The relay board can appear as a COM port on a PC. To initialise it each channel must be set as an input or output channel (relays are outputs but the chip also supports inputs, and some relay boards also offer opto-isolated inputs for devices such as burglar alarm sensors), then the relevant bit in a one-byte register is used to switch on or off a relay (16 relay boards of course have two registers, 24 relays have 3, etc). The neat thing about this arrangement is that because each USB board has its own address, the computer can control an almost infinite number of relays. The boards are self-powered from the USB bus but they have provision for an external 5v DC power supply if more than 8 relays will be closed at once.

The internet is flooded with shareware and freeware applications for these relay boards. There are numerous example programs in Visual Basic and C# but all the examples I could find were for Windows PCs. This is a good example of Mac users being at a disadvantage. EasyDAQ assured me that OS/X and Linux already had the drivers built-in but in my experience this isn’t the case. However I downloaded and installed a driver from FTDI’s website and instantly my board appeared in the Mac’s file-system as /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD (the suffix being the board’s unique address; another board would have a different address). I could operate the relays from a Unix terminal window like this:

echo -e “B\x00″ > /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD

This command initialises the 8 channels on the board as outputs. It only needs to be sent once when the relay board is first powered up. Having sent that one command, the relays can be switched on and off as shown in this example:

echo -e “C\x1f” > /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD

This sends the byte 1F to register C, switching on relays 1, 2, 3, 4, & 5 (relays are numbered from 1, starting at the least significant bit). The trouble is, when I attempted to replicate this in an Applescript I couldn’t find a way to send the byte to the board rather than the ASCII characters (i.e. ‘1′ and ‘F’) that described the value of that byte. In the end the solution seems to be to place the actual bytes in a text file and send that file (or rather, its contents) to the board. Note that you need a text editor that can insert non-printing characters into the text file; the Unix vi editor can do this, allowing Ctrl+A as ASCII 1 which will operate relay 1, Ctrl+C as ASCII 3 which operates relays 1 and 2, etc. So my shell script became:

cat /users/chris/Library/scripts/Relay01.txt > /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD

Looking at this now it’s blindingly obvious but it took me over a day to get to this point with some help from a Mac forum. My Unix days are too long ago. Having achieved this it was another faltering step to learn enough Applescript to encapsulate this shell script. The answer is:

do shell script “cat /users/chris/Library/scripts/Relay01.txt > /dev/cu.usbserial-000012FD”

Having mastered this I could draw all these bits together. The comprehensive rules facility in the OS/X built-in email client allows an Applescript to be executed when certain conditions are satisfied. I wired a mains socket to relay 1 and plugged my Anglepoise desk lamp into it, and created a couple of email rules. Now, when an incoming email arrives from my personal email address with my preset password in the subject line, and a command in the body of the email, the relay is activated.

You can see here photos of a demonstration (my apologies for the poor quality, I struggled to compose the shot to show the email on the Mac’s screen, the relay board, and the desk lamp). I also had difficulty getting the exposure right for the lamp being on and off so please take my word for it that it really does work. The command in bold red text in the email is purely for demonstration purposes. The font and colour are actually irrelevant. Since many mobile devices can send emails this ‘proof of concept’ demonstration shows how an email sent from anywhere can instruct the Mac to control an external device via the relay board. In theory you could switch the heating on when returning from holiday, or control various lights in the house to deter intruders.

Finally I slightly adapted a public-domain Xcode project written by Michael Cohen in Australia for the same relay board to provide an application giving direct control of the relays at the click of a mouse. Its simple user interface is shown here.

The fit-out of the boat was competent but unexceptional. Most of the interior was clad in varnished plywood with blue fabric-covered panels on the sides above the gunwales providing some relief from the dark brown wood. The floor was a wood-effect laminate which is a practical floor covering for a hire boat. The quality of the joinery was generally of DIY standard rather than of a professional boat fitter and there were several areas which may prove problematic in the longer term.

In the galley crockery is stored in a cupboard under the sink but a leak from somewhere, we never discovered the source, meant that plates and cookware were usually wet. There was a full-size gas cooker but the push-button ignition didn’t work and the oven door was hinged on the wrong side so lighting the oven or grill involved kneeling on the floor and trying to strike a match with one hand while holding in the control knob with the other. I singed the hairs on my hand several times attempting this. The boat was supplied with a box containing about 12 matches so we had to stop soon and find a shop that sold matches! There was a decent-sized 12 volt fridge with small freezer compartment which kept nicely cold but again the door had been installed with the hinges on the wrong side. This is just carelessness since, like most fridges, the door was clearly designed to be hung from either side.

In the shower room there was an efficient push-button macerator toilet, albeit with a small seat compared with domestic toilets. This sucked the waste into a tank under the fixed double bed. With a family of four the waste tank became full in two days and because it was mounted off-centre the boat developed a pronounced list as the tank filled, causing complaints from the children that sleeping was difficult on a tilting boat. During the initial handover I asked Sue Ware what would happen when the tank filled up and she replied that she didn’t know because the boat was new. We discovered that there was no warning light or problem with flushing the toilet; when the tank was full the raw sewage was merely pumped into the canal through a hole in the side of the boat. We did experience some difficulty in finding places to pump out the sewage tank, but had an assurance from Sue Ware that any pump-out charges we incurred would be reimbursed. In the end we only had one pump-out, from the very friendly team at Castle Narrowboats in Gilwern who made no charge.

