My Sony Stereo system has given up the ghost

After many years of excellent service it has retired to the cellar room, and I've ordered a reasonable replacement, an Onkyo NR535 5.2 Receiver, together with a Jamo SUB 260 Woofer.

The Sony SS-A701 Front speakers are still going strong, with 45 Hz to 20 KHz response :)

I spent a couple of hours searching for the latter's specifications without luck, but eventually found them inside the old Stereo manual, which I nearly threw out. There was a single sheet which I'll copy here in case it'll help someone else locate them some time in the future..

I'll continue in a few days time with a mini review of my experience setting the new system up.

Where have you been Fraser?

I''m afraid 2013 was spent mostly with visits to the Drammen Eye Clinic, where I had cataracts fixed in both eyes, trips to a skin specialist in Asker concerning an itchy spot on my back, which she operated on. The biopsy showed more needed to be removed, so next it was a trip to Bærum Sykehuset Clinic, first for a check by the surgeon who would operate, then for quite a deep operation on the same area of my back to remove everything.

Once that was done, I was able to start a treatment for the results of too much sun in Singapore back in the 1950s, and later in Qatar during the early 60s. The treatment was horrific, turning my forehead into something you didn't want to look at! It took a month, and left me with clear baby skin on my forehead :)

The repeat trips to Drammen concerning my right eye, proved to be a Lamellar Macular Hole, and unfortunately could not be fixed, unless some major issue crops up. I can't complain though, as my colour vision is phenomenal, and with 20/20 cheapo glasses I can read really clearly close up :)

Otherwise, 2013 was the return of my interest in photography, triggered by Susan purchasing a new Nikon D7100. I had done quite a bit of reading about the various alternatives, and decided in the end to go Micro Four Thirds, by buying another Panasonic Lumix, the GX7. Then in quick succession I came across another Lumix, a demo LZ200 Superzoom going for a song at Komplett.no.

Both of these gave me lots of opportunity to add new neuron circuitry..

Later, I came across another bargain, this time for 5K, an Olympus OM-D E-M5 with a good Kit lens. This camera has a fantastic Optical Image Stabilization system, which operates over 5-axes or directions, and takes super photographs.

Of course, all told the above cost a bit, though much less and lighter than typical Canon DSLR gear.

More about this anon :)

PS The next episode will be about my purchase of a Samsung TV (another bargain) in order to try Google's Chromecast.

The Lumia 1020 has arrived

Yesterday I walked down to Nærsnes bay, where a few boat owners were putting finishing touches to their yachts. Luckily there were still a few boats on the water, and it was a perfect Fall morning.

I had both my LX5 Compact and the 1020 with me, so I could compare photo quality.

This morning I was surprised to find an amazing panorama picture Google+ had automatically produced from two of the snaps!

I'll try and import it here. First attempt looked OK but changed later into some odd negative symbol..?

Nærsnes Bay

My experience with a Lumia 520

As I am thinking seriously about buying a Lumia 1020 I thought it would be an idea to get to know what WP8 is like, in case I hated it after paying a bomb for a 1020.

Then I saw a special price for a black one at NOK 999. Pretty good! So I ordered it and hopped over to MyTrendyPhone to pick up some coloured back covers and a spare battery.

It arrived last Saturday 17th August in a tiny box.. opened it up and immediately had finger trouble with the SIM card. Finally solved that and away it went :)

Must say the Tiles interface is quite intuitive, as is the flip to the side for the Apps drawer, one of which is Settings, which naturally got quite a bit of use on Sunday. Battery use seemed to be impressively low, until later.

I use Skydrive with my 808 Pureview, so I installed that. I use Dropbox everywhere, so I found BoxFiles for Dropbox and added that. Then I noticed a comment saying that not only did apps get installed to the Phone memory, but the App files remained there too, so it was best to use the SD card for that.

Thats when I discovered my Prime CON with the WP8 OS.. the Store only shows you SD card IF you have manually downloaded apps to your PC and dragged them across to the SD card root!!! What...

Hopefully Microsoft will resolve this in the very near future as there is an enormous number of unhappy users asking for this 'feature' ASAP.

So, I again downloaded the few apps I had already installed, deinstalled those, and after restarting the phone was able to see my manually added apps under SD in the Store window.. yes!

