Richard Hobbs

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!

I haven’t managed to write a blog post for quite some time. This is mainly because during weekends I’ve been busy and during evenings I’ve not been able to motivate myself! Anyway, I have a few moments now, and a lot to summarise, so here goes!

Sarah and I have had several enjoyable days (and an evening) out since the last blog post on 29 March 2009! Most of these occasions are summarised below.

AJS & Matchless Owners Club North Weald Section Meet

Every so often, the AJS & Matchless Owners Club has a meeting where various sections of the club meet up to say “Hi” and discuss all things motorcycle-related. This particular one was at North Weald Airfield where we met up with another section or two. I forget which ones though, I’m afraid!

As you can see from the above photo, there were quite a few bikes there – perhaps 80 in total; they’re not all visible in this particular photo though.

All in all, a very enjoyable day! I got to meet lots of new people and was able to sit within feet of the taxiway to the runway in use for that day. I even saw a Spitfire power itself down the taxiway to the end of the runway just before throttling up its wonderful Rolls Royce Merlin Engine and taking off into the distance!

Photos of the North Weald Section Meet can be found here.

Sandringham Arts and Crafts Fair

I don’t really have a general photo to summarise this event, so here’s a rather specific one:

This event was exactly what you would expect from an Arts and Crafts Fair. It had honey, jams, wood turning, wood carving (shown above!), cookery and various other things. We also spent a few hours in Hunstanton after visiting the fair to have Fish and Chips by the sea, which was also quite enjoyable and relaxing!

Photos of Sandringham and Hunstanton can be found here.

Cambridge Museum of Technology Steam-Up Day

For Sarah, I think this day was decidedly average. For me, however, it was great!

I’ve been to the Cambridge Museum of Technology many times, and I can highly recommend it to anyone interested in pumping engines, steam engines, big single-cylinder gas engines and all things industrial. On this particular day, they had the main big boiler fired up and most of the servicable engines running. They also had a model tank club visiting with very accurate scale models of various military vehicles (mostly tanks, of course!) which they were remotely controlling around the site.

Photos of our day at Cambridge Museum of Technology can be found here.

Videos of our day at Cambridge Museum of Technology can be found here.

Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run

On 19 April 2009 the Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run took place. This is a charity event raising money for MAGPAS. 400 or so classic and vintage cars, motorcycles, tractors, trucks and military vehicles took place in the road run which went from village to village showing residents and visitors  all the vehicles and also collecting money for MAGPAS, as mentioned above.

As of 20 June 2009, this year’s Road Run had collected £12,000 for MAGPAS, and I’m glad to have contributed at least slightly to something contributing to such a good cause!

Photos of the 2009 Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run can be found here.

Videos of the 2009 Cottenham Yesteryear Road Run can be found here.

FBHVC Old Vehicle Drive It/Ride It Day

The FBHVC Drive it/Ride It Day is not an organised event as such. It’s a day where the Federation of British Historic Vehicle Clubs (FBHVC) request that as many historic vehicle owners get their vehicles out on the road for the day to show to the nation that these vehicles exist and are still driveable/rideable!

Sarah and I decided to ride to a pub in a nearby village to have lunch by the river and to then ride home, and I must say, it was another great day!

AJS & Matchless Owners Club Motorcycle Run

Throughout the year, various members of the Fenrunners section of the AJS & Matchless Owners Club organise motorcycle rides around the county (and beyond!), and this ride was no exception. We met at The Chequers Inn at Wrestlingworth before setting off on a 75 mile route, finishing back at the Chequers Inn again! These 75 miles were ridden in one continuous stretch, which, despite being the longest non-stop ride I’ve ever done, was very enjoyable!

6 of us turned up at the pub in the first place, but within 500 yards or so, 2 people had broken down, leaving only 4 of us to take part in the run. Luckily enough, though, despite 2 bikes breaking down within that short distance, they were both up and running again by the time we got back and were both ridden home later that day with no problems!

