I’ve never been much of a fan of karaoke. Whenever I’ve been dragged to a karaoke bar on a night out it tends to be exactly the same. A string of drunk guys reading out the words in monotone, doing a great job of killing songs I previously liked or half a dozen women at a time wailing out “It’s Raining Men” about as tunelessly as can be, albeit at a very high pitch. Then there’s invariably the bit when your friends demand that you go up and perform, despite having been shouting over the noise all evening and my voice having gone completely. In short, I’ve never had a good time at a karaoke night. Until now.

Some friends and I meet up every year to camp in a field near my mate Ade’s home town, have a barbecue, play some frisbee, then hit the town of Clitheroe for a drunken night out. So that’s what we did on Saturday night. Now you can probably guess the next bit - while trailing around the pubs of Clitheroe someone found out that there was a karaoke night nearby and suggested with the typical enthusiasm of a karaoke lover that we should GO THERE RIGHT NOW!!! Which we did.

So we turn up and as usual there are a few people singing off key and normal service is resumed. Or so I thought. Then a couple of the guys I was out with sang a couple of songs, one was OK, the other was actually pretty good. The night wore on and a few people did some reasonable renditions of classic sing-a-long tunes before some shy looking guy came up to the microphone and blew everybody away! This guy had an amazing voice and could really sing - certainly good enough to get through the rounds of X Factor. He was so good that I pitied the fool who went up next. It’s one thing to have a bunch of dunk guys and gals singing off key but it’s quite another when someone comes along who can actually sing and raises the bar unrealistically high! (Turns out he’s actually in a band with an album coming out soon which explains a thing or two!).

But what really surprised me was that he wasn’t the only good singer in the house. Another guy came along and he also had a great voice, hit all the right notes and was just superb. Then a girl after him was just as good! It was as though this karaoke night had decided to bring in some ringers and make the rest of us feel inadequate - if that was the case then mission accomplished!

I’ve been to quite a lot of karaoke nights over the years but never have I encountered so many people with great singing voices. Clitheroe may be famous for having the smallest Norman keep in England but it also seems to have an unnaturally high concentration of good singers per head of population as far as I’m concerned too. And it’s a fun place for a night out!

Right, I’m off to practise singing “Angels” by Robbie Williams for next time…

I’ve been an avid user of SnagIt for a few years now. It’s a great tool for taking screenshots of things and adding boxes, arrows and a variety of effects to explain something. It’s fantastic for putting together documentation or explaining to someone how to use a piece of software. You click a button and it captures either a window or you can draw a box around what you’re interested in. You can then annotate it all you want and save it in the format of your choice. It’s quick, simple and powerful. Well, that is until SnagIt 9.

First of all, let’s look at SnagIt 8:

SnagIt 8 is simple. The tools you need are on the left, such as boxes, arrows, highlighter, text and so forth. The image you’ve captured is in the middle and all effects are on the right such as resizing the image, adding a drop shadow, a torn effect (which is what I’ve used), adding a caption and so on. I frequently capture an image, draw some boxes, arrows and text on it, then add an edge effect - usually that torn paper one - then resize it and save it. Since everything is in one place it takes the minimal number of mouse clicks, all the tools such as the arrow tool remember the settings I’d used before (such as the colour, thickness and depth of shadow) so once I’ve used SnagIt one time it’ll remember everything from then on. Simple.

Now let’s look at SnagIt 9:

The first thing to note is that it uses the fancy new Ribbon control that was introduced by Microsoft in Office 2007 (it’s the strip at the top of the dialog labelled Draw, Image, Hotspots, Tags, etc. and when you click on one it reveals a bunch of related controls). When Microsoft introduced the ribbon a lot of people complained - people hate change after all. However Microsoft put a great deal of effort into deciding what controls to put on which section of the ribbon so that commonly used controls lived next to each other and were easy to discover. After struggling with it for a bit myself I have to admit that Office is far better for the new ribbon. Sadly I can’t say the same about SnagIt.

While the ribbon looks sexy in SnagIt, it’s pretty clear that not a great deal of thought went into deciding what goes where. OK, there may have been a lot of thought about it, but unlike the Office team TechSmith didn’t have the usability statistics to see how people actually use the product. And in a straw poll of one person (me) I have to say that SnagIt 9 has actually made my life harder and as a result I’ve rolled back to version 8 - the first time I’ve ever preferred an older product over a new one.

