Take mobile phones for example. They have been a blessing in so many ways, allowing you to phone someone in an emergency or when you are lost.

They have been even more of a boon in the South African context because they are the means of communication for the many who have no access to fixed-line telephones.

The trouble with them, however, is that many people don’t keep them for emergencies, but use them to share with their list of contacts, every random and inconsequential thought that enters their heads.

It’s bad when you get people in public places sharing every banal detail of their lives in piercing voices and even worse when you’re in company and someone starts checking messages or answering calls on their mobile, without a by-your-leave.

Call me old-fashioned if you will, but I think that’s pretty impolite. In the past, it was expected that, when talking to someone, you gave them your full attention.**

It would not have been considered okay to get up and walk off for five or 10 minutes without a word of explanation. Yet it now happens all the time when people answer their phone and walk off to find a quiet place in the shopping centre, to talk.

Even worse, is when they have their chat there and then at the table, leaving the rest of the party staring into space, in boredom or with some embarrassment, depending on how intimate the conversation gets.

I have never tried this, but I have wondered what would go through the phoning person’s mind if everyone else carried on talking loudly amongst themselves. They’d probably think their friends had no consideration for them.

Mobile phones are relatively new but I think it’s high time a consensus began to emerge about what is considered polite and what is not. I think it would be a considerable improvement if we only used our phones when alone or, if in company and unavoidable, we made our excuses first and kept conversation to the absolute minimum.

Another gripe I have with mobile phones is that they do make their users contactable all the time and have thereby cut into many people’s relaxation and leisure time.

One friend had the right idea and religiously switched off his phone outside working hours. It would probably be even better to have a private and a business number on the same phone so that you could ignore the business one after hours, but still be contactable by friends and family.

The last thing about mobiles that worries me, is their use while driving motor car cars. A scary experience recently has left me with the feeling that it really is better not to use my phone while driving.

I’m not sure that a hands-free kit is a viable option either. It’s not holding the phone that kills you; plenty of people drive one-handed on a regular basis, and are used to it.

What actually can kill you is concentrating too much on talking and not enough on piloting yourself safely through traffic.

I heard a suggestion from a panellist on the Buzz Out Loud technology podcast, which made perfect sense to me. It was suggested that the solution would be a phone that knows when you’re driving, and doesn’t distract you by beeping or ringing.

Such a system would be able to automatically reply to your text messages and calls along the lines of; "Hello, I’m driving and don’t feel like dying today! I’ll call you later."

I haven’t even got to the long-term effects on society when people get so used to interacting with each other on online social networks, accessed via their phones, that they forget how to get on with real people, but I’ll save that for another day.

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** Maybe I’m wrong in believing that politeness is important or, even, desirable, but I don’t think so. In my view, a society whose members have no consideration for each and are concerned only with gratifying themselves, will not be a society for too long.

Most columnists get to this point sooner or later, and usually plug the gap by writing a column about how they got into that situation. It’s a noble tradition and whom am I to change it.

The thing is that I had been planning to install and review a free new operating system, Jolicloud, but when I sat down at the usual time of the week to do this column, Jolicloud stubbornly refused to start.

I had taken a look at the browser-based version of Jolicloud and was interested enough to download the 700 Mb installation file. Making very sure that I chose the version which can work in tandem with Windows on an existing machine, the file downloaded quickly enough over Cell C’s broadband service.

The installation went smoothly even though I read one of the messages that came up, as ‘scamming the hard drive’, which gave me an instant vision of a tiny confidence trickster swindling my hard drive out of its retirement fund.

Jolicloud installed itself in such a way that I could choose to boot into it or Windows, when I switched the machine on. The first time, I chose the Jolicloud option, I got a nice welcome screen to look at. That was quite promising but less promising, was the next message which came up saying that a particular folder did not exist, and that Jolicloud was ‘dropping to a shell’.

The next thing to appear was a text-only DOS prompt with a very cryptic single Help paragraph detailing commands that I could type in at that point.

It made me realise just how much easier and more reliable computing has become in the last few years. In the past, we often had to delve into our computers’ innards and tinker for hours before they’d run again.

Anyone who has had an IRQ conflict on their computer, such as when they tried to install a new device, like a modem or a printer, will know what I’m talking about.

With new hardware and operating systems that have got really smooth and refined, this sort of thing happens rarely enough to be surprising and, if you’re trying to write a column at the time, very inconvenient.