I have no photos of this event, I’m afraid, but I do have the route as recorded by my GPS if you are interested!

The Nesting Blackbird

This wasn’t an event at all, but it is worth mentioning!

At the beginning of April, Sarah noticed that a blackbird was nesting on top of our water butt, 5 feet off the ground, in the corner between the fence and trellis running down the front edge of the canopy in our back garden, and around 12 feet from out back door, which is used all day every day!

The blackbird didn’t seem to care about Sarah and I going in and out of the back door and using the garden for BBQs etc… or even hanging washing out on the line which was around 4 feet away from her nest! I was also able to setup my tripod and camera behind the trellis pointing into the nest, about 12 inches away, zoomed right in to take some quite impressive photos.

The blackbird then laid 5 eggs!

At this point, Sarah and I looked up various facts about the blackbird and learned that these eggs were going to hatch in around 2 weeks. Before that time, however, roughly 3 weeks after the blackbird started nesting and 1 week after the eggs were laid, the blackbird appeared to have deserted the nest entirely!

After 24 hours of staying away to give her a chance to come back, we realised she wasn’t coming back and upon looking into the nest again, we realised that there were now only 2 eggs remaining.

I would like to add that we really don’t think it was us that scared the blackbird away as we had never attempted to touch the nest or disturb the plants growing around it – the gap in the plants through which the photos were taken was there naturally, and the blackbird had never been bothered by us in the past at all!

A couple of days later, there was only 1 egg left, and it was slightly cracked from the outside, so we figured something had found the nest and taken the eggs, sadly.

Anyway, we do seem to have either the same blackbird, or a different one, nesting in a new spot in the garden now, and this time we’re not going near it, just in case. I guess we’ll see what happens in due course!

More photos of the blackbird, the nest, the eggs and a few other birds in our garden can be found here.

Jampot Spares Limited Open Day

Although this was a very enjoyable day, it did start off badly!

The Open Day at JSL is an event often visited by lots of club members. A lot of these members I know from the club web site as they have helped me get the bike on the road over the last year or so, but I’ve never actually met them. This event was going to be a perfect opportunity for Sarah and I to not only meet these great people, but to turn up on the motorbike so they can actually see the bike they’ve hearing and talking about so much.

However, that, sadly, was not to be. Having wheeled the bike out into the open, started it up and got kitted up, I rolled it off the stand, pulled in the clutch, put it into first gear, and the engine stopped. The exhaust valve had jammed open again, like it did early last year.

We therefore attended the JSL Open Day by car. As I said, it did turn out to be a very enjoyable day, but for the first half an hour or so, before we arrived, I did feel rather annoyed, to say the least!

Photos of the JSL Open Day can be found here.

Videos of the JSL Open Day can be found here.

Classic Bike Show, Stanford Hall

I attended this show by car, as it would have been rather a long and tedious journey by bike! It was another good day with perhaps a hundred or two classic bikes on show, plus another 1,000 or so in the car park field, ranging from vintage pre-war bikes to modern Hondas and Kawasakis.

The Photo above shows the AJS & Matchless Owners Club stand which, as ever, was nicely presented!

I didn’t buy anything other than a mug, pin badge, cleaning cloths and a tube of Autosol on this particular trip, but there were an awful lot of things to buy, ranging from almost complete motorcycles to individual nuts and bolts. I highly recommend it to anyone wanting to admire some old bikes and to also spend a couple of hours trawling through the autojumble stalls!

Photos of the Classic Bike Show can be found here.

The Sidestand Spring and The Hurt Finger!

I have known for a very long time that the spring holding the sidestand up on the Matchless was both stretched slightly, and hooked onto the wrong place on the frame.

A fellow club member (thank you, Peter!) kindly donated a new sidestand spring to me and showed me, on his bike, where the holes in the frame should be to hook the spring into, so armed with that information I headed into the garage to fit the spring!