Take my standard workflow. I’ll capture an image, draw some boxes and arrows, resize it, add a torn edge effect and save. In SnagIt 8 I’d do the following (and I’m assuming I’ve run through the process previously and SnagIt has saved my preferences):

1. Capture the image
2. Click the ‘box’ tool and draw a box
3. Click the ‘arrow’ tool and draw an arrow
4. Click the ‘Resize Image’ button on the right and choose the size
5. Click the ‘Edge Effects’ button then choose ‘Torn Edge’
6. Save image

In SnagIt 9, things are no longer as simple. Now I have to do the following (and note that I’m assuming I’ve run through the process before so SnagIt should really remember my presets like SnagIt 8 does):

1. Capture the image (same as before)
2. Click the ‘Draw’ tab
3. Click the ‘box’ button and find that it’s chosen the default one and not the one I want so I have to…
4. Click the drop-down next to the styles to find one I’ve saved before in ‘Quick Styles’ noting that after a reboot my quick style has disappeared so I have to…
5. Use the default box and draw it, then click the ‘Outline’ button and choose the red colour I prefer to the default dark red (note that red isn’t in any of the presets)
6. Next click Effects > Shadow > More Shadows so that I can change the default shadow (note that in SnagIt 8 I’d do this once only and it would be remembered for ever more)
7. Click the arrow next to ‘Styles’ to add the current style to ‘Quick Styles’ knowing it’ll be forgotten later
8. Now to draw the arrow I’ll have to go back to point 3, but click the arrow instead of the box button - sigh
9. Ok, time to resize the image, that means clicking the ‘Image’ tab
10. Click Resize > Resize image - pretty much the same as SnagIt 8
11. Now to add the edge effect, as usual it’s forgotten my quick style so I click Edges > Torn Edges and set the values I want (click ‘Add to Quick Styles’ and hope it’s there next time)
12. Save image

Ok, I admit that if they manage to fix the fact that the quick styles keep being lost (and kept in view every time) it’ll make things slightly better, but nevertheless for my workflow - which is nothing special - it would mean a lot of flitting between the ‘Draw’ and ‘Image’ tabs and indeed that’s been the frustration. I love the fact that SnagIt 8 has all the tools you need in one place - changing tabs is like walking into another room and it just slows me down. It’s a real shame as SnagIt 9 has a lot of other cool features like being able to do multiple captures in a row and having a library recording all the snapshots you’ve taken. I gave it a few months to see if I liked it but when I happened to use SnagIt 8 on one of my machines it reminded me how much better it was so I rolled back.

I can see why as a software vendor you’d see the Microsoft Office ribbon and want to put it in your application - if nothing else it looks cool - but it’s easy to forget that the ribbon was designed to handle software containing hundreds of functions such as Word and was laid out with a great deal of care and thought. And while it works well in Word it’s not necessarily of benefit to applications with a couple of dozen functions. In the case of SnagIt it takes a light, quick and simple application and makes it just that little bit less light, quick and simple - which for me has always been its defining strength.

If you don’t take a lot of captures or are happy with all the defaults, then SnagIt 9 may be fine for you. But I’m a bit particular and fussy, so all that new GUI just gets in my way and means I’m better sticking with SnagIt 8. Bah humbug!

They say you don’t really know a person until you walk in their shoes but I think one way to get a feel for a person is to see what they keep in their wallet. I’m not exactly sure what it reveals about you but I thought I’d document the contents of my wallet so you can see what’s in there and what it says about me.

So taking them from the top, here’s what you can see:

1. £11.33 including a £10 note with ‘968′ written on it (no idea why).
2. $11 US, $20 Australian and one Scottish pound note. The first two from when I’ve visited those countries and the latter is to prove that Scottish pound notes (which have been phased out now) actually existed!
3. West Yorkshire metro card (expired) complete with dodgy photo of me looking like I’ve just escaped from a lunatic asylum (I’ve tried to recreate the crazed look but never managed it).
4. Picture of my good lady and me taken a few Christmases ago (can be seen in the clear view section of my wallet).
5. The wallet itself - container of all else in the photo. Made by Animal.
6. Various receipts. I keep them after I buy things until I get too many then just throw them out. I should probably have a system and keep the ones from larger cost items but I don’t. Bad John!
7. Some Moo cards. If only I had someone to give them to…
8. Some dodgy photo booth photos - everybody should have some!
9. An AA card, credit card, Morrisons miles card (even though I never shop there), nectar card, debit card and (essential) starbucks card.
10. Some first class stamps (only one left) and a note from my good lady reminding me that she loves me!
11. A security card to get into my office (which I’ve never used).
12. Airline tickets from my 2003 trip to New Zealand - the first time I ever flew business class - which was a wonderful holiday.
13. Tickets from a trip my good lady and I took to Warwick Castle in 2000. It was early days for us and we had a fantastic time!
14. Global Video card (everybody has one but I’ve not used it in years) and a membership from some sports bar in Leeds I’ve not been to in years.

