I have a friend who is a complete music nut. She is forever finding new stuff for me to listen to and while some of it hasn’t quite rocked my world, there are few artists I’ll be forever grateful to her for introducing me to. One of them being Newton Faulkner.

My love of guitar players is well known around these parts. Newton’s guitar style is different to the type I usually go for. As a contrast to the loud, blood-pumping rock of my usual favourites, Newton’s style is relaxed acoustic but not in your traditional style.

This was the video my friend linked me to by way of introduction to Newton:

Playing ‘Teardrop’, his cover of the Massive Attack song which is perhaps better known these days as the theme tune to House.

If that performance doesn’t convince you, maybe his one-man interpretation of Bohemian Rhapsody will?

As for his own compositions, the gorgeous, relaxed tunes are accompanied by some beautifully witty lyrics:

“I feel like a muppet with a drunken puppeteer, but I’ll survive.” – Into The Light

“Tip-toe down the hall, open the door, find out that God is a small sausage roll.” – Full Fat

“I thought by now I could have figured it all out, but now I’m further back, feels kinda stupid.” – Ageing Superhero

And if that doesn’t convince you, maybe the ginger dreadlocks will?

Find out more here:

Hand Built by Robots on Amazon UK

Rebuilt by Humans on Amazon UK

Hand Built by Robots on Amazon US

Rebuilt by Humans on Amazon US

Newton’s Official Site

Torches are always a compromise. The smallest ones are never very bright, and the brightest ones are hardly convenient to carry around. Things have moved on a lot in recent years, with big improvements in LEDs, and better use of lithium and rechargeable batteries, but the compromises are still there. Unless you’re really quite geeky about your gadgets, or you have specific needs (like camping, or walking home after dark) you probably won’t care much what sort of torch you have.

I wanted a torch that was brighter than the one I was using, but not too big. I was willing to carry something bigger, as long as it wasn’t too inconvenient. At that point, I was using a small Fenix torch, that used a single AAA battery. It was small enough to slip almost unnoticed into a pocket, and was surprisingly bright for its size. We live in a 3rd floor (4th to those in the US) flat, with an external metal staircase, so it’s handy to have some light when climbing them on winter nights.

After a bit of reading and thinking, I ended up with the Fenix P2D Premium Q5, which I’ve been very happy with. It’s probably expensive enough to horrify many people, but more expensive torches are available too. Add in the excuse of using some birthday money (or whatever excuse I actually added in to the mix – I forget), and an expensive torch starts to look like a sensible purchase. Maybe not to you, but to a geek like me trying to justify a new toy.

I’d read that it was the size of a thumb. It’s about the width of my thumb, but a bit longer. It fits very neatly in my fist, not sticking out at either end. It’s light enough than holding and carrying it doesn’t feel like an effort. It’s big enough, though, that it would take up a significant amount of space in an already part-filled pocket. It came with a little pouch on a belt loop, so that’s how I carry it, on my belt next to my Swiss Army knife. I can have it in my hand in about one second, so it’s not much hassle to reach for it.

It’s very easy and comfortable to have in hand. In a pocket, it would be quite small on its own, but it’s quite a big thing to add to a pocket that’s already fairly full. For those times when sticking a torch in your mouth is the easiest way to work with both hands, it’s usable, but a bit bigger than you’d want to chew on for too long.

Brightness is even more difficult to describe, but it’s quite impressively bright. On full brightness, when standing on the stairs outside our door, it can light up the ground three floors below quite well. It can light up the houses two long gardens away behind our building. The houses across the street from them, too, but not very noticeably. When standing, it can show up on the ground quite well in daylight, and if I shine it at a 100W light bulb, the bulb throws a clear shadow on the ceiling, even when turned on. It’s 180 lumens, if that helps any.

On full brightness, though, it has two limitations:

• It only lasts for one hour on a battery. Since they’re expensive lithium batteries, burning through one in an evening would be a problem. That’s not so likely to happen, though, because of the second limit:
• After ten minutes of use, it gets hot enough that Fenix warn that the torch or battery could be damaged. It becomes quite uncomfortable to hold.

With a small twist of the top section, though, it drops from ‘turbo’ mode to ‘general’ mode. Gentle presses of the power switch will then switch between three more power levels, giving between 2 hours of use and 30 hours of use from the same battery. Even on the lowest setting, it’s painful to look into the beam, and quite bright enough to see your way around in the dark.

It has a couple of other tricks, too:

• In turbo mode, it can also be set to strobe – very fast flashing of the full power light. Not much use day to day, but you can see why it might be useful for law enforcement and military. In a dark environment, it’s quite disorientating.
• In general mode, the same setting (an extra gentle press of the power button) sets SOS mode – it flashes the morse code for SOS. Probably not very useful halfway up the stairs to a flat in Tiverton, Devon, but could be a nice feature to have if you’re buying it for camping or hiking.

I bought mine from Heinnie Haynes, and I’ve always found them good. It looks like the P2D isn’t a current model any more, but the PD20 looks very similar, so is probably the replacement.