On a more positive note the boat was a joy to handle. I would say it was one of the easiest hire-boats to steer that I’ve ever known. When moving forwards it went exactly where directed by the tiller providing there was water under the boat. When the bottom of the boat was scraping the bottom of the canal, as it did regularly, the boat just would not turn left for some reason and we’d end up having to pole the bow away from the bank. In reverse the boat went backwards in a straight line, which is a real benefit and by no means to be expected from a narrowboat.

One thing that surprised us for a boat of this size was the small capacity of its water tank. With very moderate water consumption for a family of four we had to fill up with water every day and plan showers to coincide with water stops. As with the sewage tank, there is no gauge to show the level in the water tank and on our second day we suddenly ran out of water which meant several hours without a cup of tea until we reached a canal-side tap. The pressure of water in these taps varied greatly. Usually there was a good flow and the tank could be refilled in twenty minutes but the tap near Brynich Lock, 2 miles from Brecon, was incredibly slow. We left the hose running into our tank for an hour and a half and still the tank wasn’t full so we gave up and moved on, topping off the tank at Talybont 3 or 4 miles away. There are plenty of water points along the canal so we rarely had any trouble finding one. We took with us the excellent Nicholson Guide: Four Counties & the Welsh Canals and this proved better than the guides provided with the boat. When cruising an unfamiliar canal I always like to have a map so that I know where I am, and how far to the next bridge, lock, village, pub, etc.

The canal passes through breathtakingly beautiful countryside, and for much of its length it follows the contours halfway up the slopes of the Usk Valley, giving an elevated position for views across the valley. (From an engineering standpoint this might be unwise as the canal has suffered repeatedly from landslips that cause the bank to slide down the hill and the water to pour out, most recently in 2007). The canal is never far from villages though so if you don’t mind a short walk there’s usually a pub and shop nearby. We had no trouble getting newspapers, bread, milk and a few groceries.

We didn’t stop at many pubs, having brought our own food and drink because we were uncertain how rural the canal would be, but one pub that deserves a mention is the Bridge End Inn at Crickhowell. We had moored near bridge 118 and this pub is about threequarters of a mile away, down the steep hill from the canal to the road bridge crossing the River Usk. We had to walk through the inevitable crowd of smokers gathered outside around the entrance which is slightly intimidating when visiting an unfamiliar pub but inside the welcome was warm and the beer well kept. The pub was very busy but they found us a table in the restaurant without delay. The menu at first glance looks unadventurous, with many dishes that one would find on pub menus the length of Britain, and the prices weren’t the cheapest, but when our food arrived we forgave them everything. They weren’t standard, bought-in frozen meals that required reheating, the food was proper home-made fare. Louise had melt-in-the mouth Welsh lamb (£13.95) and I had a delicious steak pie with a shortcrust pastry top (£12.95). There was a good selection of vegetables, and the house red was a very pleasant wine for £10.45. Service was attentive but not pushy from an efficient waiter and if we visit this area again we shall certainly return for another meal.

One feature of the Mon & Brec is its shallowness. It’s not a lack of water because the level was always up to the rim of the weirs, and following the 2007 breach millions of pounds have clearly been spent by British Waterways during its 2008 closure on renovating the canal. We were told by Phil Ware that BW are reluctant to dredge the canal for fear that it might trigger another breach of the bank. So for much of its length, even when cruising down the middle of the canal, we would hear the bottom of the boat scraping the bed of the waterway. Regularly we would run aground, and passing other boats could be tricky because we would both have to risk moving towards the side of the cut where the water is even shallower. Inevitably one or both of the craft would run aground and quick work with the pole, plus reverse gear, was required to refloat the boat. Fortunately the canal is very quiet with relatively few privately-owned boats compared with the main network of canals in England. Most of the craft that we passed were hire-boats from the several hire companies along the canal crewed by good-natured holidaymakers like ourselves. Most canals are murky but the Mon & Brec is positively muddy, presumably because of the silt from the bottom constantly being stirred up by passing boats.

At the southern end of the canal, towards Pontypool, the canal becomes even more consistently shallow and much quieter. We cruised for a day and a half without passing another moving boat. At the southernmost point of the navigable canal we moored to take on water only to find that the British Waterways tap was dry. We had hoped to walk further south to follow the line of the canal that is no longer navigable but a local ‘character’ sitting by the towpath eyeing our boat, who looked rather shifty himself, warned us not to leave the boat unattended because it was a “dodgy area and they’ll break into the boat within five minutes”. He didn’t actually ask us for money for him to keep an eye on the boat and keep ‘them’ away but perhaps that was his hope. Anyway we did have a quick stroll across the road to the sad remnants of a flight of locks. I wonder if I’ll ever see this restored.

In its 35¾ miles running from Cwmbran in the south to Brecon in the north the canal has a bit of everything. We were comfortably able to cruise south from Country Craft’s base at Cwmcrawnon down to the end at Pontypool, then head north up to the basin in Brecon, then back to Cwmcrawnon in a week without feeling rushed. There are six locks, the 375 yard Ashford Tunnel which has a very low roof, a few swing bridges, and an electric lift bridge at Talybont that requires the boater to close a gate to stop the traffic on a remarkably busy road and then use a British Waterways key to operate the bridge. A queue of about 7 or 8 cars formed on both times that we went through so one feels obligated not to dawdle. A couple of the bridges are very low, so that the mushroom vents on the roof of the boat only had a couple of inches to spare. This makes steering the boat challenging to say the least because one must squat down on the rear deck and hope that the boat was pointed in the right direction. Even holding the tiller is risky under these bridges because the clearance is so tight that you fear grazing your knuckles.

