Richard Hobbs

As the title implies, there’s rather a lot to talk about this time around, so I’ll try to keep each subject relatively short!

In summary, Sarah and I have been to several more steam rallies, I have been to a bike show, I queued up at 5:30am for an iPhone 4 on launch day, I was official photographer at a wedding(!), I’ve spent 2 nights sleeping on a punctured air bed, we’ve bought a caravan and “done it up” and I’m now involved with “Ada”!

First of all, Meldreth Manor Bike Show

Held at Meldreth Manor School, this is a charity event organised by the Royston and District Motorcycle Club. It’s actually the “Royston and District Motorcycle Club Annual Show”, but is known as the “Meldreth Manor Bike Show” to most people.

I wasn’t planning on going to this, mainly because it’s held on a Wednesday evening, but decided to at the last minute. I have to say, I’m very glad I did! Over 3,200 bikes turned up for those 4 hours and it was spectacular!

Photos of Meldreth Manor Bike Show 2010

Video of Meldreth Manor Bike Show 2010

Somersham Carnival

Sarah and I travelled to Somersham Carnival again this year on the back of the Matchless. The carnival was as enjoyable as ever, with a Mardi Gras theme, and guess what? I won “Best Motorcycle” again!

Photos of Somersham Carnival

iPhone 4

Some of you are going to think I’m crazy, some of you may not, but I queued up outside Lion Yard Shopping Centre (now called the Grand Arcade, I believe!) in Cambridge at 5:30am on iPhone 4 Launch Day to attempt to swap my perfectly good 32GB iPhone 3GS for a brand new 32GB iPhone 4! I was 8th in line.

Did I get my iPhone 4? Yes!

Was it worth paying out my contract with 1 year remaining? Was it worth getting up at 4:30am? Was it worth spending that day with no mobile phone because I had to activate the new one in iTunes before I could use it?

Yes! Well, I think so anyway.

Many people have spoken of reception issues, dropped calls etc… but although I can successfully make the reception indicator bars drop off by holding the phone in the wrong place, I have never suffered a single reception-based issue with the iPhone 4 whatsoever. I do have a case now because I keep dropping it, but I never had an issue for the 2 months before I got the case!

The “Retina” display is amazing, the LED camera flash is excellent as a torch, the speed increase is gratefully received, the camera is of much better quality and the 720p video recording is very good indeed! In summary, I can definitely recommend the iPhone 4 above all other iPhones! There is *no* reason not to upgrade in my opinion!

Classic & Vintage Bike Day, Cambridge Museum of Technology

Once again, at the Cambridge Museum of Technology, there was a classic and vintage bike day. It unfortunately clashed with the “World Cup” (something to do with a game called “football” apparently), but there was a very good turnout considering!

There were a few people out the back working on the main steam engine too (unrelated to the bike show, of course), trying to find which one of the boiler tubes was leaking. I must admit, I spent most of my time with the steam engine people discussing the best way to find the leaky tube! Every idea I came up with, though, had either already been attempted or was actually useless! I guess we live and learn!

Photos of Classic & Vintage Bike Day, Cambridge Museum of Technology

Video of Classic & Vintage Bike Day, Cambridge Museum of Technology

Hollowell Steam Rally & Heavy Horse Show

The Hollowell rally is always one of the best rallies of the year in my opinion, with a great variety of exhibits, ranging from giant insects, through Titan the Robot, to the “Dancing Digger” (a JCB with a very skilled driver!). Needless to say, we took the motorbike again and had a thoroughly great time for the entire 3 days! If I remember correctly, the temperature outside was very warm indeed (high 20s, anyway) and helped make the weekend great!

Photos of Hollowell Steam Rall & Heavy Horse Show

Video of Hollowell Steam Rally & Heavy Horse Show 2010

Photographing a wedding!

Another thing I’ve done since the last blog post is be official photographer at some good friends’ wedding! Now, there’s a rather large learning curve to go from photographing stationary steam engines to photographing a wedding, but now that I’ve edited all 1,840 or so photos down to the final set (after a number of weeks!) I think I pulled it off! The photos are far from “professional”, but I’ve learned a lot from the experience and, of course, thoroughly enjoyed the day, as did everyone!