All was plain sailing from there on in, though I quickly learnt that adding too many apps as Tiles soon had the battery running down.

I like the phone. Readability is great. The camera is OK in daylight. Things are pretty easy to set up, Gmail works, and a Software Update to GDR2 is just around the corner...

So bring on the Lumia 1020 'camera' :)

Edit: There was a problem I forgot. After using the camera OK with the Black cover I swapped to the Red one, and when I had visitors, we discovered the Camera button did not function. All but the Red worked fine, but I must say, the covers do NOT meet Nokia Quality in my opinion. Perhaps its a Chinese issue, as all these parts are made there.

Unloadable Macbook AIR cleaned up

The MB AIR on loan to Hege & Ada was reported as being unusable , and sure enough there were only 800MB free out of the 80GB drive!

To access my account I started in Safe Mode by holding Shift during the boot process. Once there, I started looking for things to delete. Ada's Movies folder held quite a few GB, so I moved that over to my Black WD drive for a while.

Finally. I made a new Admin account, checked it worked OK before de-authorizing my iTunes account on the AIR, deleting the Music folder contents.. that got rid of a LOT, then from the new account I deleted 'gfraser' leaving the Home folder's remaining contents for the time being.

Have completed the job by making a fresh Superduper backup to Black 1 :)

Left eye operation and other findings

On the 23rd May I had the 2nd eye op. at around 10 in the morning. To me it felt like the first, i.e. lots of preparatory eye drops which sting at first, but go over fast enough, then another lot, and oh yes a tablet at the beginning to calm me down, and then quite a long actual operation. 30-45 minutes (?).

Eventually it was over, and I hobbled out with a shield over my left eye to where Susan waited.

Next day I was able to remove the shield, clean up carefully around the eye, and see clearly, and very brightly again :) Now I could compare the eyes for colour, brightness, and clarity, and the right eye clearly has a problem, which I would explain to the Doctor who carried out the operation later..

Off to Drammen again for 14:00 check up. The left eye was perfect!

I explained the problem with the right eye to the Doctor using a clip of bar code. He took me next door, where there was an Optical Coherence Tomography machine, sat me down in front of it, and ran a short test which produced an image similar to that shown on this link ( http://www.oyesenteret.no/problemer-etter-operasjon-22 ) see CME / Cystoid maculaødem.

Happily there is a good chance the Yellox eye drops he prescribed will sort out the inflammation in a few weeks, and the vision will clear up completely.

Later I heard Ted Salmon was having a cataract operation in the UK, and was amazed when he reported that his took no more than 10 to 20 minutes! What are they skimping?

Edit on 24th June: its a month since I started taking the Yellox eye drops twice a day, and I'm afraid there has been no significant improvement so far :( there is to be another check on July 2nd when I guess another OCT image will be run to show how much change there has been..

NB: I had to email this post from my iPad where I had prepared it, but for some reason it was not getting posted..?

Getting Contacts onto the 808 Pureview

This may not sound like much of a task. "Just make a new Mailbox with Nokia's Exchange ActiveSync and use your Gmail contacts." Yes, tried that many times, but there is a problem somewhere causing EAS to repeat asking for my password, and getting nowhere. Grrrr!

As my new 808 is SIMless for the time being, but has Skype installed, I needed to get my 100 odd contacts onto the phone some way or other.

Tried three different ways of Exporting Google contacts from my SG Nexus, but they all resulted in either the syncing of a single contact, or nothing at all.

Finally today, I used the Android app Contacts Backup Pro, which allowed either all contacts in a single vcf file (thats what didn't work in the earlier apps) OR all contacts in a zip file! Yes.. that sounded hopeful..

And it was. I transferred the zip file to my iMac, dragged it off Android File Transfer, and copied it to Dropbox. Then on the Samsung PC I was able to use Nokia Suite to Import all of the expanded zip's vcf files in one fell swoop :)

YES, and then it synced automatically to the 808. Nokia Suite has come a long way since the bad old E61 days...

Final test was to see if these contacts showed up in Skype on the 808, and yes, they did. So, though SIMless I can communicate out of the 808. Must try Skype messaging next to see if that is two way..