The experience also underlined the change that has come over me. In the past, as an eager wide-eyed young computer enthusiast, I would have seen a failed software installation as a challenge.

Now, my first thought was "To hell with that! Where’s the uninstall button?" Life is just too short to get involved in unnecessary battles.

The trouble with Jolicloud and other alternative operating systems, I think, is that there are so many different computer environments where they might be installed. It takes lots of money and R&D to produce and refine an OS so that it will work in the majority of situations.

I can imagine that Jolicloud would work perfectly on hardware, like Jolibook netbooks, sold by the company. As my experience shows, however, there will be machines and setups where it just won’t work.

Google’s Chrome OS is on its way and I predict that it will be a better bet in the free OS stakes, if only because the company has huge resources to put into making it more bullet-proof.

One of the surprises waiting for me over the festive season was the arrival of Cell C’s fast and affordable Internet service in my remote neck of the woods.

I had been to the launch last year and had been very disappointed to find that there was no signal yet at my home in Waterfall.

Sometime between the launch and Christmas, it did finally arrive as I found in an idle moment when I plugged the modem into my netbook and found I was connecting to the Internet at hitherto undreamed of speeds.

One of my first acts was to download a 700+ Mb file and I was delighted (a bit of an understatement) to see it arriving on the netbook at speeds of between 3 and 5 Mbps. And me used to my paltry 384 kbps ADSL connection!

The arrival of the Seacom undersea cable, the subsequent bandwidth price war between ISPs, and the Cell C launch means that the time is coming when South Africans are really going to be able to participate in a truly meaningful way in the Internet revolution.

One development in that revolution, launched late last year, and which is going to make a great deal of difference around the world, is Google’s Chrome OS. It is a free operating system for netbooks which is designed to allow people to to access all manner of online applications and services in a quick and easy way.

It looks and behaves pretty much like an Internet browser and has the benefit that its small size will make it much quicker for users to switch their computers on and get on with whatever it was they were wanting to do.

There was quite a lot of hype and discussion about the new OS but I discovered that a competitor had already arrived on the scene, before the Google launch.

Jolicloud (jolicloud.com) was born for the web, according to the website, and is also a free operating system which works along the same lines as Chrome OS.

It has the even more ambitious aim of bringing a decent competing experience within the reach of people who can’t afford new computers, expensive operating systems and applications.

It is relatively small and designed to work on old low-powered computers to make it easy for their users to connect to the Internet and use a huge variety of online applications and services.

It is available for download for free from the Jolicloud website and can be installed on a computer without an operating system or alongside an existing operating system. In that case, the user can choose to use it or the original OS and applications that were on the machine.

Jolicloud will also power new low-cost netbook computers and, in fact, the first of these Jolibooks has already been launched. It can be viewed on the Jolicloud website and I must say it looks as cute as a bug.

I will be installing Jolicloud on my machine and, next week, I’ll report back on it in greater detail.

Top of my list is will be Apple’s iPad tablet computer which, it is rumoured, is probably going be updated soon.

It has been an absolute game changer in the mobile computing space and Apple has sold  many millions of them in a very short space of time. Most other manufacturers are attempting to compete, and some have even launched products, but I don’t believe that anyone has yet achieved the level of coolness that Apple has.

People are using iPads for all sorts of things including browsing the Internet, listening to music and watching video and even as a work tool for displaying portfolio pictures, taking notes at meetings and many more tasks. I want one badly.

The latest version of the iPad operating system, iOS 4.2, which applies to the iPhone and iPod touch as well, offers a new facility known as AirPlay. It sounds great and allows you to stream music and video wirelessly from your Apple device to any AirPlay-enabled video or music system.

What this means is that entertainment content can be easily transmitted from the device in your pocket and played on any compatible television set, music centre or external speaker. I can see AirPlay in my future, that’s for sure.

Another technology that has recently arrived in South Africa is called Powermat and it is able to charge electronic devices without the need to plug them in. All you do is place the device on the Powermat and exactly the right amount of power is transmitted to it, via the mysterious process of induction.

It sounds like witchcraft, but it’s apparently true and you can get a Powermat that can charge two devices at a time for $99.95. There are also a selection of receivers which you attach to your devices to enable induction charging.

