Technology Grrr, this is what I do not what I tell you to do, a very long rant.

They say there is no fool like an old fool and old fools like me, for the most part, know damned well that if you let your grip on technology slide it will probably rebound horribly.

Anyway this is one of my occasional posts about the state of my technology, as much for my own information in future as for anyone else’s now.

With the announcement of the newest I-Phone to be released at £1,000 and looking at the prices of the various technological options that I can’t afford, combined with the pile of technology accumulated but unused, either because it was never any good or because it is now out of date, I thought it was about time I did another technology post.   

First how badly can things rebound? I suppose the answer to that is what happens when you personally go wrong, waking up in hospital is always a bit of a leveller. Anyone miss reading this, be assured that I haven’t but have met a few people who have recently. Back in the day there used to be the headphones and even if you couldn’t twiddle the knob then someone would do it for you. Hospital wards for the most part used have a TV too. Nowadays what you are most likely to get in terms of entertainment and connection with the outside word is free wifi and the loan of a phone charger. 

If you wake up in hospital without your phone and headphones, you will have to wait until someone brings them and if you haven’t got, can’t use, then it’s the ultimate pits may be long and silent wait for the grim reaper. If this is all too much to consider I can of course sell you a good book that you haven’t read, we really are pretty good on “I really liked book X what else would I like?” so you carry it around unread in case you have issues.

Now I have three children in full time education and work in a shop with my wife, so this means were we to upgrade everyone to the latest I-Phone it would cost £5,000, which isn’t really shop assistant country.

There is also the cost of the other technology, which essentially will only do what a smartphone does, but will sometimes do it, better, faster, louder, larger or wosisname.

I am writing this on a Windows PC with Windows 10 operating system and have just used my mobile phone to take a picture of it, which has automatically uploaded onto the internet and will be already there when I paste this post into blogger and go to add the pictures.

Anyway the last time we replaced five phones was about a year ago, the cost was about £130 each, this was mainly because of the previous Android operating systems and the amount of memory on the phones, rather than breaking them or losing them.

The main issues with mobile phones for us, in descending order, starting with the worst have been, battery life, operating system getting too out of date, not enough memory, physical ware and tare.

Personally I reckon that it is better to get a cheaper new phone than an expensive one secondhand, last time this was 4x  “OUKITEL K6000 Pro 5.5"4G Android 6.0 Octa Core Smartphone 3GB+32GB 16MP Touch ID” obviously a year has passed and this is now a dated phone so probably  not the one to buy now.

The camera is reasonably good and I use it for nearly all of the photos that appear on this blog, although I use A Better Camera app as this means I can lock the camera on infinity and take snapshots outside with out waiting for it to focus.

I have mentioned this phone in previous blog posts, here is the link to them https://thanetonline.blogspot.co.uk/search?q=oukitel

The main pro to it is the battery life, which means it doesn’t go flat on me or my children, so when asked, they are sticking with theirs too.

My wife has a Wileyfox phone which has a better camera, better wifi connectivity but not the long battery life which is the priority for me and the children.

Computer wise for the most part it’s Windows 10 that we use, and looking at the blog statistics it seems that it is Android Phones and Windows computers that most people use.

There has been a change recently with Microsoft, with a shift away from trying to sell you a new operating system to trying to rent you software and it is important to be aware of this.

The main issue if you have a Windows computer is likely to be updates, if you have your computer set on automatically update then this sometimes gets stuck and needs sorting out using the Windows update website. The secondary issue is programs that get downloaded by mistake, mainly virus checkers. Windows 10 has its own virus checker Windows Defender, it’s free and seems to work adequately. The old issue of forgetting of forgetting to untick the box saying “would you also like to install McGonagall’s poetry”

Sometimes you can get rid of these issues and you have to wipe the whole computer and start again. This brings us to the issue of where do you store the stuff that you don’t want to wipe?