And the main thing? The bride and groom like the photos, so in a way, nothing else matters! The lack of professionalism, the overexposed whites, the underexposed blacks and the bad composition mean nothing now because the people that matter like the photos!

Cambridgeshire Steam Rally

A week or two after Hollowell, the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally at Swavesey happened. This was only the second year for this rally, but with double the number of exhibits from the first year, the event was the best yet! The weather was roasting hot too, which helped bring the crowds in.

Photos of Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, Swavesey

Videos of Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, Swavesey (this year’s video not yet edited, but watch this space!)

Thurlow Steam Rally

The latest rally was the Thurlow rally. This year it clashed with the AJS & Matchless Owners Club Jampot Rally (due to the Jampot rally having been moved forward a few weeks) and although the decision of which one to attend was a difficult one, I’m very glad we decided to go to Thurlow this year! More on that later.

One thing I’d like to say about the Thurlow rally is about the atmosphere. This rally is one of the most relaxing rallies of the entire year and for that reason it is one of my favourites. The larger rallies have to be very organised, with scouts running the car park, army cadets acting as wardens to ensure safe passage of vehicles in and out of the arena, people in yellow jackets everywhere keeping the rally running smoothly, etc… but somehow Thurlow manages to operate pretty much on time, perfectly safely and everything just happens on-site with seemingly no stress whatsoever!

Don’t get me wrong though – i’m sure lots of stress goes into the organisation of the rally each year, but the impression of a lack of stress and panic during the weekend certainly makes for one of my favourite rallies of the year, so thank you for a great rally again Michael!

Photos of Thurlow Steam Rally

Videos of Thurlow Steam Rally (this year’s video not yet edited, but watch this space!)

Caravan

While at the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, there was a problem. Our air bed developed a slow puncture. On my side. During the first night. On a very rough field.

This wasn’t the end of the world, as I can somehow survive on very little sleep if I have to(!), but I could not find the puncture anywhere! If I pumped up the mattress in the morning, by 10pm it would still be up, but 3 hours after I started laying on it, it’d be out of air completely.

At this same rally we were informed by a couple of fellow rally-goers who we know quite well now, that there was a caravan for sale near them for £200. So, the day after we got back from the rally, we headed up there to pop in for a cup of tea and to take a look at the caravan down the road. Needless to say, we drove home with the caravan in tow!

Since we bought it, we’ve actually spent more money on it than it’s worth, but in doing so we’ve made it our own, and in the 1.5 weeks that followed the initial purchase we have completely re-foamed and re-covered the seats, washed the curtains, cleaned and sterilised the inside, washed the outside, re-carpeted it and put all the hinges and door-stops on that weren’t quite screwed in properly! Our aim was to have it read for the Thurlow rally, and that we did!

I have to say, having spent a year going to rallies in a tent, upgrading to a caravan is an infinitely large step up (not literally). For a start, there’s no risk the air bed will go down leaving you sleeping on the grass! When it’s raining, you can still have a cup of tea. You don’t have to sit on a chair leaning forward cooking or boiling the kettle on a stove on the grass. You don’t have to sit in awkward folding camping chairs. The list goes on and on! In summary, upgrading to a caravan was one of the most sensible things we’ve done in relation to rallies and other multi-day events! The only disadvantage is having to do one trip to take the caravan and another to take the motorbike, but I’ll buy a van one day to solve that problem!

Finally, I’ll mention “Ada” (seen below).

As far as I know (at this early stage) Ada is a 105 year old (built in 1905) 10-ton 7 nominal horse power Fowler general purpose steam traction engine. It is owned by David and family, who were after some help with the engine. David currently looks after the maintenance and running of the engine mostly on his own and while I know very little about the mechanical side of steam engines at this stage, I’ve been wanting to get involved with a full-size steam engine for many, many years. This year, at the Thurlow rally, that opportunity came up and I took it!