There is also a power cube available, with a selection of pins on it, that will allow you to charge a wide variety of devices that do not have dedicated Powermat receivers. The technology has arrived in South Africa, but so recently that it does not yet feature on the importer’s own website.

Another technology which I’ve noticed and which will probably come into its own next year is solid-state drive (SSD) devices. These are essentially hard drives without moving parts.

They are still pretty expensive but are significantly faster than conventional hard drives and, because they have no moving parts, are going to be much less prone to failure as well.

Western Digital SSDs are already available in South Africa and the recommended price for a 64 GB drive and the associated kit to upgrade an existing computer is R 1499.

The prices will certainly come down as more of these things are produced and it may soon become common practice to have one in your computer to store its programs and operating system, a step which would significantly improve the computer’s performance.

Those two sound like great cameras and aimed at squarely at enthusiasts, with price tags to match, but there are still very good buys to be made for a lot less money.

Still very capable, are the Nikon D 3100 and Canon 500D models which are often available around town in bundles, which offer great value. You’ll often get the camera, a bag, a memory card and a second lens for between R7000 and R8000.

Point-and-shoot cameras are also popular gifts with happy snappers and professionals alike, because they are relatively compact and, although they don’t offer quite the same image quality as a DSLR does, they will produce pretty good pictures.

The number of compact is available is so huge and they are updated so frequently that it is pretty much impossible for anyone to keep track of them. The trick here is to pick a well-known brand and buy the best model you can afford.

I do not have a compact myself but I have been hankering after Canon’s new G12, released a couple of months ago. I have also heard good things about the Panasonic cameras and slightly less good things about Nikon, although their latest P 7000 looks very promising.

Blogger Thom Hogan has just completed a review of some compact cameras on his bythom.com blog, and this may help in choosing one. I’ll include a link to the review page on my blog, address at the end of this article.

I mentioned Amazon earlier and they will also be the source of the next gift on my list, which is a recently-released CD which covers the early recordings of Elvis Presley at Sun Studio.

Elvis: Rockabilly Years’>Rockabilly Years: Just About As Good As It Gets, at £7.99, includes all the material recorded by Elvis at the legendary studio and, as a bonus, there are a couple of tracks recorded during the Million Dollar Quartet jam session when Elvis played along with Carl Perkins, Jerry Lee Lewis and Johnny Cash.

I’ve been getting into early rock ‘n’ roll and rockabilly and Amazon has an extremely good selection of music and books. I recently bought A Rocket In My Pocket: The A Rocket in My Pocket: The Hipster’s Guide to Rockabilly Music">Hipsters Guide to Rockabilly, by Max Décharné.

It covers the origins of rockabilly including a substantial section on Sam Phillips, the studio owner who gave Elvis his break, and his Sun Studio. There is a companion soundtrack CD’>companion soundtrack CD to the book, and I got that too.

Talking about music, and not just rock ‘n’ roll, buying music online is the new big thing and, although Apple’s iTunes music store is not available to South Africans, Nokia’s Ovi store is.

I have bought some music from it and have found that the selection is great and the pricing quite reasonable. You do get unlimited music downloads included with some Nokia phones but I prefer to pay for the music I want because I can then play it on any device that I wish to.

The bonus is that the system keeps a list of the tracks you buy and, should these ever be lost, you can sign in to the store and go to the account section, where you can download them again.

While looking around at the South African online store, Kalahari.net, I found what for me must be the most unlikely gift of all. It is a Harley-Davidson pen and goes for a staggering R1995 although, at the price of the bikes themselves, that is a mere bagatelle.

Me being me, however, my first move was certainly not to try and find parking at a busy shopping centre but instead, to fire up my trusty browser and go out onto the web to see what I could find.

My first stop was almost my last when I visited South African shopping site wantitall.co.za to look for a new memory card for my digital camera and nearly gave it up in disgust. They had a 4 GB Kingston memory card on offer for the special price of R230, marked down from the ‘normal’ retail price of R480.

Now, I don’t know what planet these guys have been living on but, when I went to the B&H Photo Video’s website, I discovered the same card on sale for just over R 50.

From previous experience, I know that their delivery time is also about a week, so the choice of retailer for that particular gift is a definite no-brainer. I have said it before, often, but it bears repeating that South African retailers really do need to revise their business models.