The shallowness of the canal did present challenges when mooring. There were a couple of canalside pubs where we wanted to stop but just couldn’t get the boat close enough to the towpath. The canal has numerous designated 48 hour moorings with rings or bollards but we just couldn’t get the boat close enough to use many of these. When we could get close we might still need to tie the boat about a metre from the bank and use the plank to reach land. In the mornings the boat would often be stuck fast in the mud and require plenty of revs from the engine plus hard pushing from one or both poles to move the boat back to the deeper channel in the middle.

Overall we had a lovely week on the Mon & Brec and would recommend it as a relaxing canal holiday. Two weeks would probably be too long unless you want to moor up a lot and go walking. The only disappointment was the dirty boat and some hirers might wish to investigate the other companies whose standards might be higher. However this didn’t spoil our enjoyment of a lovely canal.

The first step of this process is to obtain a copy of WGET, a command-line application that is freely available in versions for Windows, Mac OS/X, and Linux. WGET downloads files from web servers using either the http, https, or ftp protocols. You don’t understand what that means? Don’t worry, you don’t need to. Just use a search engine to search for ‘wget download’ or similar and make sure you’re downloading the version for your chosen operating system. If you want to learn more about wget www.gnu.org/software/wget/ is a good starting point. Having downloaded WGET, install it on your computer.

Now, we need to find the name of the .RAM file to download (RAM is a Real Audio Metafile that contains the information RealPlayer needs to receive streaming audio). For some programmes this can be retrieved from the source of the BBC iPlayer as I described on 21st February 2009. For example the full URL of last Monday’s Afternoon Play is:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/aod/playlists/vp/vt/h0/0b/RadioBridge_uk_1415_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram

However increasingly this information appears to be missing from the iPlayer source I look at. In that case you need to find the 8-character PID from the iPlayer Real Converter website. This website makes it easy to find the PID for the programme you want. Remember that the PID is reversed in the URL so the PID of Monday’s Afternoon Play in the link above is b00htvpv. Note also the time of the broadcast (in 24 hour format - e.g. 1415 for 2.15pm) and the name of the BBC radio station (e.g. radio_fourfm, bbc_7, radio_three, etc).

Having got the PID we can form a URL by substituting the three pieces of information shown here in blue:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/aod/playlists/vp/vt/h0/0b/RadioBridge_uk_1415_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram

Open a command prompt (in Windows run cmd or on a Mac run terminal.app). At the prompt enter wget followed by a space and the URL you’ve just constructed. For example:

wget http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/aod/playlists/vp/vt/h0/0b/RadioBridge_uk_1415_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram

and hit the Return key. Within a second or so WGET will download the file that contains the real URL of the program you want. In the case of this example the file is named RadioBridge_uk_1415_bbc_radio_fourfm.ram and is just 189 bytes in size. Open that file using a text editor (e.g. Windows Notepad or OS/X TextEdit), not using RealPlayer which will probably be the default application for a file of that type. You will see, as shown here, that the file contains the real URL of the Real Audio stream using the rtsp (Real Time Streaming Protocol).

Copy the first part of that URL (up to, but not including, the first ?). In the case of our example it would be:

rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk:554/radio4fmcoyopa/radio_4_fm_-_monday_1415.ra

This is the link that we can paste into RealPlayer, or Audio Hijack Pro, or whatever application we have to download the programme and save it as an MP3 file. Note that this link is not specific to a particular episode of the programme. It will work for next Monday’s Afternoon Play and the one after that. In this case since Afternoon Plays are broadcast on every weekday I can download Tuesday’s Afternoon Play merely by changing monday to tuesday in this URL. Note also that if I also wished to download for example the comedy quiz Just A Minute, which is broadcast at 1830 on Mondays, I can just amend the time in this URL like this:

rtsp://rm-acl.bbc.co.uk:554/radio4fmcoyopa/radio_4_fm_-_monday_1830.ra

So there we are. A seemingly complicated method for finding a programme’s URL but once you understand the process it isn’t that difficult to set up several downloads.

The program costs £85 by Paypal which I feel is a fair price for what you get but although the website displays a picture of a box (as shown here) you don’t get a box, or even a CD.  Having paid the money you are taken to a web page with a link to download it.  However the link only downloads a small program called the BPS Viewer which then itself downloads the Laz-IE trader program.  Therefore not only do I not have a CD, I don’t even have a downloaded file that I can burn to a CD myself.  I really dislike this.  I therefore suggest that you save the download web-link somewhere safe, and also your Paypal transaction number, so that you can obtain another copy of the software should you need it.  In my case I installed it on an old Windows XP computer but decided it was too slow so installed it again on a faster Windows Vista machine (that’s why I was glad I kept the download link).  The installation on Vista wasn’t immediately smooth; the software complained that it couldn’t find the file MSCOMCTL.OCX.  This might be something I did wrong but fortunately with the help of Google I found a copy of that file, downloaded it, then registered it (not as simple on ultra-secure Vista as it used to be on previous versions of Windows).  Many users might have to ask for help at this point. It’s interesting to me that although I provided my email address when I purchased Laz-IE Trader, I haven’t received any communication from BPS, not even a simple ‘thanks for buying our software’ email. Unlike other software vendors they haven’t indicated whether I will receive upgrades or new versions in the future.

