Olympus Reviews

Inflateable Canoes for Grown-ups

Posted: 22nd August 2011 by admin in Outdoors

We are not talking about blow-up toys here. Inflateable one and two person canoes have come on in leaps and bounds in recent years. Now you can have a canoe that can be defalted and will fit in the boot of even the smallest car.

Living next to the River Thames, we have wanted a Canadian canoe for years, but never really had the storage space. Then on holiday last year we saw a couple in a rugged looking inflateable called a Sevylor Colorado and so we got chatting. They convinced us that their boat was perfect for expeditions on UK waterways.

This year we bought one for ourselves and after a summer of canoeing I can confirm that they were definitely right. The Colorado is a piece of design genius.

There are three seperate chambers, encased in two layers of ripstop nylon, so it is really rugged once inflated. This takes about 15 minutes and then you are off on the water. It is very stable (far more so than a kayak) and has ample storage space if you want to bring along camping eqipment.

It handles very well due to a proper skeg (little fin sticking down into the water like on a surfboard) which apparently is a new addition (so make sure and check it has one if you are buying a Colorado Canoe second hand on ebay). Due to it being full of air it is incredibly light, so portage over locks is far less effort than in a traditional canadian canoe. However if a big wind whips up, it will of course be more affected than a heavier vessel.

Fireshot – rolling back to the free version

Posted: 4th August 2011 by admin in Web

Fireshot is a really handy free tool for Firefox users. It makes taking screnshots easy and makes cropping them a doddle too. This is useful for bloggers in particular who like to illustrate their posts with the odd screenshot.

However there is this sneaky ‘upgrade to pro’ button. Any errant click unlocks some additional features and then after 30 days locks you out because your ‘trial’ of the pro version has expired.

How do you get back to the free version? Well, we have been searching for an answer for days and cannot seem to find it.

Simply uninstalling and reinstalling doesn’t work.

Our next attempt will be to uninstall, upgrade firefox and then try to reinstall fireshot.

However, there is at least one technique that works. If you switch to google chrome then there is a version of fireshot for that and it cannot pick up the firefox data, so you are back to a free version, but only at the expense of switching your preferred browser.

Big Leather Box

Posted: 11th July 2011 by admin in Gear

I was in a furniture store in Shipston upon Stour (near Stratford upon Avon) at the weekend. The Leather storage box was a thing of absolute beauty and one I felt I should share with you.

Is a box a gadget? Probably not, except by the widest interpretation but this thing is just to georgous to ignore.

Just look at it. I wish you could feel the leather. It was so solid, well crefted and fabulous I almost opened my wallet.

I would happily forego any number of PS3s and cups with the periodic table on them it it meant I could have this beauty in my house. Sacrelige!

If you get the chance and are looking for really beautiful furniture The Richard Harvey Collection in Shipston is great. The showroom is a converted chapel which is breathtaking in itself, well worth a wander round. Why don’t we get shops like this in London?

Kitchen Gadgets

Posted: 31st March 2011 by admin in Gear

The kitchen has always been a place to find gadgets of one sort or another. But what separates a gadget from a tool?

I think time is the issue. If a new invention finds its way into your (and everyone else’s) kitchen then we call it a gadget. If it is still there and being used 5 years later it is a tool.

Worst gadgets in my kitchen

Poached egg pod

This silicone cup has been used about 4 times so far. The eggs turn out slightly rubbery and the pod doesn’t stack nicely in the cupboard, so I doubt it will survive to become a tool.

Deluxe lever arm corkscrew

Very nicely engineered and removes the cork without hassle, but takes up a lot more room than my old ‘wing’ type. However it does make opening a bottle more of an occasion, so this may well stay the course.

Novelty Ice Cube tray

Utterly pointless and rather desperate. Definitely going in the bin as soon as I clear out the cupboard.

Wine saver

A small bottle top that forms a slight vacuum. Although bottles rarely remain only half drunk around here this little beauty is now officially a tool. Hooray…hic.

Motorised pepper mill (with blue light!)

It was a gift from someone who clearly hates me. Nobody at my house has arthritis, so we are perfectly capable of twisting a hand grinder ourselves.

Enlarging filters

Posted: 28th February 2011 by admin in photography

A simple lens that screws to the front of a slr camera can provide up to 10x magnification on the cheap. However, there is a problem with distortion with these cheap ‘enlarging filters’, so use them with care. Having said that, by screwing a 4x filter to the front of a long lens (200mm) I was able to get some excellent closeups in windsor great park today.

My lenses were made by Hoya and cost about £20 each.

