The Communications Conundrum

The Year in Review

After more than three years at home, 2023 marked my return to travel and an epic return to Africa. The trip was the hardest we'd ever had together and it left me simultaneously drained and re-invigorated. On the one hand, I now hated the process of travelling and decried the failings of confused airline personnel. On the other, I had seen some magnificent mammals and birds and the new camera and lens combination had performed magnificently.

I had, as has become a habit, started work on the write-up for my coffee-table book about the trip whilst I was there. It gives me something to do on a very hot afternoon. I can sit on the veranda and work on my laptop for an hour or so every couple of days and be almost ready to go with the text as soon as I get back. I finished the book in record time and found myself really enjoying the writing process, almost more than the holiday itself.

Once I started, I couldn't stop. I'd always had a desire to write a novel, but also wanted to write an autobiography of sorts. I combined the two and, having satisfied myself that I could actually do it, buried the autobiographical novel in the depths of my hard drive to never see the light of an embarrassing day. But I had ideas flooding my brain and just kept on going. By August I had pretty much burned myself out for a time, having written and published 3 full novels on Amazon. I stalled in the fourth novel, however and only managed to come back to it at the end of the year, publishing it at the very end of December.

Meanwhile, I created a paperback version of my travel book and then went on to publish three small volumes of photographs, again on Amazon. Frankly, writing and publishing is addictive. As the year turns over, I have started another novel and words are flowing pretty well. So, 2023 is all about words. More than 300,000 published words if we are counting.

As for the rest of my year, I guess it has been much like any other. My blood-pressure has been brought under control by medication and my general mood seems to be improving, probably thanks in part to taking Vitamin D. I am indeed a year older and the aches and pains are probably to be expected. Nothing life-threatening though. I continue to work as usual, spreading my time out between the workshop in Maughold and my regular customers.

My friends and I have made plans to return to Africa in February once more. Again we will be in Tanzania - around the shores of Lake Victoria with a few days in Rwanda, a new country for me to add to the list.

The Conundrum

So, for all my personal success in getting words onto the page and out into the world, there remains the increasingly difficult problem of personal communications. I have written at length here in the past about my anxieties and mental health issues. It isn't something that just goes away and, indeed, it seems to come and go as time passes.

For much of the second half of 2023 I have had very severe problems with personal communications. I've always had issues with using the telephone. I'm always very happy to answer a call and get stuff sorted. I just always find it difficult to make an outgoing call. It's a problem that I've always been conscious of, but I do try my best to work around it. Sometimes, however, I just can't do it. This year has been particularly bad and this communications anxiety - for wont of a better word - has spread to other forms of communication as well.

I now find it almost as difficult to respond to an email, Whatsapp, Facebook or text message. I normally get there in the end, but at the very least it can take a couple of days for me to simply work up to formulating a reply. It's not always like that, of course. On some days I can respond quickly and simply to an incoming message as soon as I get the chance and spontaneous questions are far more likely to get a quick answer.

I'm far from convinced that it is something that I will ever get over. I can only apologise to anybody who has expected a response from me and not received one. For anybody who needs a more immediate response, then probably best to call me on my mobile. If I don't come back to you, then leave it for an hour or two and try again. If I answer, everything will be fine. If I don't then I may just be unable to return the call. Don't feel that you are bugging me, it probably is helping.

The Upgrade

If 2022 was the year of the camera, then 2024 is the year of the computer.

I last built myself a new desktop computer at the very end of 2017. I went all-out to build something that was close to state-of-the-art for the time in the hope that it would last me a while. I've had a couple of upgrades in the intervening six years, but it has worked pretty much flawlessly for that time.

Still, the art does advance and I was starting to find that some software was beginning to feel a little sluggish. I've discovered the power of Topaz Photo AI and frankly the processing power needed for it to work well is staggering. I had the graphics card, but the main processor and memory were lacking. Even some of the new features of Adobe Photoshop push the old system to its limits.

Anyway, over the last few months I've built up a set of new components and created a totally new PC tower that should hopefully keep me going for another few years. I don't think I've ever done a rundown of my hardware, so here goes.

It's now an AMD Ryzen 7 7700 processor with 32Gb of DDR5 memory on an ASUS B650 mainboard. Storage is provided by a 1TB Crucial NVME SSD as a main drive with a pair of 4TB Samsung 870 SATA SSD drives for data and main backup. I use an external 4TB portable hard drive for secondary backup.