I guess my first thought is that I’m quite sentimental considering how many things are in there that are there purely to evoke memories! So what do you think it says about me? And what’s in your wallet?!

So it was my 34th birthday on Tuesday and I’m a bit old to throw lavish parties and expect fabulous presents. These days I like to have a low-key day, not “celebrate” as such, but just do the sort of things I like doing normally. We went to see The Dark Knight on Saturday at the local cinema but foolishly underestimated how popular it still was - we couldn’t get in! Instead we saw Wall-E (which I actually wanted to see anyway) and it was fantastic (including a couple of noticeable references to the classic Silent Running in there which it owes a lot to). It’s amazing how Pixar manage to get you so emotionally attached to something that has no facial features at all! But that still left The Dark Knight to see…

So we looked at our diaries (well, metaphorically speaking as I’ve never been any good at keeping a diary up to date) and decided that we might as well go on Tuesday night, which also happened to be my birthday. Seemed like a nice way to “celebrate” and sounded good to me. Whenever friends asked me what I was doing on my birthday I’d say “it’s great, we’re going to see The Dark Knight and I can’t wait!”. Until my birthday comes along and my good lady returns home from work with a surprise…

We’re not going to see The Dark Knight at all! We’re going out for a special meal at our local Aagrah curry house with our friends Ben and Anna - it had been planned for weeks! Now normally if that was sprung on me I’d have been immediately thrilled and punching the air (well, probably not punching the air per se, but metaphorically punching the air). Except it was a double surprise. On the one hand I was going out for a delicious meal, but on the other I’d spent the day looking forward to seeing the film, made sure I’d eaten throughout the day as I knew we weren’t going to have a big meal (since we were off to the cinema) and now I wasn’t. Of course if you’d given me a choice of seeing the film or having a meal with my friends I’d have taken the meal every time!

But my first question to my good lady was: “why did you tell me we were going to the cinema? Why didn’t you just not say anything?”. If it was the other way round and I was planning the surprise I’d have made sure that she didn’t make plans (maybe hinting that we were doing something) or just not mentioned anything at all - perhaps said I was having my legs done on Tuesday night so not to go and book cinema tickets (well, that’s what she’d have said, I’d have probably said I was doing a power workout or something more manly).

It turns out that she’s a terrible liar, no doubt as a result of her being such a fair and honest person whereas I’m an excellent liar and, eh, also a fair and honest person (I wouldn’t lie to you!). So I’ve explained to her for future reference that the key to success in fabricating a lie or keeping something from someone is to not compound it by adding another lie on top. For one thing that just makes it more difficult to remember but for another it just makes things more complicated. Sometimes the best way to lie is to just say nothing at all.

And for the record it was a delicious meal and I enjoyed it far more than I would have done had I gone to the cinema. We’re going to see the film on Saturday and this time I’ll be booking the tickets, just to make sure. Oh yes, and I’m an ungrateful git. But you probably worked that out already!

I’ve spent the past couple of years putting a lot of work into John’s Background Switcher but neglecting another utility I wrote called John’s Image Converter. I originally created it to provide a quick way to scale down photos for emailing and using on my website. I had some cool ideas to make it a lot more useful but never seemed to sit down and implement them.

I finally had a few spare days and evenings, put a bit of work in and am now ready to launch John’s Image Converter 2. The sales pitch goes something like this…

“Have you ever needed to quickly shrink down a photo so that it’s small enough to email to a friend? Or wanted to take a folder full of holiday pictures and resize them all at once? Or maybe you’ve seen the snapshot scrapbooks that John’s Background Switcher creates and wanted to make one from photos of your children but don’t want to change your background? Well the unimaginatively named John’s Image Converter is the answer to all of the above and more!”

One of the things people have asked for time and again was a way to convert a whole folder full of images - maybe you’ve got a bunch of photos from your fancy 10 megapixel camera and want to send them scaled-down to your friends. That would mean sending an email with 200MB of attachments or tediously resizing them one at a time. Now you just fire up John’s Image Converter, pick the folder of photos, create a new folder where you want to scale them to and set the maximum size (or percentage to resize them), click ‘Convert’ and you’re done:

I also thought to myself that it would be quite cool to re-use the work I did in JBS to produce montage images (like snapshot scrapbooks and photo mosaics) so that you can create your own montages without having to use John’s Background Switcher (heck, maybe you just like having the same background all the time!). Now you can:

Anyway, John’s Image Converter is completely free so you’ve got nothing to lose by giving it a try. You can download it here!

