Bemoaning the faults that develop in digital cameras

The Technomage's old Canon digital camera has just stopped taking pictures - or more precisely it's started taking psychadelic shots like this.



This prompted us to run through all the problems we've had with the various models we've owned over the dozen or so years since we started moving away from 35mm. All but one still remain in use and have given years of service - but virtually all had a trip to the camera doctor relatively early in their lives.

Our film cameras were relatively trouble-free - in my 20 years or more of using Yashica SLRs I can recall only one fault, while he had no real problems with his Olympus ones. My beautiful tiny Minox 35GT was perfect - but then it got stolen. Even my lovely 1960s Kodak Retinette 1B needed only occasional servicing and I bet it would still work if I ran a film through it now.

But digital is another matter...though luckily we've managed to get most faults fixed cheaply, under warranty or under a product recall notice for a known problem.

My Nikon Coolpix 950 was a top of the range, £750 camera when it was launched in 1999 (I paid about £450 once prices had dropped). Its selection dial failed - fortunately just inside the warranty period - but since then it has been a great camera, especially for special tasks - particularly 360 degree panoramas, macro and copying 35mm slides and negatives. Its swivel body design is a classic that I wish would be reintroduced on something with a few more megapixels.

All three of my / my Dad's gorgeous tiny Sony U models - U20, U30 and U40 - have been back to Sony for free repair having developed the same known CCD fault one after the other. But again, they still take decent pics and remain in regular use (and are often admired - they too have a great design).

Then shutter button popped off my two-year-old Sony H5 recently though we managed to get a new part for a fiver from Hong Kong and - fingers crossed - it seems OK now.

The Technomage's first Canon was an A5 - its battery compartment failed and it now lies broken in a drawer. His second was an A90 which decided to put a spot on all pics and so the money was refunded by Argos and he replaced it with the A95 that has failed today. Luckily, I spotted the similarity with effects of the Sony CCD problem and it turns out that Canon has a similar free repair programme and so should fix it.

So that just leaves his new Canon SX20-IS, which seems very robust...but only time will tell.

Don't like woodpeckers anymore

We'd been delighted in the last week or two to see a greater spotted woodpecker coming regularly into the garden and feeding from the fat balls.



And we've been equally delighted that blue tits have returned once again to the nest box outside our kitchen door.

But we've just come back from a couple of nights away and to our bewilderment noticed that the opening to the nest box has grown dramatically.


Before...



After...



We've come to the conclusion that the culprit must be the woodpecker - we don't think a squirrel could get up there very easily. I wonder how long it took it to enlarge the hole? Wish we'd been here - we'd have been rattling on the window to scare it off. I know it's all part of nature and the woodpecker has its own young to feed etc etc but we're very fond of our hard-working little blue tits and would rather the woodpecker stuck to the fat balls.

Fortunately both adult blue tits are still in residence - and still arriving with mouthfuls of juicy caterpillars, so we can only conclude that at least one of their young is still alive.

Next task: to go and top up the fat ball feeder in the hope that the woodpecker will be satisfied with that...and then build a new nest box for next year - this time reinforced with lots of steel mesh...

Méthode Sodastreamoise

Heston Blumenthal's Feasts series on Channel 4 makes very entertaining viewing even if 99.9999% of his astonishingly imaginative ideas are beyond the reach of us mere mortals.

As I'm not up to edible wallpaper and food that hovers, I was delighted that one of the items in his 80s Feast could be replicated in seconds.

All we had to do was put some wine into our Sodastream, press the gas button a few times and there it was, miraculously transformed into "champagne".



Heston had got busy with the fizzy on some of that 1980s classic, Blue Nun - and found that the city workers he tried it on tended to prefer it to Champagne! Our attempt involved the remains of a bottle of Aussie Chardonnay and perfectly acceptable it was too - and a lot cheaper than most fizz.

We've long been fans of the Sodastream, preferring our soft drinks (usually high-juice squash) to have bubbles but not wanting to buy bottled fizzy water. However, it's getting harder and harder to buy the traditional gas cylinders as Sodastream is now primarily based on a different system and switching would involve us in considerable investment in new equipment.

For now, we've accumulated about eight of the original cylinders and exchange any empties for full ones whenever either of us visits the dentist. The nearby Robert Dyas at Chancery Lane in London is one of the few places in the known universe that still stocks them and long may they continue.

Going to the pictures in a town without a cinema

We don't seem to get to the cinema very often these days. About 15 miles away, there's a multiplex and a much nicer smaller cinema (recently taken over by Picture House and refurbished) and we make occasional visits further afield to an IMAX for spectaculars like Avatar in 3D or Star Trek, but we often lament the fact that there's nothing closer to hand.

Or at least there wasn't. But we're now able to have a change from films on TV and see them just a couple of miles away - albeit only once a month - and it's all thanks to an excellent scheme called Suffolk Digital Cinema, which loans out the equipment to local communities and points them in the direction of where to hire the films.

We'd been aware of it for a while and had originally looked into signing up our little village, but concluded that the audience here wouldn't be big enough. So we were delighted to find that the nearby leisure centre now puts on the films. We missed the first two or three for various reasons but showed up on Friday and paid our £3 each to see Hairspray, which we knew little about - it turned out to be very good fun.

The screening was very relaxed and friendly. There were probably about 30 people there, half adults and half girls of about 10 or 11 - who gave up on the chairs and mostly went to lie on the floor at the front, which isn't something you can do at a normal cinema!

A new sewing project

I've just started a new cushion cover - one that I can design as I go along, to suit my whims and avoid the boredom of having a project where everything is predetermined. There will be 25 identically sized squares (with narrow black borders) and the idea is that half will have a flower, with the rest each being just one or two colours done using the textured stitches that I tried out on samplers.



One square will be a sunflower - I've done a practice version of that one already.



The others will be initially based on designs from various books - particularly some that my parents' neighbour, Auntie Dorothy, kindly gave me earlier this month.



I've also copied out a few flowers from one of her other books and am trying to pick an easy one for the first square to give me confidence. This one is possibly a bit small as it's only 25 holes wide whereas the squares are about 50, but I've others to choose from.



Once I've done a few, I hope to try designing a flower myself from one of my photographs...but that may be a bit ambitious! To help with planning, I've splashed out a whole £2 on 36 crayons and 40 pens. I don't think I've ever had such a large set of felt-tips before and would have loved them when I was little!

Big plant and big plants

I've been very negligent about this of late, in part because of spending the week before last in Germany at a very big exhibition about construction and mining plant...



As well as being a very big plant exhibition it had some very big items of plant...



I then came back stuffed full of a cold, so vegged out last weekend and didn't at first notice that I had a very big plant of my own here. An old amaryllis bulb that had been starting to show signs of renewed life had had put on an astonishing foot or so of growth in just a couple of weeks and two magnificent red flowers about 7" across had appeared.



I wonder what made it come to life now? I'm sure it's at least two years since it had flowered - I've completely ignored it during that time but I'm determined to look after it better now in gratitude for its display! Letting the leaves grow through the summer and then putting it in the dark seem to be the next steps, according to Direct Bulb's clear instructions.

The other rather alien plant lurking in the conservatory-type room (not grand enough to be an actual conservatory) is this.



It's a groundnut/peanut that I planted a few weeks ago and haven't yet got round to moving to a bigger pot. Not convinced that it's going to be a cost-effective way of getting peanuts (as the value ones in Tesco are only 27p) but it promises to be interesting!