Here we are talking about access to a very big computer, either for free or by paying various amounts for the pleasure. This is called cloud computing and I use Google Drive and Google Photos to do this. So what can you do with the cloud. You can use it as backup in case one of you technological lumps beaks or gets lost. You can use it instead of finding the right lead to shift things from one you technological lump to another, or you can have everything going on on several lumps at the same time.  

I was writing this blog post on MS Word mainly because I am lazy and it’s better a capitalisation than Google docs, however come lunchtime and wanting to go on writing it, I pasted it into a Google drive document which I can open on my phone, laptop and this PC in the shop, all at the same time if I want and add to it as I see fit.

So what am I actually using on the tech front at the moment? One smartphone, one fairly ancient Windows 10 computer on my desk in the bookshop, one fairly ancient Windows 10 laptop, one secondhand bridge camera and one folding bluetooth keyboard.

Technology I hardly use but that is still being used, DSLR camera, essentially replaced by the phone camera but still used to take the pictures for the stock on the shelves bookshop site http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/browsethebooks/ Android tablet, taught me to use my phone much better but in the end not used as I use my phone instead of it but now used in the bookshop.

I find that I can do everything on an Android phone that I can do on an Android tablet and as I can access the great big computer at Google can do pretty much everything I can do on the PC or laptop, using that remotely.

I cart around the following bits of wire which allow me to use my phone to charge other people’s devices and for me to connect the bridge camera to the phone so I can publish pictures I have taken with it onto the internet.

Thoughts on the extra tech lumps.

Camera wise, for most things, the camera in the phone is good enough and performs most of what I used various digital cameras for in the past. In most cases I would say that most people would be hard pressed to tell the difference between a shot of Ramsgate Custom House, taken in normal daylight, using a £100 smartphone form one taken using a £1,000 digital camera.

The recent exception to this has been the bridge camera. This really started out because of wearing reading glasses during this summer. I find it much easier to use a camera with a viewfinder that has optical correction.

To explain this further. There is a little knob by the viewfinder that compensates for my reading glasses which means that when I look into the viewfinder, not only can I see what I am taking a picture of, but can read all setting inside. This is no new thing the slr I had in 1972 did the same thing, although I didn’t need reading glasses then.

My dslr is too big and heavy to cart around with my painting equipment, so I too to going into the Cex Shops in the various local High Streets, here is their website https://uk.webuy.com/ and trying any smallish digital camera with a viewfinder, that was under about £50.

What sold me on the Canon Bridge was the zoom. These are all photos taken standing in the same place at the same time using various levels of zoom.

now it may be that the £1,000 phone can do this too, and I think my dslr could with the right lens and a tripod.

The pictures above use a mixture of digital and optical zoom and assume having the camera already set on low enough quality for sensible internet publishing, around 500 KB per picture, if you already have the camera set on maximum quality they you won't get any digital zoom.

The folding keyboard that works with the phone is another essential for me. 

Technophobia bytes the technophobe.

I guess in the world we live in you have to be able to use a computer and smartphone at the most basic level to be employable.

Technophobia is an issue that for the most part involves people who don’t have to contribute anything to the society in which they live and for the most part it eventually rebounds on these people quite badly.

I first came across it when I was a child in the 50s and 60s at that time my father ran the main bookshop in Salisbury and we had a home telephone, something fairly unusual at the time. Having the telephone was in some way related to work and occasionally he would be waiting for an important call. At some time or another this waiting corresponded with a visit from one of those aunts, who seem now to be extinct.

Anyway we all went out leaving the aunt behind with the instruction that my father was waiting for an important telephone call. When we returned and my father asked about the phone, the aunt said. “It rang at half past four, I didn’t answer it as I don’t know how to use a telephone.”

The next time was when I was a teenager and my parents rented out a cottage to a couple who had been tenants there since the time of the ark. This was a no bathroom, gas lighting, no hot water, loo at the bottom of the garden cottage, that my parents wanted to modernise, but the old couple were so resistant to change that my parents gave up and let the old couple carry on living in their timewarp.

