Sunday 26 April 2015

Photos now available on Mac

Screenshot 2015 04 26 07 55 24

 

Apple seem to ration their major announcements to their keynote speeches and the last one majored on the iWatch. Despite having a house full of apple hardware I am an abstainer from the iPhone, I spend so little of my time not in front of a keyboard that having a portable version of the internet seems expensive and pointless. Accordingly a Dick Tracy style iWatch holds little appeal.

Less prominent was the roll out of Photos, the new photo management software for Apple devices, that was touted in an earlier keynote speech. 

This offers a simpler quicker interface for interacting with your photos, and unifies the software available on OS devices, laptops and desktops and IOS devices such as iPads and iPhones. It also signals the end of iPhoto, if you install Photos, it replaces iPhoto. Aperture the higher end photo management software has now vanished from the AppStore, but will presumably remain useable for a while. Both iPhoto and Aperture would routinely use the same database, and it is this database that Photos now take ownership of. 

Where things really get interesting is the ability to store photos seamlessly in the cloud. There are plenty of cloud solutions out there, I already seem to subscribe to a chunk of them. Some are very content specific, such as iTunes Match which will store your music in the cloud, or Evernote which is restricted to various document formats. Others are less restrictive, Dropbox, or Wuala will duplicate a folder full of stuff in the cloud. Some of these will allow you to save stuff to the cloud and delete safely from your hard drive, such as iTunes Match. Dropbox will let you use it for uploading some stuff to the cloud and deleting from your own hard drive, but not photos. If you want to save your photos to the cloud with Dropbox then you still have to retain a copy on your computer. 

My laptop is getting a bit old and with only 250 gig of hard drive space it is starting to run out of space. I have built up a fair few photos, and recently bought a DSLR which allows me to take a mountain of photos, and a lot of gigabytes of data, very quickly. Accordingly I have long been interested in some means to save my photos to the cloud. 

Flickr will allow you to upload any volume of stuff, but it is not really a backup means, and although you can treat photos as private, it is a fair amount of work and there is always the risk that you have inadvertently uploaded something to the public site that you did not want to. 

Accordingly something integrated straight into my usual photo management application that provides cloud storage is definitely something that I am interested in. 

When Photos came out, I did check for reviews, apart from Walt Mossberg, who had a problem with uploading because of a corrupted database, there was little objective opinion out there. However the monthly cost for what I was needing was less than a pound so rather than wait for the next issue of MacFormat or whatever I just jumped in. The support pages reported a lot of problems, as they invariably do, with minimal comment from Apple, also fairly standard. There were also some ingenious ‘solutions’ involving Terminal scripts. 

From long experience I generally avoid hacking about with my computer, and for anything involving an irreplaceable database or the cloud, I find it best to just leave it running, overnight if needs be, and let it sort itself out. It did take a few days of uploading, but eventually the upload completed. My iPad is too aged to access the photos on the cloud, but I presume that they are there. 

There are various issues with backing up photos, 

1  you are probably backing up a database rather than a collection of individual photos, and a corrupted database means you lose everything. Backing up to the cloud is all very well, but you need to be confident that any corruption is contained at source, and a corrupted database on your laptop does not upload to corrupt the cloud back up too

2  it s not going to be quick, you could be uploading gigabytes of data, upload speeds are a lot less than download speeds, expect to run things overnight 

3  increasingly, if it is on your computer, it is a kick in the pants away from being in the cloud, and it is not inconceivable that it could be made public at some point 

4 you will end up renting access to your photos, 

Despite some investigating I really could not find a practical means of backing up my photos to the cloud, so I thoroughly welcome the option within Photos. It does seem reasonably straightforward but it is certainly not instant, and it would be easy to mess about and corrupt your database of photos. In a few years everyone could be using it. Just how reliable is it? Only time will tell, other back up options remain advisable but Photos cloud storage does seem like a useful and timely solution for most folk. 