I bought the Fenix Diffuser Lantern at the same time, which is a useful accessory. It’s just a single piece of plastic that fits over the end of the torch, spreading it’s light in all directions. Sam has used it a few times in place of a lamp at her side of the bed, but it would be a very useful camping accessory.

I also stocked up on the NexTorch CR123A batteries, which makes the torch much cheaper to run. At a rough estimate, I seem likely to get through around three or four batteries a year, so the 12-pack will last a long time.

Unless you either obtain some geeky delight from a torch, or go about the sort of activities that really require such standards of light output, you’re unlikely to want to shell out for a torch like this one. If you do fall into either of those categories, though, it’s a very nice little tool/toy. I have no real need for it, but I love it anyway.

I’m not really much of a gamer. I play a bit, but it’s generally ‘casual’ games. I don’t have a console, and I don’t think it would be worth buying one for the bit of gaming I might do. A Wii [: UK, US] might be worthwhile, but we’d have to buy a TV to go with it first, and that’s quite a bit of money.

When I switched to Mac some time ago, I was prepared for the fact that there weren’t as many games available. Before that I’d been using a tablet PC with no CD or DVD drive, which would have been enough to stop many games from working anyway. Age of Empires is the only ‘real’ game I’ve played much of, and even that probably averages out to less than one game every couple of weeks.

All that said, I was still quite glad to see the arrival of Steam for Mac, with a bunch of new games available, and more to follow. Even better, to celebrate the launch, they’ve made Portal free for both Mac and PC for a couple of weeks. Portal is similar to the old platform games we used to play back in the days of 8-bit home computers, but with a big twist. It’s fully 3D, from a first-person perspective. Imagine a first-person shoot-em-up like the old Wolfenstein, Duke Nukem, Unreal Tornament, etc; but instead of running around shooting anything that moves, you’re walking around completing a series of puzzles. In the early stages, at least, there’s very little real peril. Nothing is trying to kill you, and you’ll work the puzzle out eventually. In the stages I’ve reached now, though, things are getting a little more dangerous, with a few ways to die.

The result, for me at least, is a more fun experience. The puzzles are cleverly built, and there’s sometimes more than one way to beat them. It’s very immersive, and takes a bit of thought.

Steam itself seemed quite flaky at first, crashing several times as I tried to have a look around the store. It was updated the next day, though, and again the day after, and seems much better already. I’ve heard elsewhere that this is fairly common with Steam and their products – lots of problems for the first day or two, but they quickly fix things.

I’m eying up my next Steam purchase already (I suspect Civilization IV is my kind of game), but it’s well worth taking the chance to get Steam and Portal while Portal is free.

I’ve done a bit of cutting down on what I keep running on my Mac recently.

I used to keep lots of apps running all the time – email, Tweetie, Evernote, iTunes, Transmission, Google Chrome. All running, all the time, even overnight. Chrome always had a few tabs open – PigPog’s dashboard, Facebook, Google Reader, and usually a few things that I might decide to do something with at some point. It was a land of distractions, and things ground to a halt when I tried to run Aperture.

I installed iStat Menus, after reading about it in Smoking Apples. Aperture ran, and all my RAM was used. MacOS paged furiously out to disk, but couldn’t really keep up. Aperture would hang when building previews, sometimes for hours on end.

I tried closing almost everything else, but it didn’t help much.

I finally got around to testing the two 2Gb memory modules I’d removed when one became faulty, found out which one it was, and put the other back in. My Mac now had 3Gb rather than 2Gb.

I ran Aperture. It quickly used over 2Gb RAM all on its own, finished the processing it was doing, and shrank back down to around 200Mb. Just as it should. Looks like the problem was that with 2Gb of RAM, doing that just took a lot of paging in and out, and so, a lot of time.

By then, though, I’d taken a bit of a liking to having less stuff sitting open. I do quite like to see emails when they arrive (I don’t get many at home, so it’s not much of a distraction), but I don’t always need the Tweetie window there on show. iTunes doesn’t need to be running when my iPod isn’t actually syncing. Evernote doesn’t need to be running all the time, though it’s quicker to throw things into it if it is. Mail can at least be closed overnight.

As for the browser, I’m trying to make it a habit to leave it running, but with no windows actually open. That way, it’s very quick to start if I click a URL somewhere, or want to have a quick look at Facebook. The rest of the time, though, there’s no need to keep things open. I just need to check for any spams or comments on PigPog once or twice a day, and look at Facebook occasionally. Google Reader doesn’t need to be checked obsessively – just looked at sometimes. When I want to.

So far the results are good. I’m spending less time repeatedly checking the same sites and feeds several times an hour. The only problem is staring at the relatively blank screen, and wondering what to do next. I decided to write. I’m writing this now.

Producing some sort of output, rather than staring at Facebook and Twitter for an hour – sounds like an improvement to me.

MSK Templates – Moleskine ® English.

I’ve just found this, and will no doubt be spending quite some time poking and playing… it’s a jolly interesting development, though!

I’ll post more thoughts when I’ve explored it a little more.