Despite losing my vision I still enjoy watching television. My viewing habits haven’t changed too much I still enjoy watching everything from cartoons, documentaries and dramas. It is however a little easier to follow shows that are story driven and rely less on visuals. The reliance on visuals is why I find a lot of modern day films difficult to follow.

ONe of the most annoying things however those is navigating through the channels on television. While Audio Description was introduced to describe the actual shows there hasn’t been a great improvement in navigating channels. There are one or two screen reading free view boxes. But it isn’t something I have really invested in to date. The reason being my Apple TV.

The Apple TV supports VoiceOver just like the rest of the Apple line. The great thing about this is it reads menus and the full description of the media. This has made selecting shows an absolute breeze for me. Now when my son asks me to put on “choo-choo’s” I dont have to tell him to wait for mummy. I can just flick the Apple TV on and navigate through the menus to find Thomas, or Chuggington or Dinosaur Train any of the shows he loves with trains in them. read more

Inspiration is a label that has often been applied to my running exploits. I have always struggled a little with this and have never self assigned the label. Being inspired by someone is so personal anyone who sells themselves as inspiring is just a little to arrogant for my taste. So I have often distanced myself from the labels “inspirational” and “motivational”.

When I started out running I certainly didn’t think about inspiring others. I just set out to try and achieve something for myself. To see where I could push myself too. Running alone was initially more by necessity than the challenge. I hadn’t considered how difficult it would be at first, I just thought I didn’t really have an option if I wanted to run. So I went out and learnt to do it.

Pushing how far I could go came when I decided to see if I could take what I had done and sustain it for long training sessions. It turned out I could, I really enjoyed those early days of training finding out what was possible. read more

With the changes in my running schedule due to the ebb and flow of my life I had planned on a few changes to my 2013 race schedule. Due to the cancellation of the 2012 NYC marathon I had intended to defer to 2013. This was a little up in the air as this year is set to be a busy one. With a new child on the way I didn’t think it too wise to head to NYC shortly after leaving my wife with a new born and Grayson!

So all the races I had intended running in 2013 are now off. I have been wondering exactly what races I should enter this year. I have reached out to a few friends to try and tag along to a few events. Then today I received a text message from an old running friend. I rarely get to see this person but whenever we meet up its to do something special, be it attempting a 100 mile run, filming a TV commercial (see below), running in ultras and even winning awards. read more

As this blog has been a testament too 2012 was a year of great experiences as well as a number of difficulties.

Due to these mounting issues I took the difficult decision to scale down my 2013 runs. I still intend to compete throughout 2013 just not to the level I had planned for during 2012. It will give me a great opportunity to add a little more balance to my life and not spend as much time training for the first time in a couple of years.

With the reduced training I thought it might be a great chance to try a few new things and do a little cross training. In order to kickstart this I have entered a little weight loss competition with 2 friends. My competing weight usually hovers around 175lbs, with my walking around weight at 179lbs. Thanks to a little excess at christmas I am a little above those weights. So a quick 4 week shred is in order to bring it inline! read more

Early last thursday morning I began the long car journey to Heathrow. I was looking forward to the flight for once as my friend had access to the gold lounge at Virgin Atlantic. I now aspire to always fly business class!

You enter the lounge through what seems like a secret door, no queues for checking in and a private line for security. It is already seeming like my first pleasant experience at an airport! The lounge itself is fantastic, an open bar, free food, concierge service and free massages and haircuts. This really is the place to wait before your flight.

After eating a three course dinner and feeling totally relaxed I headed to the plane. This is where the wonderful experience of business class ended, for we only had economy seats! Oh well with extra leg room and the thoughts of the lounge the flight drifted by.

Arriving in Newark, we were zipped through customs as the staff directed us towards the diplomat section. It appears a white cane gets you anywhere! Quickly through customs and with only hand luggage we headed for a taxi. There was a long queue so Neil took an offer to take an unofficial taxi. After spending a few minutes in the taxi I was already feeling it was wrong to be running a marathon. read more

Last week I was invited to attend the Sheffield Half Marathon awards night. I went along with the charity I had been working with and clapped as everyone received their awards. Then it came time to present the Man of Steel Award, rather surprisingly I was awarded this along with my fellow runners Simon and Charlie.

This award came as a real surprise as even though I ran further than a half marathon on the day I didn’t complete the intended distance. The night before I was dreadfully ill and was shaking all through the night, I was tempted to call the attempt off, but I told myself if I can stand in the morning I will give it a shot. I was able to stand in the morning so I went out and attempted it. Due to illness though I only achieved 15 miles on the day, but that still stands as the further I have ever run while ill! It did also take nearly 3 months till I was well again, so it wasn’t just the sniffles. I was very ill. read more

I will start this review with a little explanation of the UltrAspire MBS system. It is a Modular Belt System, so you can buy the sections separately and construct a belt that fits your needs. This is a wonderful idea as rather than buying different belts for different events you can have one core system that you simply attach different components onto. There is a whole range over at the UltrApsire store so go take a look.

The connector I chose was the Atom, I needed something to carry my iPhone 5 as I run. Finding something slimline that can accommodate the iPhone 5 is difficult. The atom is incredibly slimline with very little bulk. As well as one main pocket it also has a few extra internal pockets that are perfect for things like credit cards, great for that quick stop off at Starbucks on a long run!

What problem does it solve?

As time has gone on in my running career I wear more and more compression clothing. I love the wicking capabilities of compression wear but I hate the lack of pockets. The Atom solves this problem. read more

If you followed Pt. 1 of this little series you should have lots of scanned images in the TIFF format. What is needed is a little post processing. This will tidy up a lot of the minor issues such as deskewing the text, rotating the pages so they are perfectly straight and so on. To do this we need to install a piece of software called ScanTailor. The good news its free, the bad news it can be a little fiddly to install on OS X (simple install on windows though).

Installing ScanTailor on OS X (10.8+ – Mountain Lion)

The first step is to install Xcode, this can be found in the App Store, so is a simply click to install. Once installed you need to change a setting within Xcode, in order to do this open Xcode and go to > preferences > downloads > and select command line tools.

Perhaps the most important step of converting any book to a digital format is the initial scanning stage. There are multiple options to choose in order to scan the actual book that break down into two categories, destroying the book or keeping it intact.

Keeping it intact by far takes the longest, this is definitely the choice to make if you only want a specific chapter of a book. The best way to do this is to use PlusTek OpticBook scanner, I highly recommend the PlusTek OpticBook 3600. This is the scanner I started out with but it quickly became far too time consuming to convert an entire book.

Destroying the book by cutting off the spine allows for a far quicker and efficient scanning process. The spines can be cut off at any friendly print shop, just tell them you are visually impaired and you are allowed to convert the book to any accessible format you like. read more