Marples' time

Being moved to thin the nut tree in the back garden, the one from which we never get nuts as the grey squirrels always check them out before the nuts have reached eatable size, I had occasion to use my half inch mortise chisel, mentioned at reference 1 and possibly bought 45 years ago from the hardware store - London DIY - at gmaps 51.4016835,-0.1185625. It may, despite the new fascia, be the same shop at which I spent some of my university grant money at that time. Maybe the same in the sense of continuous existence as a hardware store, but not in the sense of continuous operation by the same family. Where does one draw the line?

This use because it is more or less impossible to tale unwanted, individual branches out at the base, at the stool of the tree. Cutting down all the branches and starting again is one thing ( a procedure known to suburban cognoscenti as coppicing), selectivity is quite another. But where the pruning saw can't go, it came to me the other day that a mortise chisel could go and I have now taken out five branches, all the crossing branches which were rubbing up against another, two of them with the chisel. Not the use imagined or intended by Marples, who no doubt hoped for better, but I could do a surprisingly neat job with it, illustrated, with the cut facing the camera being one of the chisel cuts.

It is also a big day because I have finally got my hands on a user guide for the new telephone, by the simple expedient of asking Google for one. This worked, while asking Microsoft did not, despite it being their guide, and I now have 4Mb of guide on both desktop and telephone. There will be a New Year resolution about spending at least 10 minutes a day with it. No particular programme or requirement but hopefully, over time, stuff will sink in.

I am making some progress with the camera moving into go slow mode. This seems to be because it is taking many pictures for the price of one, the idea being either to generate a short video clip or to provide a range from which you can then select the finest for presentation and/or display. But I have to find out what prompts it to start doing this or how to stop it.

I have also discovered something called enhancement, which you can turn on and off in at least one of the photograph viewers offered by Windows 10. Enhancement seems to mean doing something with the colours, perhaps strengthening the dominant colours, with the sort of unfortunate effect noticed at reference 2. But although the distinctive markings of the bark of this particular sort of tree are clearly visible above (or at least they are when you click to enlarge), it is also true that the snap is a little washed out, over exposed. Must carry on with the user guide! No more point and click!

Reference 1: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2013/04/shed-time.html.

Reference 2: http://psmv2.blogspot.co.uk/2015/12/horton-clockwise.html.