A Time of Magic

Many people would, but for the most part they don’t get any further than thinking that they’d like to be working for themselves rather than someone else.

There are lots of reasons for this of course but perhaps one of the biggest is that they never get around to finding that small business opportunity which would suit them perfectly. Maybe it’s the level of cash needed to get going with the opportunities that they look at if, say, you’re interested in a hotel complex but don’t let that put you off as, in most cases, business opportunities in a given sector come in a variety of sizes.

What’s also often off-putting is the risk. If you’re used to a regular income from a large company then going it alone can seem really risky. The way around that is to look at franchise opportunities in the sector you’re interested in. These come with a proven business format so the risk is considerably reduced yet you’re still working for yourself.

Whatever the reason is, look for ways around any problems that you might initially perceive and go for it!

Memory card technology seems to have started to move again quite abruptly leading to a few extra labels on the packaging of SD cards.

At the moment there are three basic types of SD memory cards around and whether or not they are fine for your device is a little hit and miss. First there are the cards up to 1GB which will work in all devices that take SD cards of whatever age. Next you’ve the 2GB cards which work in most relatively new devices (up to around 3 years old); if your device is 3+ years old you’ll not know if these work until you try one. Finally there are the SDHC cards which start from 4GB and should only work in devices labelled SDHC but actually work in at least some fairly modern devices when you try them (if it’s not labelled SDHC, you won’t know if it will work until you try it). A device marked SDHC will be able to use all of the current generation of SD cards.

What size should you get? If you’ve a compact camera there’s not much point in getting anything really large as you’ll never even come close to filling it eg on my 8mp compact at the very highest resolution setting a 2GB card holds nearly 500 photos and at the normal 8mp setting it’s nearly 1000 (or about 30 minutes of video). If you think about it, that’s the equivalent of getting on for 30 films and who would have taken that many photos on a holiday? On an SD camcorder, you’ll get around an hour of video on a 2GB card. Bear in mind though that if you are running out of space, you can always buy another card.

Price-wise, the best value generally seems to be 2GB at the moment with the 8GB cards being particularly expensive.

With the proliferation of the audio and video devices that we all seem to collect these days we’ve all ended up with a jungle of cables connecting it all together.

In some ways that wouldn’t be so bad as it’s usually all hidden at the back of the TV or stereo but the problem is that in many cases there are conversions to/from analog and digital between the various devices. Each of those conversions results in a loss of quality and should be avoided when possible. In the old days it wouldn’t have been so bad as we’d have maybe had the aerial going into the back of the video then to the TV but these days you can have chains of devices converting between analog and digital eg aerial to video to DVD to stereo to TV and that gives quite a noticeable drop in quality.

The way out of this is to use HDMI (High-Definition Multimedia Interface) which is a cabling technology supported by the latest devices and which lets digital signals stay digital thus you don’t get the drop in quality that you may be experiencing at the moment. Chances are that not all your current gadgets will support this but it’s something that you should be looking out for on new devices as you’ll really notice the drop in signal quality as you upgrade to the likes of large flat screen technology and HD TV.