 

Saturday 25 April 2015

A guide to the 21st century - the multi-generational house

Bs 9780714843810

One of the key innovations in housing within the twenty first century was the widespread adoption of the multi-generational house. These took various forms, for example in Japan, with the adoption of mortgages that would be paid off over successive generations, high land prices, and the tradition of relatively small land prices, the actual house might not look all that unusual to western eyes.

Similarly within America, and amongst the very rich, where there was already a preparedness to live in houses with a very large aggregate area, with regular guests and perhaps live in servants, the multi-generational home might not appear so distinctive to their eyes.

However as a major building type, and method of living it became relatively common in Europe over the century proving more palatable and robust, for many, than the cohousing model, which was to remain relatively niche.

There is a degree of commonality around the multi-generational home. At the core tends to be a single level area that is available to the oldest residents. This has fixed services, the kitchen and bathroom facilities, but also has adaptable stud walls to create rooms. As these are stud walls they can be altered, however the walls themselves, and any doors or other building fabric, are built and finished to a good standard to provide effective sound insulation. In general access to this space is all on the level and amply sufficient to allow wheelchair access. However the fixed building still affords flexibility so that further alterations could be made to further improve accessibility. The ability to alter to suit changing needs is key to this whole ground floor area. It is relatively straightforward to increase space to improve accessibility, or to partition the area to create additional rooms, but the essential core of the building can remain familiar, as will its surroundings, allowing the degree of continuity that is invaluable for the elderly.

Although the ground floor is the apparent core of the building, in practice, from within, it tends to resemble a traditional bungalow, though those fonder of more open plan living can end up with a more loft style appearance. Additional habitation is available, at least two, perhaps more, separate dwellings are provided. These will tend to both be contained within the overall floor space of the ground floor, and form the first floor. These are each independently accessed, in the main they are separated by a structural load bearing wall, but there are stud work gaps within this that would allow for doorways. The kitchen and other living spaces are smaller than those on the ground floor, however as those on the ground floor are on the large size, those on the second floor are still of an acceptable size. For the first floor dwellings flexibility is less of a priority and the rooms tend to be fairly fixed. Where possible a central atrium or courtyard is maintained at the centre of the house and even where a lift is not in place, space sufficient to install one is left available.

In addition to the flexibility over installing a lift, the second floor is not necessarily envisaged as the top floor. From the street the houses all have the appearance of a three storey building even where they only have two, because the exterior walls continue above the second floor to provide the walls of a possible third floor. Where there is no requirement for a third floor the space forms a roof garden, or an awning can be used to create semi sheltered workspace or storage space. Where additional rooms are required the space can be readily converted, as elsewhere the walls are a mix of structural and temporary, with the temporary being easily removed to create windows. By retaining these apparently surplus exterior walls, the buildings are not only easily expandable but are generally robust to any changes in planning policy, as the can be expanded without any alteration to the building footprint or outward appearance.

In general the multi-generational home appears to be no different from the local vernacular, although it may appear to be slightly larger than some houses. They are generally set on reasonable sized building plots, but this size is there to provide flexibility, for example car parking, bin storage, the ability to provide a vegetable plot or children’s play area, rather than to provide extensive grounds that require maintenance. Therefore depending on the preferences of the occupants the outdoor space might provide an attractive but high maintenance garden, or be mono blocked to provide ample parking or house a skip and outdoor storage for building supplies for a tradesman that works from home.

A multi-generational house will generally be set somewhere that is not unduly remote, with ready access to local services, both those for the young and for the old. They can therefore be expensive and that is why flexibility and a modular approach are key. They are never particularly high specification buildings, instead they are robust and built to last. They are often built by a working couple as they approach retirement, with the ground floor being envisaged as their forever home. It is possible to simply finish the ground floor, and leave the remaining elements unbuilt until required. The independent houses above can be occupied by grown up children, other relatives, or indeed let out to form a source of income. There is adequate space for a communal approach, for example large meals can easily be accommodated, alternatively separate living rooms are provided, so that residents can easily entertain themselves and others in the context of their larger setting or independently.