Display is provided by an AMD Radeon 6600 Graphics card that drives three 32-inch ViewSonic monitors at 2560x1440 pixels. I run Windows 11 Professional and it is as up-to-date as possible.

I still have my 14-inch Huawei laptop that I use for diagnostics and travel as well.

Into 2024

So, another year has passed and we are all alive and reasonably well. I've a great holiday to look forward to in February and am keen to keep on with my writing.

First Release of Facebook Advert Builder

Ready To Try Out

I've managed to pull enough of the software stack together to release the first version of my Facebook (or other Social Media) Advert Builder. It's available to download from my business website at www.davidkinrade.com and is free for anyone to download and use.

It has been designed to be as simple as possible, with drag-and-drop for any images (with buttons if you prefer) and sliders to position anything on the screen. Basically, you create a series of styles for your layouts that are consistent with your business style. These styles have a couple of foreground objects that will overlay your product or promo image. You can create different style shapes for square, portrait and landscape orientations.

Once you have some styles defined (and you may need a bit of help with the creation of suitable PNG files for this), you can then start to create new adverts. Add your product image and then type any text that you need. You can also add an unlimited number of splash objects - little graphical highlights like the star below. These can be positioned and sized to fit with your photo and layout.

I've added range of basic photo effects for you to try - just a bit of blurring, greyscale conversion and pixelization. You can also specify an overlay colour and play with the transparency to create sepia-tone and similar effects. Mix and match to see what you can come up with.

Finally, there are potions for creating a final output. You can make a PDF, JPG or PNG file and then upload to Facebook our any other platform that you might use.

This is the main screen while editing an image-based advert

This is adding and positioning a splash image to the main advert layout

This is the Style editor, where the basic style layouts are created.

Unfortunately, the manual for the program isn't finished yet - the link will open an empty PDF file. I'm starting to work on it, but don't want to go too far until I have finalized any layout changes I may want to make and fixed a few more minor bugs.

Stay Tuned!

Summer Mornings and Productivity

Summer Mornings

I've always tended to need only about six hours of sleep and I'm a fairly broken sleeper - I wake many times in the night and turn over. I do sometimes feel the benefit of getting a good eight hours, but can quite happily get by with less.

This pattern is exacerbated in the summer months. As the days get longer and the light evenings and - particularly - mornings draw out, I find I can't sleep as long as I can in the darker months of winter. If I wake at 5am, like I did this morning, then I struggle to go back to sleep and find myself getting up and wishing to use the time productively.

Often, this finds me sitting at my desk and working on whatever coding project I'm currently thinking about - or watching YouTube!

Productivity

This month's project is to try and make a Facebook Advert Generator, following a suggestion from Richard at DW Cars. It's surprising just how much benefit can be gained from a consistent approach to any online advertising - identity and consistency are vitally important here. You need to engage your audience and then become recognisable with each new view.

What I'm trying to do with this simple app is to help with that consistency by providing a template-based framework within which adverts that are as similar as possible in look and feel can be created very quickly with minimal input or effort.

I find that, working for a couple of hours - maybe between 6 and 8 in the morning - I can get a lot of work done in that short and otherwise wasted period between sleep and going out to work. These days I'm not the sort of coder who can spend ten hours of concentrated effort on a task, so a couple of hours at the most now seems to suit me well.

I'm not going to charge for this once it is done. I'll revisit it when it is complete and include a download link to the app and the manual when it's production ready. That will be a few days away at least - I still have to implement the splash objects and photo effect options yet and then decide how to handle PDF output for exporting to other media.

Another New Website - DWCars.info

Here's another new website - this time a major update for the most popular site in the portfolio that I manage, with more than a million hits to the previous iterations of the site. Like many others at the moment, Richard at DW Cars felt that their website needed a better reach and a more mobile-friendly nature. Once again, I turned to a pre-built template as the basis for the site and then heavily modified it within the framework provided to achieve our aims.

Compared to the site constructed for Hearth, this is a much more involved and complicated undertaking, just the list of software required is a testament to that, as is the amount of time involved in the creation and testing of the combined systems necessary.

