Recently I was talking to someone in a pub, and mentioned that I engaged in film photography. They mentioned that they did not personally approve of film photography, as it contains animal products. This is not something I had previously put much thought into, despite generally agreeing that meat is not a particularly sustainable source of food. Whilst, after a bit of research, I’m mostly at peace with the fact that photographic emulsion uses an extremely small amount of gelatin – primarily as it is making use of a by-product which otherwise would have gone to waste, and in of itself isn’t a driver for meat production. Until meat production is entirely eliminated, I think I’ll be OK with that. I hope by that point, someone will have invented a synthetic replacement for making emulsion – if they’ve not, I’ll happily give up the hobby if it’s what keeping slaughterhouses in business. ...

In this world of Trump, Brexit and Fake News, you may well be wondering to yourself: How can I trust anything I used to take for granted any more? I thought I generally had a grip on these things, but maybe not! What else am I taking for granted that’s completely wrong? Am I getting out of bed properly? Am I competent to make the journey from home to work? Are my shoes laced up properly? Am I even real? Why am I talking to myself? ...

Photography is one of my (numerous and disparate) hobbies, and you may be perplexed to learn that I shoot quite a lot of 35mm film. Can you even do that any more? Isn’t that really inconvenient? As it turns out, yes on both counts, but I quite enjoy it! I have always been interested in documenting the world around me, and I was given a Nikon F-301 (35mm film SLR) camera as a teenager to learn with. Almost from the start, I was what might be termed an “aspiring” photographer – more serious than your average “holiday snapper”, and not a professional, but always wanting to improve my skills and images. I was rarely happy with taking the odd snapshot here and there and was always looking out for opportunities to record how I saw the world. So this is how it came to be… ...

As someone who works in audio, I appreciate a good quality set of headphones. I am, by no means, an audiophile – I’m an engineer. I want my products to operate within tolerances that are suitable for their purpose – I’m not up for cryogenically freezing my cables or painting my CDs with green pen, or indeed any other magical tweaks to get marginal gains, at best. But I do want something that will serve me well, and be comfortable doing so. ...

A Class 800 test train set spotted at Paddington shortly before the launch of the Intercity 125 replacements in October 2017, operated by GWR and Virgin East Coast As a long time user of Realtimetrains.co.uk (which is where you should go for all your real time train tracking needs in the UK), and someone with an appreciation of Open Rail Data (having used it myself), I jumped at the chance of helping their development. They’ve put out an appeal to record GPS tracks of train services that you travel on with the link to the service on the application. A lot of the work behind the scenes performed by a small team involves maintaining data relating to train positioning and comparing this with the signalling system outputs we use. This is an entirely manual task involving one of us going out with a radio controlled watch and monitoring the passage of trains through stations and junctions. An area of recent interest for us has been attempting to compute this automatically using other known bits of information. In order to validate this effort, we either have to do the manual task with a watch or collect a large dataset of GPS traces to compare against our dataset. The more data we have will allow us to improve the end product. Which is awesome. I wanted to contribute. I found a suitable app for Android called GPSlogger which seemed to fit the bill. It has quite a few settings, so I thought I’d write a quick guide on what I’ve used to successfully generate a working track for a service. ...