I know this is a technology related column but I visited the Makro website and found that, at the time of writing, the small Weber kettle braai was on sale for less than R1000. I’ve been meaning to get one of those for ages because you can’t beat chicken and roasts cooked in them.

Maybe this year, Santa Claus will be kind to me.

My major Christmas present this year is Photoshop CS5 which I bought from the Adobe.com online store and downloaded. I have been promising myself a copy of Photoshop for years and I finally went ahead and did it even though, a month or two later, my wallet is still feeling the strain.

It is genuinely the best image manipulation program available and I recommend it unreservedly for anyone who needs (or wants) the power it offers. You do have to be fairly committed to go through its steep learning curve but the benefits are great.

Adobe also offers the extremely good Photoshop Elements program which is as much as the average digital photography enthusiast will ever need and, although there is still quite a bit to using it, it’s basic and guided-edit modes make it a lot easier to pick up and start using quickly.

Photo books you design yourself and have printed and bound make great gifts for family and friends. There are a couple of suppliers operating locally including www.myphotobook.co.za and burble.co.za.

Both offer free software which can be downloaded from their websites and both offer books and a number of other products, such as postcards, which you can create using your pictures.

The gift that really caught my eye this year and which I predict I’ll be giving to myself in the reasonably near future, is Amazon’s Kindle e-book reader. The 3G version is available from Amazon.com at $189 and I have heard its owners recommending the $59.99 leather cover with a built-in light that you can use to read it at night.

Not only can you buy a huge range of books from Amazon, but you can also subscribe to a number of publications that are automatically delivered to your Kindle via the 3G mobile network. The Kindle can also be used as a basic web browser, using either the built in WiFi or 3G facility, and it doesn’t cost any extra.

Me being me again, my gift list would not be complete without at least a few cameras on it. I am a Nikon shooter and they have just released a new model in the form of the D7000, which falls at the upper end of the enthusiast bracket.

I have downloaded pictures taken with this camera and I have been amazed at how good its performance is in low light. My current D90 is a fine camera but the D7000 blows it away in low light.

Replacing the D90 is now on my list of things to do because I am very fond of shooting at musical gigs where poor lighting is the norm, rather than the exception.

Canon has also launched a new model, the 60D, and it is apparently also extremely capable and the perfect choice for someone looking for an enthusiast-grade Canon DSLR.

Continued next time.

I reviewed the package on my computer blog a few weeks ago.

It was a copy of the latest version of their Lightroom package, Version 3, which reminded me that I have never really discussed it in these pages.

Adobe is, of course, most famous for its Photoshop image manipulation program but I believe that Lightroom is almost equally as important to photographers, although perhaps not quite yet as well known to the person on the street.

Photoshop has no equal in manipulating and fixing images and was sufficient for professionals and enthusiasts for a long time, but as these people took increasing numbers of digital pictures, the need emerged to keep track of them and to reduce the time spent processing them.

A new kind of program was needed that could catalogue large numbers of pictures, that could be used to edit lots of them quickly, that could be used show them to other people, and export them in whatever form they were required.

Lightroom was Adobe’s answer to this need and it has steadily been steadily gaining ground in the photographic community since its introduction a couple of years ago.

How Lightroom works is that you begin by importing pictures from a camera or a folder on your hard drive and then you use it to look through them, mark the bad ones for deletion and rate the others with between one and five stars. You could use ratings to show the difference between pictures which might be OK for an album or, for example, ones which are good enough to frame.

The next step is to take the pictures you want to process through to the Develop module where you can sharpen them, adjust the exposure and colour balance, correct distortions caused by your lens, remove dust spots and blemishes, apply a graduated filter to the sky or crop and straighten them.

Lightroom never alters your original picture but stores all your corrections as a list of instructions in a database and applies these to copies of the picture when you come to export it for use. It can be used instead of Photoshop for a wide variety of tasks but it does not replace it for things such as compositing more than one picture together or removing the light post growing out of somebody’s head.

The final step is to select the pictures that you need for a particular purpose and export them from Lightroom at the size you need. The Export module can be used to produce individual pictures for printing, picture layouts with one or more pictures, slideshows and web galleries.

Lightroom has come a long way since Version 1 and the newly-released Version 3 has a number of great improvements including a really good digital noise reduction capability. It now has the ability to add film-like grain to a picture and supports tethered capture, meaning that you can import pictures directly from your camera into the program as you shoot them.