Using polarising filters

Posted: 17th January 2011 by admin in photography

Polarising filters produce the one camera effect that you really cannot fake using software after a photo is taken. Therefore a polarising filter is the first accessory purchased by most photographers.

What a polariser does is to block or only let light of a certain orientation through to the camera. This means in practice that you can remove reflections from water and take out almost all the haze on a hazy day.

The effect works best when you are angled 90degrees from the sun and weakens as you turn left or right (meaning polarizers are no good for stitched together panoramic photos.

For landscapes with rich blue skies and crisp distant detail, a polarising filter is a great tool to have. One thing to remember is that as you filter out wavelengths of light, the camera exposure needs to be adjusted upwards.

Understanding Binoculars

Posted: 17th January 2011 by admin in Binoculars

I have two sets of binoculars with different numbers on the front. However, until I decided to investigate I really had little idea of what those numbers meant.

My big binoculars are a pair of Nikon 10×50 and this means the magnification is 10 times what we can see with the naked eye and the size of the front lens is 50mm (quite big for binoculars and those lenses are not light, so they are a bit heavy to have hanging round your neck all day).

My small binoculars are 8×40 so 8x magnification and 40mm objective lens.

But which is better? Well the small ones are lighter but you don’t see as far. Another issue is that because the objective is only 40mm less light enters the front of the binoculars from what you are looking at, but there again you are looking at a wider area than the 10x magnification lenses so perhaps the image is actually brighter? You need a little maths to work it out. Divide the objective by the magnification to give yourself a ready reckoner for the ammount of light that will hit your eyes.

Do the maths and you will see that they are equal in this case, but a new pair of 8x42s will give me a little more light than either of my present binoculars.

I guess it all comes down to how we use them. As a keen bird spotter I wanted to get nice an close, so I consider my 10x50s to be my best pair, but I suppose that as age creeps up on me the weight of these heavyweights may eventually demote them to second best?

Iphone 4 Rival – the HTC Evo 4G

Posted: 12th January 2011 by admin in Gear

Iphones have the ‘name’ but in terms of functionality, performance and apps, the HTC Evo (which runs the Android operating system) is a serious contender. In fact, after having looked at both I am choosing the latter.

Apart from the HD recording, wifi hotspot functionality and all the brilliant stuff that comes in the phone when you open the box, it is the android system that appeals to me. Iphone apps are being beaten into a cocked hat by the amazing apps for android.

Cost is also an issue and without the extra cachet of the Iphone brand to worry about, HTC phones come in at about 30% less cash. Free seems to be the order of the day with regular phone plans.

So, if you are looking for a real rival to the Iphone 4, take a look at the HTC.

The world’s coolest wristwatch

Posted: 10th December 2010 by admin in Gear
Tags: rolex, watch

Fewer people are wearing wristwatches these days because we all carry mobile phones that have the time on the main display. However for many people, and particularly for men, a watch is still the most expensive item of jewellery we wear regularly.

Blinged up, jewel-encrusted gold nonsense aside the expensive watches are the ones with pedigree and none has a finer pedigree than the Rolex Submariner.

This is the watch that James Bond wore (think Sean Connery in the Goldfinger and Dr No films). The watch has been around since 1954 and was originally designed (as the name implies) for Navy divers, and as such is rated as waterproof to 300m.

Costs for Rolex submariners vary considerably depending on which particular series and date they are from. One particular early series can sell for above $50,000 a piece.

The submariner is still in production and retails new for around $4,000.

Circular Polarising Filter

Posted: 25th November 2010 by admin in Gear
Tags: camera, filter, lens, polarising

If you like outdoor photos, then the great news is that the best bit of kit to add to your camera is actually not that expensive. A Circular Polarising Filter screws in to the front of your camera lens.

A Polarising Filter does two things.

Firstly it acts as a lens protector, guaranteeing the lens itself wont get scratched, but far more importantly a Polarising Filter will add some serious ‘oomph’ to your outdoor photography. If the sun is at 90% to the lens, your skies will be a deeper more saturated blue than you ever thought possible. Blown out reflected highlights off wet leaves or metal will become a thing of the past. Colours will appear richer, right across the spectrum, but the balance of the photograph will remain true to life. The haze that spoils so many photographs will magically disappear, leaving you with more lovely rich photographs than ever before.

Polarisers are the only filters that really cannot be replicated using software. There are some things you can do in photoshop that get close, but the glare removal that a polariser excels in really cannot be achieved in the digital darkroom. This is why many modern photographers cary one filter only; and that is a polarising filter.

These screw-on polarising filters generally cost less than £40 so the brilliant news is that they don’t break the bank either. If you want one piece of kit for your camera, then my advice is that a polarising lens is an excellent first choice.