The loo at the bottom of the garden was connected to another building that we owned and when this was modernised electric light was put in the loo, despite some resistance. Anyway after a space of about two years of having electric light in their loo the old couple were once again asked about the modernisation, at least replacing the gas lighting in their cottage with electric light. The answer from the old couple was made by the old lady. “I know the electric is there, but we haven’t used it, we is frit of the swish.” Further investigation revealed that when they had been going to the loo during the hours of darkness they had continued to light a candle, despite the presence of the normal electric light. Anyway when the parents had departed I being a teenager and therefore a different species and treated by everyone, my parents, the old couple and so on as a sort of classless entity that it was their duty to educate. So I sat drinking tea with them in front of their coal fire under the gas light, cake was produced, cigarettes were rolled and eventually the conversation came around to the electric light in the loo.

Obviously they used shops and the old chap went to the pub close by all of which were lit by electricity, the weren’t in any way stupid, subsequent visits showed that their sitting room was usually full of other old people drinking tea and chatting about any old thing, in fact they seemed to be having a much fuller social life than me. As a teenager I hung around there quite a lot and learned a fair amount about their lives. It was the switch that frightened them, they had never used one and weren’t going to start any time soon. The best I got out of them was. “We know it’s there if anything happens.”

This particular technophobia had an unfortunate end as the old man became ill and the old lady couldn’t manage to look after him properly, couldn’t carry in the coal to keep the fire going, couldn’t phone anyone up and ask for help, couldn’t plug in an electric fire.         

So does this sort of thing happen with computer technology now?

I know of one old person at the moment who is suffering very badly from refusing to learn to use new technology at the most basic level, I don’t really know the whys and wherefores, whether this was down to fear, bloody mindedness or some other reason.

The elderly couple are involved, they are both intelligent, sometime university graduates, the man uses computer technology and has done certainly since the BBC B came out in the eighties, the woman refused to use any of the new technology including a mobile phone.

A problem for many old people now is memory loss, central to this is not knowing where anyone is, what you have said to them and what they have said to you. This doesn’t seem to normally affect the things you have learnt to do. If you could operate the telephone you normally still can, if you can send a text message or an email, use the TV remote or the dishwasher, you normally still can.

One of the most helpful things in this situation is the stream of text messages on you mobile.

Say, they look something like this:

W where are you

H at church

W when will you be home

H 11.30

W will you buy a newspaper on the way home

H yes

Of course if you get memory loss and you haven’t mastered the new technology first, it is then pretty much impossible to learn.

So W goes to do the crossword, calls for H who isn’t there, so she works out he has gone out. So she telephones him, but as he is at church his phone is on silent and he can’t answer.      

So W telephones M who texts H who says he is at church and will get a paper, then M calls W who has forgotten she called M and has found the paper. Then W goes to do the crossword, calls for H who isn’t there so she works out he has gone out. So she telephones him, but as he is at church his phone is on silent and he can’t answer.  So W calls M who notices that W is getting agitated, and so it goes on.

This goes on and on, writing it on a bit of paper involves going off and looking for a pen and W forgetting she is on the phone. But and this is an important but, as this goes on M notices that W gets more agitated as this all goes on.

Now of course M isn’t a specialist in dementia, but this has been going on for several years and M is pretty much certain that W would be a great deal happier if she had all of the usual streams of messages on her mobile, telling her where her friends and family are and what she has said to them and what they have said to her.       

Now in our extended family there are quite a few old people, and most of the ladies have defaulted to a tablet type smartphone which they keep in their handbags and do most of their computing on. For the most part the men seem to be happiest with fairly clunky computers although obviously as all of the younger family members work they have both.

I guess WhatsApp, with it’s ability to text friends and family all over the world and easily send photos is one of the favourites. Skype of course is another, so if you have friends or family who are technophobes try and sort hem out a bit.