I mentioned before that I have an all-or-nothing approach to reading books where if I read the first in a series I’ll become obsessed and read them all. So way back in September of 2007 I was on holiday and picked up the first Discworld book by Terry Pratchett - a series of (currently) 36 books. I’d heard for years that they were pretty good but was always daunted by the fact that he’d been writing two of them a year for over 15 years so it would be a lot of work reading them all. No sooner had I read the first book - The Colour Of Magic - than I started the second and knew I was hooked.

So here I am 10 months later and I’ve just finished the 22nd book in the series! As you can see from the picture that’s quite a lot of books. I’ve been buying them from Amazon Marketplace for a pound and have really enjoyed them.

I’ve not been much of a fan of fantasy novels but the thing that appeals to me about the Discworld books - apart from the humour which has made me laugh out loud many times - is the way Pratchett uses the fantasy world he’s created as a way of making you think about our world and the things we accept and consider normal. In a reality where the world sits on the back of four elephants standing on top of a giant space turtle, where magic, a Guild of Assassins, witches, flying carpets, a scythe carrying Death with a dark sense of humour and the Death of rats is normal, he manages to show how chaotic and senseless our world often is.

For instance any member of the Guild of Thieves who robs you makes sure to leave you a receipt (which you can present to another member to ensure you don’t get robbed too frequently) but anybody committing a robbery who’s not a guild member or breaks the guild rules can be assured of an early “retirement” at the hands of the guild. Where crime is organised and self-governing people know where they stand and don’t have to live in fear. It’s crazy, but not as crazy as the world in which we live.

Pratchett is very good at making observations about the belief system of us humans, how we make sense of the world and how our imagination is what brings things into existence. In Hogfather he talks about how as children we have to believe in little lies like the Toothfairy and the Hogfather (a somewhat rougher version of Father Christmas) so that when we grow up we can believe in the big lies like justice and mercy. If we don’t believe in them - despite not being able to show any evidence that they exist - then how do we make them come to be? Once you get past the magic, the trolls, the elves (who’re evil in his world), etc. you realise that Pratchett is a keen observer of the human condition.

The books centre on the city of Ankh Morpork and the people who live in and around it. While you don’t have to read the books in sequence you do feel some progression of the various characters as they come in and out of the story lines. Death - probably the most interesting character - starts off as the cold grim reaper but as he watches humans he starts to grow fond of them, tries to better understand them and changes through the series (I was going to say he ‘warms to them’ but that wouldn’t really fit the image of a tall skeleton in a black robe!).

How Pratchett manages to come up with fresh and interesting stories for each book I don’t know - it’s an incredible feat of writing. But I’m still enjoying them and looking forward to catching up to him in the next year. He may be able to write two books a year but I can read a lot more than that!

I always make a habit of fixing all known show-stopping bugs in JBS (especially crashes) before I release a new version as invariably the longer you leave these things the worse they get. So when I released version 3.4 I  patted myself on the back thinking “this is the most solid release yet”. No sooner did I think that than I found a bug in the newly implemented Facebook code that I decided to fix immediately and release (hoping nobody would notice).

I started work on version 4 and then a number of crashes came in (when JBS crashes it lets you send in a crash report that gets sent to me so I can see what went wrong - see right - it’s invaluable). There weren’t a great deal of crashes, but what was interesting was that mostly they were not for the version I’d released but from older versions people were still using - and they were crashes that hadn’t happened before. None of them happened more than 10 times so compared to the number of JBS users out there they’re pretty infrequent - but nevertheless they ticked me off.

So I decided before really getting into version 4 I’d do a bug fix release and call it 3.5 (in the meantime a few bugs did come in for 3.4 so it became well worth doing). One of the other things that’s become clear is that some first-time users can’t work out how to use JBS. Once I explain to them that you pick where your photos are stored, then define which ones to use, then a lightbulb goes off in the head and they understand. So I’ve written a short ‘Quick Start Guide‘ which appears in the knowledge base and in the JBS help file. Hopefully that’ll stop me repeating myself and explaining how to use JBS!

Anyway, I’d recommend any current JBS user upgrades to the latest version so go and download John’s Background Switcher and have a look at the release notes here.