I ended up with two new programs on my computer. The first is the BPS Viewer which seems like a proprietary web browser that downloads and displays the Laz-IE Trader manual and a few silent videos, as well as documentation relating to other BPS products.  Personally I prefer to have my own copy of the manual but the viewer does permit you to print it, and if you have Acrobat as I do you can take a copy as a PDF (I subsequently discovered that this manual is freely available to everyone as a web page here).  The viewer gives the first indication that the software has been written by an amateur programmer.  When you first load it a box pops up saying “Please wait a few seconds while we check your registration”.  However the box remains on the screen, not for a few seconds, but indefinitely until you click a button marked Close Me.  I assume this is an amateur attempt to replicate a ’splash screen’ that many software packages use to show that they’re initialising, except that a splash screen automatically disappears.  When this happens every time it soon becomes extremely tedious to click a Close Me button just to open the viewer.

The second program, the one you actually run to trade on Betfair, is called Bet-IE, which can be purchased separately for £97.  The Laz-IE trader appears to be just a component or module added to Bet-IE.  The documentation states that some of the functionality in Bet-IE has been disabled in the cheaper Laz-IE Trader but I couldn’t see this.  All the buttons on my version of Bet-IE seem to work.  You start the program in the usual way by double-clicking on a desktop icon or selecting from the start menu and it displays, yes you’ve guessed it, a box asking me to wait “while we check your registration” and the only way to dismiss this is to click a Close Me button.  It’s as if they sat down and said: “How can we really irritate people who use this software?” 

The first step in using the program is to load the list of betting markets from Betfair.  So you click on a Load Markets link and guess what happens…..yes that’s right!  A box pops up saying “Please wait while we load the Market Data”.  That would be fair enough except that the box stays there.  After ten minutes it’s still there and you can’t continue until it goes.  The only way to to dismiss it is to click its OK button.  But wait: while the box is displayed it doesn’t actually load the market data at all.  The data only starts loading after you’ve clicked OK!  Aaarrrrggghhh!

Having loaded the markets list you choose the market you want in the usual way.  Laz-IE Trader works with UK horse racing (win markets) only.  Clicking a race displays a grid containing price data for each runner, which looks familiar to existing Betfair users. Unlike the Betfair website though these prices aren’t automatically updated.  To enable the automatic updating of the market prices you need to switch it on, and you do this by clicking a red button labelled Market OFF.  Yes, that’s right, to turn on updates you click the off button.  Having done this the button’s colour changes to green and its caption to Market ON.  I’ve never previously encountered a system or machine anywhere where you press a red OFF button to turn it on and a green ON button to switch it off.  It is annoying, and counter-intuitive features like this lead me to conclude that the software was written by a young or very inexperienced programmer, possibly a teenager in his bedroom.  Not only have they not read the Microsoft style guide for designing Windows interfaces, they haven’t even stopped to think about what would work best.  The program is littered with puzzling anomalies like this.  For example if you want to cancel all unmatched bets you click the Cancel UnMatched tickbox.  But why is it a tickbox?  A tick doesn’t appear when you click it.  It should be a button.  Tickboxes are meant for flagging entries in a list not executing a command.

Despite these criticisms a lot of work has clearly gone into this program and notwithstanding its infuriating user interface it does seem to work as the programmer intended.  It uses the Betfair API to communicate market data and trades with Betfair’s servers and my trades were all submitted into the market and matched (or unmatched) in around a second or two (although the screen updates are tantalisingly suspended while the bet is processed so you have to wait to see how the market moved while the bet was being matched).  The trading revolves around a ‘Volume of Money’ percentage figure that appears to display the ratio between the current lay odds and the ’tissue’ lay odds predicted by the BPS people.  When this percentage exceeds 100% a colour change highlights the runner as a possible candidate for a back/lay trade.  Another key feature is a Weight of Money bar to the left of each runner which shows at a glance the comparative amount of back and lay money waiting to be matched.  This is very useful.  When you think conditions are right you can submit with one click a back or lay bet for a preset amount into the market.  Then, watching as the price lengthens or shortens, another click will either submit the opposing lay or back bet for the same stake, or for a calculated stake that ensures a profit regardless of which horse wins (assuming the market moved in your favour of course!). There’s also a LazIE Bet button that will submit back and lay bets with a preset number of ticks between them which I have used effectively  Note that this is not a system, it is a tool.  It requires the user’s judgement to decide when to open and close positions so no two Laz-IE Trader users will achieve the same profit or loss.  I suspect that some people are natural traders whereas others are not, and the only way to find out is to try it.

This brings me to another feature of Laz-IE trader for which the author is to be commended.  The software has a learning mode so we can practise trading without risking any money.  In learning mode the program behaves exactly as it would with live trading with the (not unreasonable) proviso that it doesn’t check the volume of money available before matching a bet so if I submit a virtual bet for £100 at odds of 2.8 it will show it as matched if any money was available in the market at those odds, even if it was less than £100. This isn’t really a problem and the opportunity to gain confidence by trading without risk is a really nice touch.