Graphics and Video: Serif Drawplus X8, Adobe Photoshop CC, Paint.NET, Adobe Premiere Pro.

Web Code: Microsoft Expression Web, Atom, Windows Notepad.

Web Tools: FileZilla, Opera Browser.

Development: Anywhere Software's B4J, Java 14, InnoSetup Compiler, DB Browser (SQlite), JavaFX SceneBuilder by Gluon.

So, the big difference here is the database application that now sits on Richard's PC and manages the content and updates of the site. All the stock is entered into the database and then the software can build all the pages quickly and cleanly. This ensures that they remain consistent and error free. As an added bonus, the same software can create a datasheet for each vehicle and make that available as a PDF file that can be emailed to a customer or printed out as a handout.

I've always been a fan of offline website management - believe-it-or-not, the coding is simpler than trying to do the same thing online and I find that any changes are quicker and easier to implement and deploy.

I use a RAD environment called B4J. It uses a BASIC language dialect and form layout files to create an application that is ultimately compiled to the JAVA language, but the code is simpler to understand and quicker to implement. This JAVA application is then packaged as a windows program and deployed to the client's computer.

The program provides a front-end to a SQLite database that provides speed and resiliency for the data and allows a single file to store the entire website - something that makes backups a breeze. Adding a new vehicle becomes a simple case of ticking a few boxes and dragging some photos into a window.

Back to Websites

After a long period of inactivity on the website design and publishing front, I'm finally back in the production saddle, with a couple of projects being worked on at the moment.

I'm delighted to be helping www.hearth.co.com to bring their new website together. Based on a very simple and clean-looking template, the site is initially a single page that is device responsive and elegant.

I'm loving working with pre-made bootstrap templates more and more as I slowly get used to the CSS that the main part of the platform uses. As always, the more you do, the easier it becomes. Using a pre-made template as a starting point dramatically reduces the time-to-complete on a project like this. In this case we took considerably less than 20 hours for the whole page, including all the graphics, text and quite a bit of troubleshooting on the hosting side.

It always surprises me when I add up just how much software goes into the creation of even something as relatively simple as this: Photoshop, DrawPlus X8, Paint.NET, Notepad, Expression Web, Atom, Opera and FileZilla all have their part to play in the construction of assets and editing of code.

I use DrawPlus X8 to create graphical assets - buttons, logos, etc. It is a bit long in the tooth now, but I'm very familiar with it and well aware of the limitations. I do have Serif's Affinity suite, but just can't quite be as productive in the newer tools yet.

Photo editing and retouching is split between Adobe Photoshop and Paint.NET. I could probably do almost all of it in the latter package - which is free - but Photoshop has the power to do some really amazing stuff very quickly.

Like some of the other software I prefer, Expression Web is a competent editor, but now very out of date and unsupported. I'm slowly switching over to Atom - a very modern, open-source code editor with some really great features. I still need to have something like notepad handy as well, for quick edits and temporary space.

Finally, My browser of choice is Opera - they are almost all Chromium-based at this point anyway. It has a nice developer console that helps with debugging javascript and css codes. Upload to the final webspace is with FileZilla, a great free FTP client that I've used for many years now.

Don't get me wrong, websites can and do sometimes cost thousands, but with a little care, you can have something that reflects positively on your business for just a few hundred pounds.

Changing Circumstances

 When you've basically done the same thing for more than 20 years, it can be easy to become just stuck in the rut. I have helped at Copycat / Computers4-u for more than two decades - all of this century - but that has now come to an end.

The decision to leave was mine, and I'm not going to go into my reasons, but now I am able to focus more clearly on what I want to do and how I want to do it.

One of the first of those things is to get back into creating websites and enjoying the process. This is something that I have slowly fallen behind in over the last three or four years and I need to bring my skills up to date.

My first attempt is with my own primary site www.davidkinrade.com. I've found a nice template online - there's no shame in cheating a little - and modified it to suit my needs. I've created some new graphics and cut down the content dramatically for a more modern feel. The major changes are in design philosophy. This site is "responsive". In web terms, responsive means that the layout and organisation of the site responds to different screen sizes and devices. It works equally well on a mobile phone screen, a tablet, a laptop or a desktop and across all major platforms.

Expect more like this to follow in the future, as I do appear to have been bitten by the design bug once more.