My involvement with the engine will begin this winter when I’ll start meeting David at the workshop to begin the winter maintenance cycle and will then hopefully continue on through next year’s rally season and beyond! To be honest, it’s a bit of a dream come true, so thank you David for the opportunity and thank you Hugh for introducing me to David and finding me the opportunity!

Photos of “Ada” on Steam Scenes

I’ll start this post by saying, in order to do the iPhone justice, all screenshots will be shown in this post full-size! I could shrink them to save some screen space, but screen space costs nothing, so why not?

The phone screen is probably a little smaller than the size of the screenshots you are seeing on your screen, but nevertheless, they do show the quality of the various apps!

So, first of all, above is the desktop of my iPhone right now. The only non-standard iPhone applications are Google and “UK – Ireland”, one of which which I’ll come to later.

Just so you know at this stage, the main reasons for writing this post are (a) I think such a revolutionary device deserves to be written about and (b) to tell you about some of my favourite apps in case you have an iPhone and want to hear about potentially cool and useful apps!

So… onto my favourite features & apps!

Above you can see the iPod feature. I have spent a great deal of time copying every single CD I own onto my computer, then into the iTunes software and then onto my iPhone, including information for each song such as Artist, Album, Title, Genre, Year and album art! Right now, I have just over 2,500 songs on the iPhone and yes – I do try to listen to them all as time goes on! The main advantage of having so much music at your disposal is that you never know what’s coming next!

The nice feature of the iPod app on the iPhone (and any iPod with a screen, I understand), which admittedly I don’t use a great deal, is the way of flicking the album collection from left to right to find the album you want. I generally use the voice activation instead of this as it works kinda well and is much quicker than scrolling through over 200 albums!

Anyway, it’s a nice feature and, for those who don’t know about it, worth pointing out!

The next feature, as you can see above, that’s worth a mention is the Youtube application. This is built into the iPhone, and with an unlimited data download limit it works amazingly well!

The phone must be tilted horizontally to view the videos, as the aspect ratio suits better that way, and it seems to download a suitable size/quality of video depending on the quality of your Internet link at the time.

At work, for example, on the WiFi, it shows good quality full-screen videos. Elsewhere, however, where 3G is the only connection method available, it shows slightly worse quality and slightly smaller videos. This is a good feature though – I’d rather see a video after 30 seconds or less and put up with low quality than wait 5 minutes for a high quality version!

Above, you can see the video-watching screen layout. Pretty intuitive really! After a couple of seconds of not touching the screen, or when you touch the center of the screen, the bars disappear leaving the video to play with nothing in front of it.

Above you can see the Google Maps application. This is a remarkably useful app – it has aerial photos of most of the world, including accurate map data. It has points of interest, businesses, directions, traffic info and almost everything else Google Maps online has to offer! The Maps application on the iPhone has one major advantage though – use of the GPS and compass. At a press of button, you can see within a few seconds your exact location on earth and in which direction your iPhone is pointing. Very useful indeed.

Now, what with my addiction to Facebook, I’m very glad there is a Facebook app for the iPhone. On the above screenshot, I have, of course, blurred out the information that is particular to my own news feed, but I’m sure Facebook users will recognise the classic News Feed.

The current version of the Facebook application lets you view your News Feed, user profiles, friend lists and photos. It also lets you deal with requests, chat, messages, events, photos, notes and other things too. If you are on Facebook, this is the app for you!

While we’re on the subject of Facebook, I’ll also talk about Twitter. There are various apps which allow you to interact with Twitter. My favourite is “Twitterrific” (seen above). It is a simply interface which allows you to search, post, filter and many other things. I use the Free version and put up with the advert right at the top of the page, but there is also a paid for version which has no ads (as far as I’m aware) and possibly other features too. The free version is perfectly good enough for me though!

If you are a keen eBay buyer or seller, then the eBay and PayPal apps are for you. I haven’t pictured the PayPal app here, but you can see the eBay app above. I’m not too sure which features are available in the eBay app, but I believe you can at least place bids on things and keep track of the items you are selling. To be honest, I’ve not used it too much yet, but I’m sure time will tell.