I won’t go into too much detail here, but in summary, the spring is quite tough. Having hooked one end into the frame underneath the bike, I began to pull the spring towards the side stand to hook on the other end. In doing so, the spring slippped out of my grip and the hooked end went into the skin on the bottom of my finger and pulled my hand back under the bike. Having looked under the bike to see what on earth I’d just done, I saw the end of the spring trying to push through the skin on the top of my finger!

I quickly removed the end of the spring (which had gone roughly 15mm into my finger!) and made my way into the kitchen whereupon I cleaned it up and sat down on the sofa for Sarah to kindly bring me a cold glass of water!

Needless to say, I felt rather ill for the next 20 minutes, but there was actually very little pain, almost no bleeding, and 7 days later it was as if it never happened. Very strange…

Souldrop Open Evening & BBQ

A new motorcycle workshop has opened up in Souldrop recently and they decided to have an Open Evening and BBQ, which Sarah and I, of course, attended!

It was a great evening! Roughly 20 people turned up, most of them on two wheels, there was plenty of food, all barbequed by myself ( ) and it was a late, but very enjoyable evening!

Photos of the Souldrop Open Evening & BBQ can be found here.

AJS & Matchless Owners Club Crosskeys Pub Inter-Section Meet

Similar to the North Weald Section Meet mentioned earlier in this post, this event took place at The Cross Keys in Norfolk.

It was an incredibly sunny, and rather warm, day and in total I rode 134 miles! We met some more new people, spent a few hours chatting about motorcycles, had a great pub lunch and then rode home!

I must say though, 134 miles in one day, with the last 65 of them being non-stop, is quite tiring, especially at an average speed of 30 mph with a top speed of 45-50 mph! The last 65 miles, for example, took 1 hour, 54 minutes!

It was thoroughly enjoyable though, so I’m not complaining!

Photos of the Crosskeys Section Meet can be found here.

Somersham Carnival

As of the day this blog post was published, the last event we’d been to was Somersham Carnival.

I’ve been to Somersham Carnival nearly every year of my life, which isn’t so strange considering I grew up in the village!

There’s not a lot to say about the carnival really. It’s exactly what you would expect from a village carnival; classic cars, floats, a parade around the village, Somersham Town Band, an arena in the field in which various displays occur and a generally good day out for adults and children alike!

This year, however, I took along the motorbike for the first time ever. The bike itself has been in the parade and displayed in the field before, perhaps 15 or so years ago, when my Grandad still owned it, but this time it was my turn.

The other thing to mention is that I won the “Best Motorcycle” award, as shown below!

It is important to note, however, that my motorcycle was the only one there, so you could argue that my bike was also the worst bike!

Anyway, as a few people have already said, an award is an award, regardless of how it was won!

Photos of Somersham Carnival can be found here.

There were two events this weekend – my Birthday on Saturday and the AJS & Matchless Owners Club Fenrunners 2008 Motorbike run on Sunday (today), and fortunately, both have been a complete success!

My birthday on Saturday was a quiet day… but I received gifts that I like (mostly from my Wishlist!) and generally had a very nice day with Sarah!

Then, today (Sunday), Sarah and I took part in the “2008 Fenrunners Ride” organised by the AJS & Matchless Owners Club, and again - had a thoroughly good day!

The weather didn’t look too good initially, with “Thunder showers” forecast for the afternoon up to 24 hours beforehand (which would have meant we simply couldn’t go), but having woken up on the day to a foggy, but otherwise calm morning, the forecast got better as the day went on and in the end probably only 100 spots of rain hit my visor all day long!

The run consisted of two “legs”… one of 38 miles and another of 28 miles, so together with the “getting there” and “getting back”, we rode 108 miles today! Our legs ache, my arms ache, my back aches slightly, but the bike performed wonderfully and we loved it! We cruised between 45 and 50 mph all day long, and the bike didn’t shudder or backfire once! The routes can be found on my Motorcycle Routes page… they are labelled as the “Fenrunners Ride 2008″ routes, in case you are interested to see where we rode.