Smartphone wise the cost of a reasonable pay as you go Android phone is less than £50 and internet on mine ee/T-mobile costs me £20 for 6 months, so most people can afford it…

I am pretty sure that computer illiteracy among older people needs to be treated with the same amount of tact, perseverance and resolve that the reading and writing illiteracy would need to be treated.     

You can’t always say what you want

The RaspBerry

I suppose one way or another we are all waiting for a phone call, text message or email and for one reason or another we all have the phone calls, text messages and emails that we can’t or won’t do.

In these days where most people can use various communication devices to send images, I wanted to produce an image that people could send, when they can’t say what they want.

With the Turner Contemporary opening in Margate, where a lot of the art on display is and will be Modern, contemporary and some of it is and will be conceptual art, I wanted also to form some sort of link for the local people, many of whom have contributed towards the cost of this gallery, where they could see some sort of point in the this sort of thing.

If art is anything it has to be about conveying something that can’t be conveyed in words. There is also a sense in which art has to justify itself, show it has some point or purpose, this was easy in the days before photography, but now aspects of art can seem pointless.

The idea here was to produce an item, artwork if you like, that was in a sense both useless and useful and also to explain its purpose clearly.

More pictures of The RaspBerry at http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/raspberry as far as copyright goes help yourselves to the images, no need to ascribe them to me or anything like that.

I did a couple of posts recently with drawings of Tracy Emin and David Cameron in them, that illustrate just how powerful a communication tool art still is. 

In both cases my posts with them were on the first page of Google today here are the screenshots 

I think it fair to say that with Google finding about 43,400,000 webpages for the search phrase David Cameron, without the art aspect my post wouldn’t have featured in the top ten.


Very little in art is entirely original, artists look at other artists work and this influences and inspires what they produce, the primary inspiration for The RaspBerry is a work by the artist Conroy Maddox called Onanistic Typewriter  you can always Google it if you want to know what I mean.


I produced a work called Onanistic Netbook here it is

Art tends to inspire reaction in other artists and two artists I was talking to and photographing this week Andrea Francke and Mary Ikoniadou added further inspiration.

I will do a post about their work and their recent appearance in Broadstairs at a later date, here are a couple of pictures I took of them at the weekend.     

A question that has been floating around here in Thanet since The Turner Contemporary opened is, what is art? And a question that has been put to people in the past is, are you an artist?

There are different answers here of course, one chap quizzed in this way drew freehand a perfect circle another a perfect straight line. No one really seems to have come up with the goods, when it comes to expressing the answer verbally.  

For me being able to draw a picture of someone that is recognisably that person, seems a reasonable qualification. 

Another indicator is putting something one has produced in front of someone who has qualified academically as an artist and having the something pronounced “good” or “OK” in terms of art, this is also something that would suggest one is an artist.

I stopped producing art in any form about forty years ago, mainly because of the trouble it caused, now I have started again and have run a few of the results through some of these criteria.

One problem is that once one starts again it isn’t easy to stop. 

Now we come to one of my concerns about The Turner Contemporary, which is are they pulling off what they hope to achieve, this isn’t quite as simple as are they getting the visitor numbers now?

What I mean here is, in the terms of the parameters of what they hoped to achieve, at the moment an exhibition of contemporary art, is what they are displaying good, average or bad.

Looked at as it were in the way readers of this blog have looked at the various bits of art that I have put there recently, does it work? This is quite easily explained in terms of the pencil sketches of Tracy Emin and David Cameron, regardless of whether you think they were good or bad, if they have changed your visual perception of these people slightly, then they have done what I set out to achieve.

I have only one only one tangible way of measuring the public’s genuine interest in what the gallery is doing and that is by looking at the viewing counters on the various videos they have published online.

The gallery published a video embedded in their website yesterday and since then it has had only 87 viewings I did the same thing with some videos on this blog on Sunday, within 24 hours they had all had several hundred viewings.

Now sitting through four or five minutes of video to the end so that the counter clocks your viewing suggests a genuine interest in the content of the video and my concern is that the genuine interest isn’t as much as it should be.