Saturday 8 January 2011

A few pictures of Ramsgate today and a technological ramble

Mobile Phones

As I have mentioned before I seem to be allergic to pocket technology meaning that mobile phones seem to dissolve in my pocket, anyway Simon who works in the bookshop on Saturday’s has managed to resurrect my old PDA phone.

Unlike me he understands mobile phones and found the best available deal for what I wanted, which is a phone that works and gives cheap reliable internet access. Contracts are out for me as I don’t use the phone much as a phone so what I have got now is T mobile pay as you go with 6 months unlimited free internet access for £20.

Secondhand Bookselling and mobile internet.

In these days where just to remain in business requires dexterous use of the technology that is ultimately sinking most small businesses, there are still some secondhand booksellers who claim to have rejected the internet completely and to be operating in some sort on technological timewarp.

It was with some amusement that I came upon one of these individuals in a charity shop the other day, with his mobile internet phone set up with an app that allows the built in camera to read the barcodes on books and show the prices that they are listed on all of the main internet sites.

There he was zapping away trying to find books that would make him a profit when sold online.

I reckon that the reason that I still have a bookshop is that I have used all the modern technology available to improve the quality of the book stock on the shelves for the past fifteen years.

Today’s Pictures

http://www.michaelsbookshop.com/notebook8111 I published these with my notebook so the screen is so small that I couldn’t actually see what I was doing.

Matt B’s help with the TDC videos

see http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/ThanetStar/~3/LfUeFaX-rU8/using-and-abusing-tdc-flv-files

On Matt’s recommendation I downloaded VLC media player from http://www.videolan.org/ you may wish to uncheck the file associations during the installation process to prevent all of your media opening with this program, if you do the same.

This is a free media player, the youf of today assure me that it is the one everyone in the know uses, it will play the video file directly from the TDC website, so you don’t have to wait for it all to download and it is actually big enough to see.

1 comment:

  1. I was on ebay earlier and saw one bookshop with 80 THOUSAND sales. so for bookshops who ignore the internet do so at their peril. I am a luddite with technology but even I manage computing.

    ReplyDelete

Comments, since I started writing this blog in 2007 the way the internet works has changed a lot, comments and dialogue here were once viable in an open and anonymous sense. Now if you comment here I will only allow the comment if it seems to make sense and be related to what the post is about. I link the majority of my posts to the main local Facebook groups and to my Facebook account, “Michael Child” I guess the main Ramsgate Facebook group is We Love Ramsgate. For the most part the comments and dialogue related to the posts here goes on there. As for the rest of it, well this blog handles images better than Facebook, which is why I don’t post directly to my Facebook account, although if I take a lot of photos I am so lazy that I paste them directly from my camera card to my bookshop website and put a link on this blog.