Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Relocating’ Category

If you’re like me, you’ll have a range of non-digital images lying around including prints, slides, VHS tapes, and DV tapes. The resolution of the various affordable scanners has now reached the point where it’s something you’ll only need to do once rather than needing to repeat it in a few years when the resolution gets higher. So in increasing order of difficulty, here’s how you do it…

Prints are by far the easiest to deal with. Most people will have one of those all in one printer/scanners and that’s the way to go. Depending on your computer setup, you may need to install some additional software, for example in my case the scanner software was part of the HP printer software and it was already installed. Two things you need to do are to firstly print a plain coloured page that you’ll use as the background to all your scans and secondly to set the resolution to the highest (300dpi will work fine as prints are generally not printed at a higher resolution than that).

What you do is place your photos on the scanner (face down), put the background sheet behind them, and then scan them and save as JPG images. This will produce an image with, in my case, a blue background behind them. That blue background is there so that it’s easier to select the image that you want. I use Gimp (which is free) for selecting the image from the background and tidying up the image e.g. livening up the colours from a faded colour print or to modernise a black and white print. This made a massive difference on some of my images. One important point is to save the original saved image rather than just those you’ve improved.

Slides and negatives will require you to purchase a slide scanner. There isn’t a massive choice in these at the moment as people have, by and large, gone digital. You can spend thousands on them but in reality for home scanning what you need is the KODAK RODFS70 Slide scanner at around £180 or a more up to date model of that if there’s such a thing by the time you’re reading this. There are cheaper (£50-ish) scanners, but they have much lower resolution and somewhat slower: the Kodak one weighs in at 22mp which is plenty for slides and you can scan a box of 36 slides in around 7 minutes. Worth noting is that some of the much more expensive scanners are a lot slower as they do a scan of your slide in the same way as the print scanners do i.e. it takes a minute or so per slide vs the seconds that the Kodak model takes (it takes a photo of your slide using a very small camera, hence the seconds rather than minutes). You need to buy an SD card to go along with the scanner and it doesn’t require a computer during the scanning process. Slides scanned using this come out brilliantly on large screen TVs. One thing to watch during the scanning is that the brightness range of the Kodak scanner is less than that of the slides so if you’re scanning something with a very bright detail on it then you’ll need to adjust the brightness on the scanner but I found that was only required on a few slides out of the thousands that I scanned.

Videos (VHS or Betamax) aren’t much more complicated than slides but, again, you will need some items of hardware. First is something to actually play your video with (preferably the original camcorder), and secondly a USB Video Capture device (about £10). If you’ve lost the original camcorder, you can buy one on ebay for around £50. Basically, you connect the leads on your USB capture device to the camcorder, fire up appropriate recording software on your computer, and press play. There’s a wide range of software that will do this, but the free VLC should work just fine.

Digital Video is something that should be simple as it’s digital already. At one time it was but the Firewire interface that’s required has been discontinued on all PCs from around 2012 i.e. a good while ago. You could use the same approach as for VHS tapes described above, but you’ll lose a lot of resolution and it seems a shame given that DV video is already digital. As above, you will need a camcorder to play the tape, which can be bought on ebay if needbe.

In the absence of a firewire port on your PC, what you need to do is either buy a Pinnacle USB Moviebox (the 500-USB or 700-USB) on ebay (I used the 510-USB) and use the Pinnacle Studio software (around £50, but if you’re as organised as I was, you could copy all your DVs in the free trial period) and you’ll also need the driver for your Moviebox which you can get from https://cdn.pinnaclesys.com/SupportFiles/Hardware_Installer/readmeHW10.htm (it works on Windows 11). Alternatively, you could buy a pre-2012 Mac with a Firewire port and that should be able to read directly from the DV i.e. you won’t need the Pinnacle software or Moviebox. As with the VHS options, you fire up the recording software and press play, the main difference being that the Pinnacle software can control the camcorder so you usually get a clean copy of the recording, though occasionally I found that the automatic cutoff missed bits so I had to do it manually.

All copied, so what’s next? Well, now that you’ve gone through all the work above, you don’t want to lose your digital copies so I’ve them copied onto a WD My Passport Ultra. Get the Ultra rather than the normal one as it is much faster: copying 1.5TB took over 11 hours on the normal vs around 5 hours on the Ultra as it uses USB-C.

If you’ve any questions, add them in the comments and I’ll try to answer them. I think you’ll find this is the only comprehensive guide to getting your images and videos into digital form, or at least I couldn’t find one (and I looked a LOT).

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

The first thing to note is that Australia is big, really big. Not only is there different geography including the usual city, coastal, countryside, and mountains but there’s entirely different climates to consider too. So, for example, if you’re looking up north around Darwin you can have monsoons, around Alice Springs you’ve got major heat in the summer, and in Tasmania you’ve basically got a normal (for UK people) climate. Hence, we’re concentrating our search in Tasmania.