So how do you trade?  Well this is where the manual comes in.  It’s a 55 page book that’s packed with information.  I read it through completely three times to make sure I ‘got’ all the concepts.  I could be unkind and point out that whoever wrote it (it’s unclear but might be someone named ‘Dave’) didn’t excel in English at school.  The punctuation is all over the place, apostrophes are abused, and sentences run into each other without a full-stop in sight.  Despite that, let us be clear that whoever wrote this manual knows what they’re talking about and deserves to be taken seriously.  I know from personal experience that an illustrated manual like this cannot be thrown together in a few hours.  It will have taken days of work to describe the many real-life scenarios in this manual and the writer appears to know their subject.  I would urge anyone who buys Laz-IE Trader to read the manual carefully before risking any money.

So does it work?  Well yes it does.  It requires concentration and patience.  You cannot walk up to the computer, place a couple of bets, and walk away.  Like so many things in life I suspect that trading with a tool like this becomes easier and produces better results the more you repeatedly practise.  Use the learning mode to begin with.  Sometimes it seems as if the market is conspiring against you and every time you open a position the market suddenly moves the ‘wrong’ way.  But little by little the losing trades become fewer and the winning trades become more.  After using the learning mode for a while I started trading with minimal stakes. There’s no substitute for trading with real money, no matter how little, for keeping focussed and getting a buzz of excitement. If you study the example at the top of this piece you’ll see that while trading in just £5 units I backed Shared Edge at odds of 3.85 and laid it at 3.0, backed Ever Cheerful at 8.2 and laid it at 7.2, and backed Ardent Prince at 9.2 and laid it at 8.8. The result was a race where I couldn’t fail to make a profit. In the event Suhayl Star won, an outcome I could never have predicted, but the nice thing about trading is that you don’t care which horse wins. You focus on creating a profit regardless of the outcome. So in that example I won only £1.41 on the race but since it was a guaranteed profit, not a gamble, and since my maximum risk at any time was only a fiver that is a very satisfactory result. Scale it up to a more realistic £50 risk and I’d have made a £14.10 profit for about five minutes’ work.

There are a few things I’d like to change. I wish the software made it more obvious when a race was actually running. There were several times when I was concentrating so much on a trade that I failed to notice that the pre-race market had been suspended and was now running. The race header does change from counting down to the scheduled start time into the word ‘running’ but it’s easy to miss this. I’d also like the stop-loss facility to be simpler and more intuitive to use. Many of my losses have arisen purely because the market moved against me and I was too slow to close an unprofitable situation.

In conclusion I recommend this program. Since it depends upon input from BPS’s servers every time I run it I have no idea how long they’ll remain in business or if one day I go to use it and find it no longer works. In that sense you never really buy the software, merely rent it for an indeterminate period. I’m slightly sceptical about the benefit of the Laz-IE Trader ‘Volume of Money’ percentage and alerts as an indicator of trading opportunities; sometimes they work and sometimes they don’t. But using the weight of money graph and an instinct that comes with repeatedly trading I think it’s possible to return a profit on nearly all races if you work with concentration and discipline. I’ve never been interested in video games but I think trading with Laz-IE Trader could easily become addictive. If you have the time to sit at a computer through the afternoon, are reasonably numerate, and have the patience to read the manual and learn the concepts, this software is definitely worth a try.

Update on 22nd March 2009: After another weekend of using this program my confidence has grown. I have traded 26 races this weekend (22 on Sat and 4 on Sun). Only three races were losers for me, and they were early on Saturday when I made careless mistakes because I was ‘rusty’. Was I lucky? Only time will tell. However the last twenty races have all returned a profit and that is either very lucky or this trading really does work. The most important thing to remember is that you don’t have to trade. If I lock in a profit before the race starts I have tended to leave it and move on to the next. If, as in a few cases, I still have an open position at the off then I can usually trade the natural volatility of the market during a race (as long as it’s not a 6 furlong ‘quickie’) to return a guaranteed profit. I certainly wouldn’t claim that you can profit from every race but providing you balance the natural instincts of fear and greed in a calm manner I’m pretty sure this program does allow you to make an overall profit from Betfair trading.

Update on 28th March 2009: I’m definitely getting the hang of this trading using Laz-IE Trader now. I traded 17 races today, one at a small loss (once again, early in the day when I was rusty after a busy working week), then 16 profitable races. I can only reiterate that it seems to be a clear knack, and once you get ‘in the zone’, focussing on the markets and sticking with it until you make a profit, it becomes, not exactly easy, but stimulating and fun. I’ve tended to start on a race about 8 or 10 minutes before the off, focus on the favourite or second favourite where most of the volatility is, and when I’ve locked in a profit of a few pounds I leave it and move on, even if there are still several minutes remaining before the start. That way, if things move against me (as they did several times) I’ve got a chance to recover my loss and turn it into a profit. You really should give this a try!

Arthur Ransome, who wrote Swallows and Amazons and knew a bit about this sort of thing, got it absolutely right. He said of houses that they were just badly built boats, so firmly aground you couldn’t think of moving them.

I know what he means. Anyone who has a boat knows what he means. There’s something about the mobility of a boat - especially a boat you can live on - that appeals to something deep and fundamental inside us. It’s the idea that you can just pack up your home and take it with you wherever you want, something that must be connected with our primeval past when we were hunter-gatherers, travelling every day as we followed food, our homes on our backs.

