July 2021

All right children, settle down. Uncle Dick is going to tell you how you can have fun on a rainy day with your camera.  First go to the camera cupboard and get the equipment out. Then have a good look at it. a. Is it covered in bits of fluff, cat hair, and Doritos crumbs? You can spend the morning with a soft cloth, some cotton buds, and possibly a wet wipe. Do not open the camera - gently get all the external crud off it. Then go look into your gadget bag or camera box and see where the gunge came from in the first place. Vacuum, sponge, and brush as necessary to expunge the demons. If you find old film tab ends that say Kodachrome A you might consider doing this sort of maintenance a bit more often. b. Is the battery dead? Try charging it. If the charger refuses to do anything investigate whether it will boost your spare battery. Some chargers cannot recognise a battery that has been left to go too flat - seeing it as a foreign...

You may remember the famous scene from the 60's Oliver Twist movie when the the little hero bravely went up to the beadle at the workhouse and asked for more gruel. I'm not sure of the exact passage in the Dickens original, but I suspect the end result was the same; he got thrashed and starved. I've taken it as my model for family relations...

That's not a typo. Principals was what I wrote. In this case we grasp the principals of the computer design teams for Macrohard and Rutabaga - the people who decide what your next Rutabaga or Macrohard computer will look like - firmly by the throats, and explain what we want. a. We want the foot of the desktop computer to be wider and deeper. This may seem to be counter-intuitive. Everything these days is meant to be slimmer and smaller. But be realistic - go to the mirror - are you slimmer and smaller than you used to be? Is your desk slimmer and smaller? Not if you are actually doing any work on it. Mine is the size of the flight deck of the NIMITZ and even now I'm contemplating folding the wings on the graphics tablet to make it fit better. In short, we have bigger desks, and multi-level desks. The footprint that the Rutabaga rests on can be bigger to give the screen a lot more stability. b. On that stable base, you can add ports. You can thunder, lightning, or be...