My Ideal computing device:

What would it look like?

It would be about the size of a current netbook, with a 9 or 10” screen. It doesn't need to be especially thin – most current netbooks are fine. It would not have a keyboard although you would be able to attach one. The casing would be robust and scratch-proof – rubber, or leather, perhaps? The screen would have a cover like the sony reader. It would have a fold-away stand so that it could be operated flat or tilted up like a screen and the stand would have non-slip feet so that it wouldn't slide around on slippery surfaces. The stand would also allow it to be used in portrait or landscape mode.

What would it be like to use?

Firstly it would take a maximum of 2 seconds to be ready to use when I turned it on (or opened the flap or whatever). This is really important – I seem to wait spend half my life waiting for machines to boot up or come out of hibernation or whatever. It would also always, always always respond immediately to my input. This does not mean that everything happens instantaneously, it just means that it would tell me immediately and accurately when an operation was going to take some time and the multi-tasking would work properly so that it would always respond to my input. Neither windows nor Linux does this at the moment. It would have a multi-touch screen and would automatically flip between landscape and portrait modes a la iPhone. It would be always connected via the most appropriate method without me having to tell it what that was – that is, it would have mobile 3G, wifi, network connection blah, blah and would automatically choose the best and cheapest one available (a bit like RDS radios do).
It would have a camera that would normally be housed in the casing but that could be teased out on a bendy bit of cable so you could point it in the right direction.
It would be location-aware (i.e. gps)

What would I do with it?

Listen to music/audio
Watch HD video
Do internet stuff with it
Use it as a satnav
Make phone/video calls with it (and I don't want to care whether it uses skype/other ip phone technology or mobile phone, I want it to figure that out for me)
Read stuff
Make notes (written or recorded, with speech/handwriting recognition and indexing)
And I want an application which will allow me to bookmark, scribble notes on, tag and search for any resource, whether its a document, a webpage, video or sound file.

Now owning a device like that might just change my life...

Sunday's bay race

On Sunday I was on Steve and Steve's Hunter Formula One, Sparkle for the Scarborough Yacht Club's Bay race. The conditions were pretty much ideal for racing with a F3-4 SW wind (the flags were flying more than 50% of the time and there were a few white caps in the bay) and little or no swell. The course was Southerly start, with a long downwind leg from the green boy in the south bay out to the Scalby outflow boy at the north end of the north bay. We went with the No1 genoa and no reef in the main. I was on the main.
On the downwind leg we opted not to raise the spinnaker but goose-winged most of the leg. This turned out to be a good decision as a lot of the other boats were having trouble maintaining control and I think were overpowered. We certainly didn't lose much ground over the opposition.
On the upwind leg we were definitely over-powered. There were a couple of occasions where we were on our beam ends with no power at all in the main - the Gennie was knocking us over. I think we should have gone with a No.2 and a small spinnaker (I don't know whether we have one). Upwind we may have even benefitted from taking in a reef on the main.
Note for next time: try pulling the outhaul right out for the upwind leg

Whitby Regatta 2009

Here's a video I did of whitby Rowing Regatta:

Whitby Regatta 2009 from Steve Green on Vimeo.

I took nowhere near enough cut-away footage so I ended up having to do dissolves between a lot of the takes. It was really difficult to get the right balance between the interests of the participants, who want to see the race develop and other people who want a bit more going on. I'm hoping to add some background music to the video, hence the claps at the start for a sync point.

Charlie playing in the sea

Here's my first video: it's our dog Charlie playing in the sea.



I shot this in low quality (3MB/s) cos I did it before I got my new graphics card and the motherboard graphics couldn't cope with the highest quality session.

You can hear the wind noise - a decent mic is on my Christmas list! You can also see the auto-aperture pumping at one point. Otherwise not bad

My Equipment

I have a Canon Legria FS200 camcorder. I looked into getting an HD camcorder but figured out that if I started working with HD I would need to buy a new PC (or at least upgrade the motherboard), adding about £500 to the price of the project. I bought the Canon mainly because it was one of the cheapest I could find that has a reasonable amount of manual control and, most importantly, an external mic input. In the end this turned out to be a wise decision as you get a lot of wind noise off the internal mic on anything but a still day.
The reviews I have read criticize the low light performance which I suppose is fair enough although I don't really have anything to compare it with. I wish you could select non-interlace as I am extclusively working on a pc so it looks rubbish until you have converted the files to something else.
The colour rendition is fabulous. I thought it was a bit brown at first but then when I went back and looked at the scenes I had shot I realized that the colour rendition is in fact incredibly accurate.

I've got an old pc (1.6GHz AMD processor). I downloaded the Sony Vegas editing software as a trial as it was the only one that didn't need a 3GHz processor and a dedicated hard disk. Vegas is fabulous! It is so fast and immediate. Don't believe the people that say it's hard to use. They are just used to using Adobe Premiere. If you don't have any preconceived ideas about how to do something then Vegas is very easy to use and the "Show me how" mode is brilliant.

I bought a new graphics card, an nVidia GeForce. Because my pc is so old I basically had a choice of one. I was a bit disappointed until I downloaded an nVidia driver that optimizes MPEG replay. Everything plays really smoothly now.