A great new feature is the lens correction facility which can fix the perspective and other errors introduced by a wide variety of lenses including the most popular ones available from the major manufacturers. This can either be done automatically or on a picture by picture basis.

I believe that Lightroom would be a valuable tool for photo professionals or enthusiasts but it would be overkill for the happy snapper who only takes a couple of pictures now and then. There is nothing especially hard about using it but it does present something of a learning curve and it would pay the new user to spend some time to learn to use it to its full advantage.

There is a huge amount of material available including many books, online tutorials and videos to make learning it very easy. My favourite source for Lightroom information is the Adobe TV site (tv.adobe.com) which hosts a number of video tutorials including a show called Learning Lightroom 3.

Two other shows, both presented by Julieanne Kost, are Getting Started With Adobe Lightroom 3 and The Complete Picture, which also covers Photoshop. Each of the three shows consist of a number of episodes which are well worth watching.

I have found Lightroom particularly valuable as a timesaver in my photography and was particularly impressed recently at how easy it was to call up all the photographs I took in 2009 and rated with three stars or better, which I wanted for a photo book I was making.

Lightroom is available for both PC and the Apple platform. It’s main competitor is the Apple-only Aperture program which does simplify the choice for us PC users.

The bit that I don’t like is its ribbon interface which has brought me no benefit and has had me searching through the Help facility on many occasions, looking for features which have been moved from where I was used to finding them.

This has brought me to realise that, no matter how good Word is, the search facility within its Help feature is pretty bad. To borrow a phrase from the panellists on the ZA Tech Show podcast, it’s ‘full of suck’, meaning it hardly ever manages to find the particular part of Help I need.

You’d imagined that searching for the phrase ‘insert file’, would bring forth the details about how to insert a file into a Word document. But no, instead, you get instructed how to write, insert or change an equation, and other similarly irrelevant bits of information.

Similarly, if you typed in ‘bold text, you’d assume that the thing would tell you how to make your text bold. It doesn’t, of course, and you have to wonder what the programmers were smoking the day they discussed implementing Word’s Help search feature.

Word is not the only program that I’ve had troubles with in recent memory but I have luckily found a decent substitute. The answer is to use a conventional Internet search engine, like Google, and ask it what you need to know.

I thought I’d give it a try for my Word query and went to Google and typed in the phrase ‘insert file’ and, because it wouldn’t know that I was asking about MS Word, I added the words ‘MS Word 2010′, and then I hit Enter.

Bingo!

The first web page listed by Google had the details about how to insert a text file into an existing Word document. Mind you, I don’t know why I’m surprised, because I have found that Google comes up with the answer is surprisingly often, when you ask a question.

To test it, I asked the question ‘how many Rand equal one dollar’, and the first link it found was a page containing a graph showing the exchange rate between the two currencies for the last six months.

It likewise had no trouble with the question ‘distance from St Petersburg to Moscow’ which, if you didn’t know, is about 438-442 miles by road. I was amused by a link on the page to a related article which posed the question about the distance from St Petersburg to Leningrad; it’s zero, of course, because St Petersburg became Leningrad became St Petersburg again.

So take my tip and ask your favourite search engine if you need to know something you can’t find in your program’s help feature. Ironically, the search engine will often direct you to the right page on the software manufacturer’s own website or, failing that, one of the many helpful private ‘how to do it’ ones.

Talking of Google, I see that they have brought out a free electronic booklet for novices on how the Internet works. It’s called 20 Things I Learned About Browsers and the Web (20thingsilearned.com) and should be required reading for anyone venturing out into the Internet wilderness.

It contains just enough information for anyone to understand what the World Wide Web is, how it works, and where it is possibly going in the future. You might be tempted to think that this information is not necessary for you, but the Web can be a dangerous place for the uninitiated.

For example, a lot of Internet scams rely on decoying you to a fake website, which may look exactly like your bank’s, and recording any personal information that you type into it. The book makes the point that it is easy to copy a website but less so for a scammer to have the correct address on his fake site.

Knowing the structure of Internet addresses will help you to spot anomalies that give the game away. Just for example, your bank’s address might be yourbank.com while the scamming website might have a superficially similar address like yourbank.xyz.com; easy to spot if you know what to look for.

Some subjects somehow just beg to be presented in monochrome even though they don’t look too bad in colour. This is one of my favourite shots from recent times.