In addition to a temperate climate, Tasmania has a whole lot fewer people: the population density is around 1/20th of what I’m used to locally. That different population density obviously affects the traffic density too which is obvious to me now but confused me initially. One consequence of that lower traffic density is that you can expand the radius that you’re considering for a property. In my initial searches, I used distance as the decider but it turns out that you can drive a whole lot further in twenty minutes in Tasmania than you can in twenty minutes in Belfast.

Unless you’re planning on living in the wilds (of which there’s a lot in Tasmania), there’s essentially two major population centres: Launceston and Hobart. Hobart is the capital and we found that there’s a lot more traffic there than there is in Launceston, as you’d expect from the larger population (about 200,000 vs 80,000). This is also reflected in the house prices: something that would sell for around A$700,000 in Launceston is more like A$1,000,000 in Hobart. That said, if you drive just ten minutes further out of the centre, an equivalent Hobart property is down to A$800,000 or so: it surprised me no end how much the prices changed if you added an extra ten minutes distance.

So, what are we looking for? Well, we have two slightly conflicting objectives in that Wendy and I will be retiring, whereas the boys will be looking for work, which means that we can’t be too far from their employment, hence our searches are looking for somewhere within about 30 minutes drive of either Launceston or Hobart. We’d also like somewhere with “a bit” of land so, notionally, minimum of a couple of acres, but not loads of acres, although we’ve found that isn’t as cut and dried as it first appeared as, for example, 100 acres of forest is probably easier to look after than 2 acres of landscaped garden. We’re not moving for about two to three years, so the prices will obviously have changed over that time but we’re using as a rough guideline A$800,000 as our maximum. Interestingly, when we were looking up to April, we seemed to need that A$800,000 but looking in July we found a number of suitable properties around A$600,000. Other than that, we’re just looking for three bedrooms minimum but even that’s not so clear-cut as you’d expect as Australian homes come with the usual bedrooms, kitchens, bathrooms, living rooms that you’d expect but also things labelled “study” (which could equally be a bedroom), rumpus rooms, entertainment rooms, workshops, storerooms, and a whole host of other categories, many of which I’ve never heard of.

They have open viewings in Australia so we were able to visit several properties whilst we were there (you can search for these via https://www.realestate.com.au/buy/inspection-times-1; they appear up to a week or so ahead). One thing that was clear right away was that the estate agent descriptions were very accurate, but equally clear was that we also needed to know more about the surrounding area of the property that we’d be buying. To partially get around that, you can use satellite view and street view on google maps, which we were doing, but it’s a lot clearer when you’re driving up to the property and having a look around. For example, one property we went to see was just hemmed in between two others and the back garden was pretty much a sheer drop, neither of which were obvious from our online investigations. Equally though, another property has what’s essentially a small national forest in its back garden which was beautiful but not at all obvious from the estate agent description or photos: in fact that property was one we’d buy if this were two years from now, yet, ironically not one that we’d have looked at buying.

What we’ve been mainly using to do our searches is https://www.realestate.com.au (that link takes you directly to one of our searches). There’s also https://www.domain.com.au/ but we found that the facilities on it weren’t so good. The RealEstate site lets you add filters, the key ones for us being the number of bedrooms, maximum price, and minimum land. You’re best to look for one less bedroom than you think you need as it will include houses with other types of rooms that you could just as easily use as a bedroom, so we actually would like four but search for three. House type is “interesting” as it’s, of course, Australian style so you’ve the usual house, townhouse, villa, retirement living, and apartment, but also acreage, rural and land which can all include houses on them. There’s also a map search option which we’ve found to be very useful as you don’t need to know what postcode areas you want your property to be in. Once we’d done a bunch of searches, we noticed that one particular estate agent seemed to turn up in a fair number of them: Neil Hawkins and, funnily enough, he was at one of the properties that we went to visit too! I suspect that’s a common occurrence in that a particular estate agent will likely specialise in the properties that you like yourself. I’m not 100% sure that we’ll end up buying our property via Neil, but I wouldn’t be surprised if we ended up doing that.

We thought at the outset that a scouting trip was essential, and it did indeed prove to be very useful. Whilst most people doing that kind of thing stay in a hotel and then just scoot around the areas that they’re interested in, we chose a self-catering property in an area that we’d previously been looking at for properties. That gave us the opportunity to get a feel for what it might be like living there and the boys pointed out later that it felt like we were living there. For Tasmania, that was Cherry Top Farmstay which is on the edge of Lilydale. It turns out that Lilydale did indeed feel like the kind of village which we’d want to be close to (we don’t want to be in a village though) as it has all the services you need i.e. decent supermarket, post office, medical centre, a small group of takeaways, coffee shops, a tavern, a petrol station, a school, and even a swimming pool. We were there for almost two weeks and were able to cover just about all the things we were aiming to do so we checked out how to sign up for Medicare, change the driving licence over, and saw round a number of other areas that we’d been considering. That said, there were a bunch of things that we couldn’t fit into the time available and we’d have needed at least another week. We’d also have liked more time to explore round Hobart as the two days didn’t really cut it, although it did highlight some negatives (the traffic) and positives (Cygnet). Our trip also had the advantage of highlighting some things that we particularly liked such as the small village feel of Lilydale and put us off Sidmouth a bit as it doesn’t seem to have that, although on paper it seems to.