I have also been able to figure out that today I obtained around 62 miles per gallon, which isn’t quite as great as I had expected from a 350cc single-cylinder motorbike, but considering we were going through villages, up and down gentle slopes and I had two people on the bike, I don’t think it’s too bad. Time will tell what mpg I’m getting on average… if you are interested in keeping an eye on the mpg, take a look at my Mileage page – this will be added to as time progresses, and when I have enough values in there it’ll produce a nice graph like it does with the other vehicles!

Anyway – one of the better weekends of the year overall!

Just looking forward to next weekend now – Haddenham Steam Rally on Saturday and another AJS & Matchless Owners Club bike run ending at the 3rd Legion Bike Show in Histon on Sunday!

I’ve fixed the brake light now; it was a cut or pinched cable that goes from the switch to the negative terminal on the battery. I blame the chain for hitting it (its previous route up to the battery practically touched the chain, it turns out!).

The tail light isn’t fixed yet, but that’s going to be something of a yak shaving exercise unfortunately. To get to the cable I have to take off the seat. To take off the seat I have to take off the luggage rack. To take off the luggage rack, I have to take off the panniers. I know there’s only 3 steps to this, but to be honest, if i’m not planning on riding when it’s dark, i don’t need a tail light anyway, so I have until second Monday in September to fix that (when the local AJS & Matchless Owners Club meeting is happening).

Anyway… i’ve managed to rack up another 50 miles or so in the last couple of days, the first of which was a very enjoyable 20 mile run into the local countryside on Friday which you can find on the new Motorcycle Routes section of my 1966 Matchless G3 web site!

This route, by the way, (and all future routes) was (and will be) recorded with Nokia’s SportsTracker application running on my Nokia E90 mobile phone (which has a built-in GPS) – an excellent piece of software in my opinion that makes the GPS in the phone well worth having (using the GPS for navigating around the country as a “satnav”, using Nokia Maps, also makes it worth having, of course, but SportsTracker is great too). SportsTracker basically uses the GPS to record your longitude and latitude through an entire journey while also recording your speed, distance, time, altitude etc… – it can then export all that information as a KML file which you can either load into Google Earth or upload to your web site and point Google Maps at, which is exactly what i’ve done on the Motorcycle Routes page!

The second run was with Sarah, when we visited Bar Hill to see my grandparents (11 miles) and then rode back cross-country (20 miles). That was also very enjoyable!

Today, it’s raining, so i will probably not go out today!

Things do seem to be running OK on the motorbike at the moment, touch-wood!

After making our way to the Thurlow & Haverhill Steam and Country Show by car due to the rain, we ended up still having a great day! When I’m not taking the bike, I am taking the tripod, so some photos of the event can be found here: Thurlow & Haverhill Steam Rally Photos.

Since then, I have successfully made it to the AJS & Matchless Owners Club Fenrunners meeting near Cambridge (despite a few drops of rain en-route) for all local members of the club to have a look at it and good old chat…

When the meeting came to an end, however, I set off for my first ever ride in the dark (of nearly 20 miles, along the notorious A14) only to find, 50 yards down the road, that my tail light didn’t work, and neither did the brake light!

So, I set off back to the meeting place whereupon we decided it was too much to fix that night, and we simply stuck a torch in the red casing and strapped the whole lot to the luggage rack, and I then successfully made it home, thankfully!

Since then, I’ve managed to fix the brake light by soldering one of the wires back together that looked like it had been either cut or pinched - I suspect the chain caught it, given it’s previous route up to the battery! The tail light will come later, but given that I’m not riding in the dark again for at least 4 weeks, I have some time to fix that yet.

I have also been out this afternoon for a nice ride from Huntingdon to Ramsey and back, across the fens, totalling around 20 miles, round trip. It was quite a nice route actually – not many cars, lots of corners, excellent visibility – click here for the route on Google Maps!

So, as mentioned earlier, touch-wood, things seem to be ok at the moment! Let’s hope they stay that way…