around the dominant person in the gr

Learning what I can do with Siri. Found out that I could get directions to work from Siri and that I could correct the way it pronounces names when it gets it wrong. Mind you, even after getting it to correctly pronounce the name in the system when I asked it to send an email message to that person again it managed to get it wrong what's more. I suppose Siri is still in the infancy stages of its development and is going to be getting better bit by bit so we will have to give it some leeway. Even so despite this small problem I have been very impressed in the way that it works and I expect to use it more often.

What a June! I had a party to organise for my wife and my mom came for the party and my son was supposed to come too, but the bloody French air traffic controllers put a big spanner in the works. The birthday party turned out te successful and my wife had a great time, Our friend Karl came to the party and also had a great time - Only thing is - Karl died from a heart attack the next day. So the end of the month was all about dealing with th eloss of my very best friend

I work at a campsite in the town of Platja d'Aro on the Costa Brava Catalonia and here are a few snippets how things work in the campsite. I am a dog person and I talk about the german couple with the blind dog that left this morning and also about a Swiss couple with a lovely German Shepard type of dog. The dog is a big baby and cries when he can't see his owners.

it is fairly inevitable that if you get into photography you're going to be a bit of a geek to. There is so much good technology that you can use and play with them making your marvellous photos. You won't be able to resist using the manual settings even though 95% of the time you would get good photographs by using the automatic settings. There will be new lenses that will tempt you and you software that you can use to creatively enhance your photos before you share them. I say that digital photography is now at a point where it is complete and utter fun being a geek photographer.

Listening to a radio play written by Jessica Brown, it was called Lost or Stolen. It made me think about what it is like to be a teenager and learning to get along with other people and working out how other people think and operate. Much of the dialogue was of the inner voice of each of these two characters and the conflict came from the difference between what they were thinking and what they ended up actually saying. I also listen to other podcasts such as the Science Weekly, the Mac Cast, Wired Magazine Podcast and even the agricultural drama, The Archers. I am working on writing my own stories at the moment and so I find it very interesting to see how other writers, authors have put together their novels or plays. It seems that to be a writer you have to be a cruel son of a bitch to your protagonists to create as much conflict as possible in the passage to the climax of the book.

I had a great year finding out how to do things with Android devices and I wrote an article the other day which was very positive. Then since then I have been tempted back to the iOS Apple way by some applications that I can only get on Android. I have Omnifocus on the iPad and there is now a new version for the Mac which syncs across. Not ever going to be on Android. I miss Twisted Wave and other audio apps on iOS and of course there is the fact that the movie editing on Android is rubbish. I would be tempted by a Nexus 5 for a new phone but what if Apple come out with a bigger iPhone later this year, I do like a bigger phone as I have with the Galaxy S3. Then there is the iPad Mini which would do everything I need. less messing about sliding between platforms. Having said that, sometimes it can be good to have choices of which device to use.

Taking a photo of the moon and making some adjustments to it in applications on my Mac. I used Intensify Pro and also Pixelmator. Pixelmator has some great tools that you can use to do all sorts of things to bitmaps converting photographs into digital art.

Talking about web SEO problem I have been sorting out. A broken spoke on the bicycle and having to get the car through the test. About my photography book which is coming along nicely and working with my Mac.

I am working on a book containing all of the articles about photography I have written lately. I am also adding some content that has never been seen before. There will also be links to the video tutorials I have produced. In this I talk about how I am loving the NEX6 camera I am now using.

I don't like technology and I just bought a 27 inch monitor to add to my iMac on my computer desktop. it really is quite wonderful to have such a lot of screen space to put my computer stuff on the screen.

Back to using an iPhone because the Android Audio app is terrible. At least it was the last time I tried it. I had to find work arounds to make it work.

I have just got myself an electric bicycle, in fact I bought a second-hand mountain bike and got an electric bicycle kick to fit to it and I'm very pleased with it. It means that I'm more likely to get out on his bicycle to get to work and back during the summertime. Without the electric motor fitted to the bicycle I am more likely to get into the car rather than the ride to work. I mean, who wants to get to work and be all tired and sweaty? Then on the way back home the last part of my journey is a climb up a very steep hill. I know that if I had to climb the steep hill every day of the week after being standing about work all day there is no way that I will do it. I will be getting the car out and spending the money on diesel same as I did before. I put a post up onto Google plus about getting an electric bicycle and there was a guy who thought that there are no good reasons, one might be just one why anybody should have an electric bicycle. He even reckons that you should call it something else other th

often you will find that when you are dealing with larger companies you get worse customer service. Everytime you ring up you get talking to a different person and you feel like none of them are helping you when there is a problem that needs to be sorted out. Last year the company Nuance decided to delay giving me the software I had just paid them for guess they wanted to do a security check for some weird reason and then this year when I do the next upgrade I have another different problem with them. This time the serial number which is another thing that is a pain in the bottom for the general user of software, doesn't work and I was the whole day not being able to use the software I had just paid for. In the end out of desperation while waiting for them to deal with the problem I gave myself the ability to use the software in trial mode. At least it is working now and I can once again do some dictation and I'm quite happy because the new version of the software is much better than the previous version.