Above and below is the “Photogene” application.

The “Photogene” app. costs £1.79 at the time of writing, but if you are into Photography and often end up taking photos with your iPhone for one reason or another, this app is definitely worth having.

It allows you to brighten, darken, increase/decrease contrast, saturation, white balance, black balance, apply effects, sharpen, soften etc… and as you can see from the two screenshots above – it’s very capable of making an original photo look significantly better!

If you have Photoshop, Paint Shop Pro, or some other software on your PC, then that may do a better job, but as far as the iPhone camera goes, this app is very good indeed.

The “Decibel” app, shown above, has had a series of very good reviews, apparently, and on that basis I paid the £0.59 to download it to find out that it was a simple, but accurate, decibel meter! I had to calibrate mine slightly (fortunately I had access to a professional calibrated decibel meter), but once calibrated it was pretty accurate! If you have a need for a decibel meter, this is probably the best and cheapest one out there!

I’m now going to talk about games…

Above, you can see “Blowfish”. This is a very addictive game. The idea is that the red sea urchins float around the screen and you have to inflate the blowfish to fill the screen without a sea urchin hitting the blowfish while it is being inflated. Very simple, but high addictive!

I am also a big fan of racing games on any platform, and above you will see “Fast & Furious” on the iPhone. The handing is a little strange – left and right turns are made by tilting the iPhone left or right, respectively. The accelerometers do a fairly decent job, but by the end of a race I often find the accelerometers have skewed one way of another and I end up holding the phone tilted to the left in order to maintain a straight line! Regardless of that, however, the game is very good and worth the couple of quid I paid for it!

Finally, I’ll talk about the TomTom turn-by-turn satellite navigation software.

There are now lots of turn-by-turn navigation apps available for the iPhone, and I think TomTom is one of the most expensive ones at £59.99. Navigon sells for £52.99 and CoPilot Live sells for £24.99 at the time of writing, but regardless of this, I think TomTom is still the best!

All iPhone satnav users complain of dropped signals (due to the low power GPS unit inside the iPhone itself), CoPilot has mixed reviews but is generally regarded as a very good value for money satnav solution, but I personally don’t like the way it looks. For me, it was down to the two main players – Navigon and TomTom. Navigon has “Lane assist” and “RealityView Pro” to help you get into the correct lane when entering or leaving a main road, but it only has 5 character postcode searches. TomTom, on the other hand, has full 7 character postcode searches, but doesn’t have “Lane Assist” or “RealityView Pro”. What TomTom does have, however, is IQ Routes which make routing much more intelligent and take general traffic trends into account.

For me, 7 character postcode search is a very useful feature, and I can work around Lane Assist etc… by simply reading the signs on the road. What I can’t do, however, is know the traffic trends and incorporate them into my route plan, and this, in my book, makes TomTom a winner!

Anyway, with that all said – the iPhone does have one major limitation, in my view. You cannot transfer files between devices via Bluetooth. You have to plug your iPhone into your iTunes install to get your photos/videos from it. You could email them, but that can take a very long time depending on your Internet connection.

That aside though, I think the iPhone has revolutionised the mobile phone market and is hopefully here to stay for a very long time!

Since my last blog post I have, as you might expect, been relatively busy!

The first event since winning “Best Motorcycle” at Somersham Carnival was the Classic & Vintage Bikes Day at Cambridge Museum of Technology.

This was a fun day, as usual! There were lots of bikes, as you can see, and lots of good people to talk to and get advice on my carburettor, which is still running rich for some reason!

Photos of Classic & Vintage Bike Day, Cambridge Museum of Technology

The weekend after this was the Hollowell Steam Rally.

I had booked the Matchless into this rally as an exhibit, but hadn’t realise quite how far away it was – just over 60 miles. As a result, I begrudgingly went by car! I could have ridden, but 60 miles would take at least an hour and a half by bike, and to get there before 10am and not to leave before 5pm would mean it would be quite a long day, which this particular weekend I didn’t fancy.

