Happy New Year to all my family, friends and visitors to my websites. My first New Year resolution is to use the Wii Fit more! My second is to look for more “Free” (open source) solutions to my computing needs to reduce my dependence on proprietary software even more. Let me explain … Linux is […]

One of the main reasons I still Windows Vista is for video editing. Just about everything else I’ve been able to do do in Linux which is by far my preferred operating system. Now I have a HD flash based camcorder I tried to edit the video in Windows Vista using Adobe Premiere Elements. Despite […]

Santa has bought me a nice new camcorder. It’s a Samsung VP-HMX10 HD Flash (SDHC) camcorder. The camcorder is fine, but I’m still working on a few problems with my video editing software Adobe Premiere Elements 3 (which I have purchased before, not the software supplied with the camcorder). There are problems with the supplied […]

It’s certainly been an eventful 2008, dominated by the birth of our son Oliver in February. It doesn’t seam as though 10 months has past, this year has really flown by. I thought that it was hard work with one child before, but having a baby and a toddler at the same time is hard […]

It’s Christmas Eve, we’ve run out of Christmas gift tags and the shops are out-of-stock. So I’ve created my own print-your-self gift tags. These are easy enough to create using a bit of clipart and a vector drawing package such as Draw in OpenOffice.org. To save you the hassle you can just download and print […]

Here’s an idea for a Christmas craft to do with a child. Simple to make and looks great. The materials should be available from any local craft store. In my case most of the items came from HobbyCraft. The paper was bought on a roll, looking a bit like wallpaper. These cost over £4 each […]

The full title of the book is: The Christmas book – Discover a simpler, greener Christmas. Hand-crafted gifts and cards, Natural decorations, Traditional Recipes. Editor-in-chief Sheherazade Goldsmith. The Christmas Book is about creating a more traditional, less commercialized, more handmade and eco-friendly Christmas. It includes Christmas Decorations, greeting cards, gifts and cooking. With items suitable […]

I wouldn’t normally review something as boring as a vacuum cleaner, but I just thought I’d put out a word of warning to stop anyone else wasting money on this particular item. I recently purchased a Russell Hobbs Hepa Cyclonic 1800 vacuum cleaner. We were in need of a new vacuum and this one was […]

I have successfully upgraded the engine used for this blog on www.watkissonline.co.uk. This is powered by wordpress 2.7 running on Linux. I was told about the update being available through dashboard rather than having to check for updates manually. Upgrading was fairly painless following the simple instructions. During the last few major upgrades to WordPress […]

I’ve already posted about how annoying it is when people abuse parent and toddler and disabled parking spaces. I often confront these people and ask them why they are being so inconsiderate, especially if as a result I have been unable to find a suitable space. Usually they just ignore me, occasionally I do get […]