But it’s a childhood thing too. It’s to do with camping trips with mum and dad, the Cubs or the Brownies; it’s to do with the excitement of summer holidays when even putting up a tent in the garden was an adventure. It’s to do with the films we saw then, and the stories we absorbed, about gypsies in their brightly-painted vardos, and cowboys and covered wagons opening up the West, everyone on the move, no one rooted anywhere, every hill on the horizon and every bend in the road a new world waiting to be explored. It’s that thing we had about ‘gentlemen of the road’ - as we used to call tramps then. People who spent their lives meandering in carefree abandon, sleeping in barns or under hedges, their errant lives untrammelled and unregulated by the petty restrictions which limited the rest of us.

There’s a heady freedom about not having a home, because then, paradoxically, everywhere becomes your home-wherever you lay your hat, as they say. Yet you don’t lose that sense of liberation if you have a home that moves. You get the best of both worlds: the chance to wander about, but to sleep in your own bed too. Caravans, I’m told, can give you the same feeling - though their drawback is that they are linked inexorably to roads. And in the twenty-first century roads are busy, noisy hellholes where everyone’s going somewhere only to come back again immediately afterwards. On the canals, the water road is tranquil and calming, and nobody’s actually travelling anywhere properly - just, like me, pretending to go on journeys to give some purpose to their wanderings.

This text is reproduced here with the kind permission of the author and the publisher.

I’ve come up with two ways, neither of which is as convenient as the name being static. The first is what I would call a do-it-yourself method. Browse the BBC listen again website to find the programme you want (e.g. Radio 4’s listen again page is at www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/progs/listenagain.shtml). Click the link to listen to the programme in the iPlayer but click the pause button as soon as it starts to play. Now right-click the black bar near the bottom of the iPlayer (just below the play/pause button) and choose View Source. This will display an editor window containing the iPlayer’s HTML source. Search the file (using Ctrl+F) for Real:. This will take you to the section of the source where, immediately after the colon, is the link to the Real Audio file you need. Copy everything from http:// to .ram. Paste this into your Real Player or other recording application and you should be able to download the file and save it in MP3 (or other convenient) format for future listening. This method works, but what a chore! I was hitherto recording around 30 Radio 4 programmes a week and with static names the whole process was completely automatic. Using Audio Hijack Pro on my Apple Mac the jobs were all scheduled in the Mac’s iCal calendar and would be recorded even if I was away from home.

The alternative method I’ve discovered is using an excellent website which I stumbled across at www.iplayerconverter.co.uk/. Initially I thought this was the answer to all my prayers but it isn’t quite. There is much useful content on this site but it isn’t comprehensive and I have encountered several errors in the PIDs they report. For example, as I type this they show the PID for this afternoon’s Saturday Play as b00hmlhk when actually it’s as shown above. Also the website shows that programme as not available for download when it clearly is because I’m downloading it right now. Nevertheless this website has content which offered welcome information when I was hunting for solutions to this problem. One of their most useful offerings for me (provided the links are correct!) is an RSS feed of programme links for your preferred BBC radio channel. For example the Radio 4 feed is at feed://www.iplayerconverter.co.uk/r/4/aod/rss.aspx. If you have an RSS reader or email client that supports RSS you can use this to receive a daily feed of links for downloading. I should add that the link sent via RSS for today’s Saturday Play was correct, unlike their website. The RSS feed provides updated links throughout the day for every programme (except those that cannot be downloaded), and it’s a simple matter to click on the required link (or copy it) to obtain access to your chosen programme.

Another development of interest is that the BBC makes available an XML file for each of its Radio channels containing key details of their programme schedule, including the all-important PID. Every three hours the Beeb releases an updated XML file containing details of all programmes that can be downloaded now, and that will be available in the coming 48 hours. A fascinating description of this XML data, and how to obtain it, is contained in this document: http://docs.google.com/View?docid=d9sxx7p_38cfsmxfcq. For example the Radio 4 xml file can be downloaded from www.bbc.co.uk/radio/aod/availability/radio4.xml. If I had more time on my hands I’d be very tempted to write an application that would use this data to automate all my downloading. Maybe next year…

I take a daily capsule of Omeprazole to control acid production in my stomach because repeated burning and scarring of my oesophagus was causing a constriction, and threatened serious longer-term problems. My specialist prescribed the medication and indicated that I shall have to take it indefinitely. When my GP first started prescribing this medicine in 2007 he did so for three months at a time and I paid a prescription charge of £6.85 for that quarterly supply of capsules.

On 1st April 2008 the Government raised the charge for prescriptions to £7.10, an apparent increase of 3.65%. However when I next visited my GP’s surgery in Mere, Wiltshire to obtain a repeat 3-monthly prescription the receptionist said I could now only receive my prescriptions four weeks at a time “because of a change in the law to save waste”. I asked how this would save waste when I need to take to take this medicine daily and she gave one of those ‘it’s nothing to do with me and I don’t care anyway’ shrugs. This had the effect of making the real increase in my prescription charge an enormous 337%, not the 3.65% announced by the Government. Furthermore, the surgery announced a reduction in their opening hours at the same time so that patients who don’t work in Mere would find it extremely difficult to visit the surgery every 28 days without taking time off work, and for those of us who live several miles from Mere we would incur additional transport costs as well as the inconvenience. By coincidence, soon afterwards Louise was prescribed a course of antibiotics by another GP at the same surgery, who also repeated that he could only give her 28 days’ worth of medicine at a time. On that occasion the surgery actually cut up the drug manufacturer’s bubble pack with scissors, dividing a single box of pills into two so that my wife had to pay a double charge.