As I say, we’re aiming to move around 2027 or so but we’re going to continue to look now and again as we build our evidence for my visa application that, all being well, we’ll be submitting late 2026.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

It’s been a while since the last post here! Turns out that home schooling plus real life plus blogging would require more hours in the day than there are available.

For those missing the final couple of segments of the psychology notes, they’re coming over the next few months.

So, we’re preparing for another international move, to Australia this time. We’re just back from our initial scouting trip which let us look at a few potential locations and an initial look at a few houses that would be along the lines of what we’re hoping to buy in due course. Moving to Australia is a bit more complicated than moving to France was as we (well “I”) need to apply for a visa rather than just turning up as we did when we moved to France.

We started preparations late last year when I created my IMMI account (https://online.immi.gov.au/lusc/login) which is what you use to apply for an Australian visa these days. Unfortunately, there’s no option to produce a printed version of the form so to find out what documents and whatnot you need, you’ll need to go through the whole application adding in “to be added later” or the equivalent in the various text boxes. And, there’s a LOT of information and documents that they want!

One issue that we noted as we moved through the form and looked at what others before us have done is that it’s largely geared up to couples that have been together for a couple of years and, paradoxically, much harder if you’ve been together for 20+ years as we have been. Now, I know you’re thinking that “hey, we’re married and have a couple of kids, it’ll be easy”. Nope. Each child you have just proves that you were together one day nine months before they were born, similarly for that marriage certificate. What they’re looking for is evidence that you’ve been together continuously for all those years, right up to the point when you submit the application. So, for example, the “relationship history” that you each need to write needs to cover the period from when you first met, all significant events since then, right up to the day you hit “submit” on your application.

In practice, we have found that we’re going to need to create the evidence because we haven’t been saving it up all those years. Seeing as they will be looking at this blog as part of the evidence: dear immigration officer, I know that sounds really bad, but honestly we’ve been together for over 20 years as you’ll see from this blog!

The immigration people like to see that you’ve been on holiday together which you’d think would be a doddle to prove. However, it turns out that the airlines don’t keep records going way back and we only have insurance for one holiday naming all of us because we’re on the Nationwide insurance now and it doesn’t work as proof. Accommodation booking only take the name on the credit card so are no use either. Photos sound good, but although we’ve heaps of photos, we’ve very few with both of us in them and have been making a point of doing joint selfies lately to start creating that evidence.

Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

Not so long ago, the only IT seminars put on locally were those by the BCS and usually only about once a month over the winter months with very much the same faces seen at every one.

Roll that on a decade or so and there seem to be seminars coming out of the woodwork everywhere. This week there were two quite different but equally good ones.

First off was a very interesting perspective of how agile methods are used in CME. Although broadly aimed at the development community, it had enough background for others in the IT community to pick up on it. This was one of those from the BCS series and oddly, despite there being hundreds if not thousands more IT jobs locally now, the number attending was much the same as it has always been for BCS events. That unchanging number is a bit sad really as some other non-BCS events can have hundreds of people at them these days, so why not the BCS ones?

The next day was something of a marathon ISACA one on COBIT that ran on for around two hours. That’s something of a specialist field so it wasn’t surprising to see just a handful of attendees for what turned out to be a surprisingly comprehensive overview of the COBIT methodology. The ISACA events are quite frequently attended by a hundred or more people but it does vary from topic to topic and speaker to speaker.

Over the course of a year there are quite a number of such talks. By far the best attended are generally the ISACA and BASH ones representing the IT security and IT development communities with a continual stream of niche ones at Farset Labs.Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.

We’ve been meaning to settle down to write our book for years now but have only just gotten going properly on the initial stages of it over the last week or so.

Our working title is that of the original incarnation of this blog: Living in France without a TV crew. We figured that we needed at least a working title to focus our attention on what material would go into the book and what wasn’t really that relevant.

We’ve even got a very broad provisional structure:

1. Choosing a place in France, of which we’ve nothing formally written yet;
2. Moving in which’ll likely draw mainly on the articles here from 2004-2005;
3. Some chapters looking in more detail at various aspects eg learning the language, education, etc.;
4. Moving back, which raised more issues than you’d expect.

To see what we’d already written, I’ve been pulling together the relevant posts from 2004 through to 2009 which, even after loads of deleting, amounts to 322 pages and 180,000 words ie we’ve loads to work with.

 Copyright © 2004-2014 by Foreign Perspectives. All rights reserved.