Nevertheless, it was a great day, and having had a towbar fitted and ordered a bike trailer, there should be nothing stopping us going next year!

Photos of Hollowell Steam Rally 2009

3 weeks later, it was Cambridgeshire Steam Rally. Sarah and I decided to use this rally as a test of our new camping equipment before the AJS & Matchless Owners Club Jampot Rally at the end of August and also to find out whether Sarah and I both like camping or not!

As it turns out, we love it!

Above you can see our tent with the bike parked next to it. We parked up next to Des and his Trantor, who we learned was possibly the most fun person to camp next to on the entire camp site, so thank you for helping to make our first rally great, Des! I think I still have your lighter too if you’re reading this!

I should also suggest, at this point, that everyone visits the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally web site! I noticed, a couple of weeks before the rally, as the rally is quite new at its current location (this rally was previously known as the Wood Green Steam Rally and was located at the Wood Green Animal Shelter, as you may have guessed) it had no web site!

I therefore contacted the organisers and offered to create a web site for the rally. They agreed, and the site was made! Needless to say, at the moment, the entire design and all the photos and videos are my own. Whether this will change over time I’m not sure, but for the moment at least, it’s true.

The other amazing thing that happened this weekend is that I finally, after 13 years or so, found Tony Warwick and his steam engine “Gigantic” (engine pictured below)!

As a child, I frequently visited my Grandparents’ house and also attended various local steam rallies on the back of my Grandad’s Matchless. At various rallies, and sometimes parked out the back of my Grandparents’ house, I went to have a look at “Tony’s engine” – “Gigantic”. It is a 1912 McLaren road locomotive which Tony has owned for as long as I can remember. I’ve had several rides on the footplate of “Gigantic” as a child and remember the engine like it was yesterday.

However, when I went to university and my Grandparent’s sadly passed away, I never went over there any more and consequently never saw the engine. Tony also had the engine off the road for a very long time as he was rebuilding most, or all, of it. As a result, I’ve been hoping to find “Gigantic” again and after 13 years or so, at the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally I finally did!

For old times’ sake, I also managed to get on board again – once on Saturday evening, and again on Sunday for a trip around the arena. Videos below…

Photos of Cambridgeshire Steam Rally 2009

The weekend after the Cambridgeshire Steam Rally, it was the Thurlow Steam Rally at Horseheath Racecourse near Linton, Cambs.

We weren’t originally going to camp at this rally, but having had such a good time at the Cambridgeshire rally, we decided to camp after all! For this rally, however, I bought a tow bar for the car and borrowed a bike trailer!

The problem at the Cambridgeshire rally was that I had to drive to the rally site with Sarah and the camping gear, drop off both, drive home, get the bike out the garage and ride back to the rally site. Then, when the rally had finished I had to do the opposite! This wasn’t too bad at the Cambridgeshire rally because it was only 15 miles from home, but the Thurlow rally was much further. This is why I bought a tow bar and borrowed a trailer (my own trailer is on order)!

So, again, the rally was excellent and we will make every effort to go again next year! A video summarising at least some of the rally is below:

Photos of Thurlow Steam Rally 2009

Now, onto my new iPhone!

In summary, I have a new mobile phone – the 32GB iPhone 3GS and it’s excellent in almost every way!

On the left you will see my current desktop. In case you somehow haven’t managed to learn this fact yet, the iPhone is a touch-screen phone by the way!

For those of you who don’t know, most of the applications on the left are available as standard on all iPhones. The only non-standard icons are the Google “g” icon and the “UK – Ireland” TomTom satnav icon.

To be honest, most of the applications are available in slightly different implementations on other phones too, but the iPhone’s apps are typically much nicer to use than on other devices due to the touch screen and the way the menus etc. are all structured.

I know other phones have similar functionality now, but I’ve never tested any of those, so for the moment, in my opinion, the iPhone is amazing!

Anyway, I will talk about my new phone more in a separate post – there’s too much to talk about here!