I was sufficiently incensed by this to write to my MP to enquire how this ‘change in the law’ had been kept so quiet. He forwarded my letter to the Department of Health, and received a reply from the Rt Hon Dawn Primarolo MP, Minister of State. Ms Primarolo stated: “While it may now be common practice for prescriptions to be issued for one month or 28 days at a time, there has been no Government directive to specify the length of time for which prescriptions should be issued. Responsibility for prescribing, including the issue of repeat prescribing and the duration of prescriptions, rests with the doctor who has clinical responsibility for that particular aspect of a patient’s care.” She goes on to say: “The decision of how much to prescribe for how long is…..a complex one and should be left to the doctor.”

Therefore my GP’s receptionist misinformed me by saying the law had changed. Presumably she did this either because she was poorly trained by the doctors for whom she works or because the surgery has introduced a policy of restricting prescription duration so that patients pay more for their medication. I wrote to my GP, Dr Edward Halsey, at Mere Surgery, enclosing a copy of Ms Primarolo’s letter, and invited his comments. He didn’t reply by letter but telephoned me at 9.45 one evening. His approach to the questions in my letter was guarded but he did conclude by saying that I could have a quarterly prescription “if you want one”. Well of course I would prefer to pay £7.10 for a three-month supply of my medicine than £23, and be saved the aggravation of visiting the surgery so regularly to collect it.

So a few days later Louise visited the surgery to collect my quarterly supply of Omeprazole. Curiously, instead of 13 weeks’ supply, the doctor had prescribed 12 weeks. She queried this and the good doctor was summoned from his consulting room. He gave no reason why he thought a quarter comprises 12 weeks when it is clearly 13, but he amended the prescription so we got there in the end. It remains to be seen whether we’ll have a similar battle in three months’ time. Also it makes me strongly suspect that many other patients at that surgery who didn’t challenge the receptionist’s “change in the law” story are still paying too much for their medicines.

For several years I have carried a pair of snow chains in the boot of the car as part of my emergency kit. I tried fitting them a couple of times when I bought them but that isn’t the same as using them on snow. I carry them not so that I can get to work on the snow but purely as a last-resort emergency measure if I need to get home and am stranded, or perhaps if I must ferry someone to hospital when the roads are otherwise impassable.

Today I have stayed at home, the roads this morning being covered with such deep snow that attempting to drive to work would have been foolhardy. It was a perfect opportunity to try fitting the snow chains and driving on them. When in the box snow chains are a confusing tangle of coloured links. Even when laid out carefully they can be hard to understand. The brief, multi-lingual instructions don’t help. Nevertheless I crouched by my front wheels in the snow this morning and fitted the chains knowing that I might one day be grateful for having undertaken this exercise. The first chain took about 10 minutes to fit but the second was completed in half that time.

I then took the car out onto the snow-covered roads. Grip is immeasurably better and one quickly gains confidence that the front wheels will retain grip when ascending and descending the slopes. The steering is still awkward as the front wheels follow ruts left my other vehicles and I found myself gripping the steering wheel tightly. The sensation is not a pleasant one and the car doesn’t travel as smoothly as if on a normal tarmac surface. Nevertheless as an emergency measure they are well worth having, the purchase price being an insurance premium to give peace of mind.

Until the WaterBuoy came along boaters have usually attached a cork float to their keys. It’s a low-tech, rather bulky solution. Pictured here is a traditional cork float keyring (price £2.25) alongside the WaterBuoy (price £11.70). At first glance it’s a no-brainer. Why carry the bulky cork float around when you could have the compact WaterBuoy? The WaterBuoy has the added advantage of being visible at night which could be important if the keys are dropped into a moving current of water and won’t remain where they were dropped for long. Despite this, in my opinion using the WaterBuoy carries an unacceptable risk and I wouldn’t trust it to look after my keys or small valuables.

A cork ball may be bulky but it can be tested. If, at any time, I wish to verify that my cork float still works, I can drop it into a filled bathtub, swimming pool, or other controlled environment and satisfy myself that it floats. I know that even with rough handling over several years the properties of my cork float that make it less dense than water won’t deteriorate. Therefore I can say with confidence that in ten or even twenty years’ time if I drop my keys attached to the cork float into the water, they will float. It requires no maintenance.

Contrast this with the WaterBuoy. Mine arrived a few days ago (January 2009) but the bottom of the box carries the tiny legend: ‘Production Date 01.2008 Made in China’. So my WaterBuoy is already a year old. Inside the box the printed warranty tells me they will replace any WaterBuoy with a manufacturing defect for a period of 6 months after purchase, and refund the purchase price for a period of 3 years from the production date shown on the packaging (my italics) if the device fails to work. So my 3 year warranty has already decayed to two years before I even obtained the WaterBuoy! Furthermore, if I drop my keys overboard and the WaterBuoy fails to operate, in the event that I manage to get my key-less craft back to the shore they will give me my money back. Big deal. How could I ever prove that the WaterBuoy didn’t work? The defective unit would be conveniently lying on the bottom of the ocean or river or canal, safe from lawyers, courts, and technical specialists. It would be just my word that it didn’t work. So this lack of apparent confidence in their own product by the manufacturer is my first objection.

