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A good friend of mine, who we’ll refer to as ‘Bob’, mentioned he’d just renewed his motor insurance for a 2006 Audi S Line for £648 from a household name specialising in insurance for older persons, I suggested that was a little high in my opinion and asked if he had used a comparison website, he replied he hadn’t, I also mentioned he had 14 days ‘cooling off’ period before his renewal was confirmed.

Bob is reasonably computer literate but did admit to never being bothered with comparison sites so I suggested we tried to see what results we might get.

We tried the ‘Meerkat’ one and the ‘Opera Singer’ one, both came back with results from around £300 to £1100(!), a good average to include all the usual benefits - Motor Legal, Breakdown Cover etc, and with an excess of £500, was around £420.

I suggested Bob went back home and talked to his original insurance company, and to mention other well known branded companies were quoting around £420 and that he had the documentation in an email to prove his point, within seconds his original quote was reduced to £420 with a refund of £228 on it’s way.......!

14 hours of footage, 2000 photos, 10 days to edit - the Mindanao 2024 video is now on YouTube.

When I knew I was going to the Philippines, I asked on a photo forum about using the Kodak Mini Shot 3, I had several replies. Now I'm back I posted a final update on the thread.

I’m back from the 3 week trip (and currently editing 14 hours of 4K footage and 2700 jpegs!), the Kodak Mini Shot 3 was a huge success. I was worried with 10 cartridge packs going through of x-ray but, having passed through 4 scanners in the UK, China and the Philippines, there were no problems.

The camera performed perfectly, although I did have one cartridge that wouldn’t load into the camera (could have been a heat or humidity problem). The camera worked in various lighting conditions and gave perfectly exposed and, generally, colour correct images. The Filipinos loved it, having never seen anything like it before, and I was under constant pressure to take as many instant photos as I could.

On one occasion the camera gave an overheat warning and I did find around 12 prints caused the battery to go down, a USB power pack would have solved that issue, but I was warned about taking one through Chinese security (it proved an accurate warning, I was grilled about all my batteries at security) but in all, the camera was a great success.

For the Mindanao trip, I’m hoping to do regular photos and updates to both the Peace and Hope Facebook page and my Wordpress blog to keep people informed of the very hectic schedule.

All my IT kit is Apple, MacPro, iMac, iPad, iPhone etc but I’ll admit I wasn’t looking forward to using an iPhone for these updates, I’d planned on using a older Dell laptop I’d beefed up with RAM and SSD but the size and weight was playing on my mind so, I shopped around and found a refurbished HP Stream 11.6” with 4Gb RAM and 64Gb SSD from Laptops Direct, the small hard-drive size didn’t bother me as I’d bought a tiny Crucial X9 2Tb external to copy all photos and video to along with upgrade Apple Cloud and GoogleDrive storage.

For a small laptop this looks to be ideal, it’s loaded with Windows 11, I’d pre-prepared some bookmarks for Edge for the FaceBook pages I need to update and loaded those, Wordpress has a downloadable App and I loaded that along with my login details, other than that there was little else to load apart from CCleaner, I’m a firm stalwart of using it on a regular basis, so I loaded the ‘slim’ version.

I also checked using my iPhone with the laptop, both for downloading video and photos and tethering with my eSIM from Holafly with 30 days unlimited data for 69.00 EUR. I’ve been told I can access to WiFi at our accommodation so I’ll have both options.

As an aside, a good friend contacted me this morning to say his Windows Photo App refused to open and could he bring it for me to look at, after trying for around 20 minutes, a check on Google told me it was a known problem with the latest Windows update and that Microsoft were working on a fix - I then needed to check on the HP laptop to see if it had the same problem, thankfully it was still working fine.

In the words of Nigel Farage recently……”I’m allowed to change my mind”.

Back in June 2023, I wrote a piece about upgrading Affinity Photo 1 to v2, I liked the App and was using it, Serif had bought out an upgraded Version 2 and I asked for an upgrade price which they refused, instead only offering me the full price version for £67.99.

So, I bought into Pixelmator Pro on offer for £24.99 which I love using, it really is a good photo / design App and highly recommended with AI integration, very regular updates and new features.

Come forward exactly 12 months and an email popped into my inbox from Serif offering me a 50% discount on anything in-store. I sat on the email for a few days. Almost out of the blue a friend asked if I could photograph a bas relief in a local church for her, to be used in an upcoming exhibition.

The lighting was terrible and I bracketed the exposure over 3 f stops, back home I used HDR Merge in Affinity Photo 1 to produce an acceptable print for her. I remembered the offer email from Serif a day later and went to look at the cost, Affinity Photo 2 with a 50% discount was now £33.99, a price I thought acceptable, so I bought it.

Why didn’t Serif consider offering me that as an upgrade price 12 months earlier? Maybe they are now losing too many users to Pixelmator Pro.....You might think that, I couldn’t possibly comment.

A new video shoot with my good friend Peter Wells for his YouTube channel and website