I cobbled together the design for this site a few years ago and had been gradually tweaking it, changing the banner graphics, the colour scheme and such things ever since. When I switched to Wordpress last year I promised myself that when I had a bit of time I’d sit down and create a new design that was more personal to me. That time never materialised so I finally just sat down and did it anyway! If you’re reading this in an RSS reader you might want to visit my site and see it for yourself. Here’s the before and after picture:

I’m no graphic designer by any stretch of the imagination but I thought that rather than pay someone else to do it or use a standard template I’d give it a go myself to see what I could come up with.

One of the first things I wanted to do was widen the main content area of the pages so I could insert bigger photos (which is particularly useful as I’m retrospectively importing all my old photos into the site - more about that another time).

Taking the design of sites like Matt’s and the Web Designer Wall as my inspiration I decided to go down the image-heavy, non-minimalist, non-corporate route (it is the era of broadband after all). At one point I toyed with the idea of a minimalist design like Mark Pilgrim’s but in the end my ego got the better of me and I decided to try to put as many elements of my life in as possible. So here’s an explanation of what I came up with from top to bottom:

• The background picture is this photo of Goatfell which I took on holiday on the Isle Of Arran last year. It is of course in my home country of Scotland!
• The photos at the top are some of my favourites I’ve taken around Yorkshire - the place I’ve lived for the last 9 years (I can’t believe it’s that long) and a wedding photo is hidden in there too (you can just see my right shoe).
• My keyring goes everywhere I do and frankly I’ve never had a better one. 1GB of USB storage, scissors, knife, screwdriver, torch and pen built in? Swiss perfection! Or maybe I’m just a geek…
• Anybody who’s ever worked with me might notice that I never use a notepad - instead I just use bits of paper (invariably torn paper) to scribble on, which is why the design features plenty of torn paper.
• I have a thing about highlighter pens. Whenever I start a new job one of the first things I do is seek out a nice highlighter which I’ll use probably once the whole time I’m there! Hence the hover-over highlighting in the menu bar and the headings on the sidebar (yes, I really did draw a line with a highlighter pen and scan it in, I couldn’t think of a better way).
• Since my eyes aren’t what they used to be I get tired staring at black text on white all the time, so I’ve gone with textured paper for the main background - although I’ve stuck with white on my discussion forum for old time’s sake.
• I’m obsessed with coffee so that’s a picture of a cup of Jamaican Blue Mountain I was drinking yesterday at the bottom of the page - it was delicious!
• Finally, my good lady always complains that I never dust the house. She’s often written my name in dust and I swear I never see it (and conclude that dust is invisible to me). So for her I’ve gone with that grainy, grungy, dusty look, although it looks fine to me!

There are a few other tweaks throughout the site that I won’t go into but I must admit I’m really pleased with the result. Rather than having a plan I just fired up Photoshop and started working away, trying different things to see what worked with this being the eventual result. It took about 5 evenings from start to finish. Hopefully I’ve produced something original and unique that’s specifically tailored to me. And I did it all without resorting to putting a picture of me in it - yes!

Maybe I’ve been spoiled over the years by free software updates on the various iPods I’ve owned but when Apple charged £12.99 for their ‘January Software Update’ on my iPod Touch I was a bit ticked off. Since it included a few new applications I paid the money and subsequently haven’t used any of them at all - a stock ticker, note taker, email client, weather app and mapping application turned out to be completely useless to me as I use my iTouch for playing music 99.9% of the time. Don’t get me wrong though, I still love my iTouch as much as I did when I wrote this article saying how much I loved it.

There’s been a lot of furore over the new App Store where you can actually buy 3rd party applications for your iPhone and iTouch so I thought I’d go and have a look. I’m sure there are some fun games and other interesting things there, but when I plugged in my iTouch I was presented with the following message:

So if I want to even try out some of the free applications I actually have to purchase new software do I? And I’ll bet that if someone buys a brand new iTouch today they’ll get the 2.0 software included for free, just like those bought after the January software update I mentioned above did. No thanks Apple.

Out of curiosity I clicked the ‘Learn More’ button to see how much they were trying to squeeze out of us iTouch and iPhone owners but smiled when I was presented with the following:

Mwa ha ha - serves them right! I’m certain Apple will make a fortune from the myriad applications on the App Store that they’ll be getting a cut of the sale prices from, but it just seems a bit avaricious to me to charge for the software update to run them. So on general principle I won’t be upgrading my iTouch to the 2.0 software and as a result I won’t be trying out any of the no doubt wonderfully pointless applications. Sorry John, but sometimes I have to draw the line somewhere, even with Apple!