Secondly, how long will it last? Who can say? We know it contains a battery, an LED, a folded balloon, a container of pressurised gas, and a means of releasing that gas and switching on the light when immersed in water. What is the reliable life-expectancy of those components? My warranty lasts for 2 years. Will I have to buy another WaterBuoy in two years’ time to have complete confidence that my keys will float? If I don’t replace it, will it still work in five years? Ten? I’ve no idea. And this brings me to my final objection, the fact that it cannot be tested.

Unlike the cork float I have no idea if my WaterBuoy will work when required. Probably nearly all WaterBuoys will do what they claim but what if one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand, or even fewer, is defective? I cannot find out if mine is the defective one. I could carry it around for years and only learn that it was defective as I watch my keys sink into the water, never to re-emerge. A brilliant invention, but why risk it?

For most of the last decade in which I have digitized my paper documents I have used a Windows PC, and my document management software was ScanSoft PaperPort. Like most applications it has features that are really cool and others that are frustrating. On the whole it was fit for my purposes and enabled me easily to scan my documents into PDFs and store those PDFs in a deep hierarchical arrangement of folders. ScanSoft is a PC-only application so when I migrated to the Apple Mac I looked for an alternative. I settled upon Yep, which describes itself as iPhoto for PDFs (iPhoto is the Mac’s built-in repository for photographs). I may post a separate article devoted to Yep because it is a really nice application. Suffice to say that Yep enables me to scan, organise, and later find, the PDFs that encapsulate my life. Browsing the Yep support forum the subject of scanners has been raised several times, and the model that received repeated praise was the Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M (the M suffix denotes the Mac-specific variant of the scanner that is also available for the PC). After a particularly frustrating afternoon with my HP ScanJet I decided I would never conquer the rising piles of paper documents unless I used a better scanner.

It’s pleasing and easy to do research on the ScanSnap S510M scanner because nobody seems to have much bad to say about it. It seems to provide the features that everyone wants from a document scanner: speed, reliability, and simplicity. The online reviews, plus comments in forums and websites such as Amazon were all positive. One of the strong themes that came through was the inclusion of bundled software that integrated well with the scanner and the Mac. This clinched it. I placed my order and it was delivered the following day.

The Fujitsu ScanSnap S510M scanner is one of those pleasing items, like the iMac, where the act of unpacking its box and setting it up, is a pleasure. Everything is neatly packed, there’s a printed list of what to expect in the box, and there’s even a paper quick-start guide, a rarity these days when a PDF is usually included on the installation CD.

With the ScanSnap there are three CDs to install: Adobe Acrobat 8 Professional, Abyy Fine Reader for ScanSnap (a special version of the OCR program especially for this scanner), and finally the ScanSnap Manager, the software that controls the scanning process from the Mac. My one disappointment was that all the documentation only refers to compatibility with OS/X version 10.4, aka Tiger, whereas I have been running version 10.5 (Leopard) for over a year. I needn’t have worried. Everything worked perfectly. I knew the S510M was slightly out of date, its case colour having been intended to harmonise with the older white Mac whereas my more recent iMac is grey aluminium rather than white. No matter. The ScanSnap still looks pleasing enough sitting on the desk beside my iMac. My first thought was how small it is. The ScanSnap is tiny compared with my HP ScanJet flatbed, and the photographs on this page don’t adequately convey that. The ScanSnap is about the size of a loaf of bread; certainly smaller than our electric toaster. The outer lid hinges up to become the document feeder tray, and opening this automatically turns the power on, a blue LED clearly showing when it’s powered up. Inside is a separate articulated flap that folds out to form the paper catcher, although this is arguably unnecessary when the scanner sits on the desk; the two control buttons (power and scan) have been cleverly positioned to be easily operable when the catch tray is still folded closed.

In use, everything about the ScanSnap is exactly what I’ve always wanted. It works just like I want my document scanner to work. The warm-up time is negligible, barely noticeable at all, maybe a second or two. The speed of document feeding is impressive; I never have the feeling that I’m waiting for the scanner in the way I did with the ScanJet. There’s an option for the scanner to ignore blank pages. By default both sides of the page are scanned simultaneously (although you can turn this off if you wish). Documents can be saved as JPGs or PDFs, although the PDFs at this stage are strictly images; you can choose whether every page (or n pages) are saved as separate PDF files, or whether a batch of pages is saved in a single PDF file.  The ScanSnap Manager software offers to process each file using the Abyy Fine Reader OCR application which turns the PDF into one with text content that can be searched.  Alternatively, scanned PDFs can be dragged onto the Abyy icon in the dock for processing at a later time.  With auto-sizing every document, from a business card to a full letter or A4 page is scanned precisely.  Because there may be many different sized documents in a batch placed into the feeder tray I’ve noticed that smaller documents (e.g. till receipts or snippets torn from a newspaper) twist diagonally as they are scanned.  No problem, the ScanSnap’s software automatically recognises this and corrects the resulting image.  Very impressive.  In the very rare event of a misfeed, the cover of the scanner can be flipped open to reveal the entire paper path.  No more poking about with a letter knife as I used to have to do with the HP ScanJet’s document feeder.

 Drawbacks?  Well arguably I’ll still need to keep a flatbad scanner for the rare times when I want to scan from a book or magazine but I can envisage the ScanJet gathering dust while the ScanSnap sees daily use.  Cost is another; the ScanSnap wasn’t cheap but good tools often aren’t.  Despite the price I wish I’d bought a ScanSnap ages ago.