I have recently received a most thoughtful and, with my own degree of religious devotion in mind, appropriate present. “Grow Jesus”, just pop him into a glass of water and watch him grow by up to 600% in 72 hours.
This just has to be blogged!
Carefully removing Our Lord from his blister pack I popped him into a Coke glass full of water at around mid-day on Sunday 5th October 2008. I was half expecting him to float right on the top of the water, but no such miracle was made manifest and he sank right to the bottom. I couldn’t get him to stand upright in the glass, let alone walk on water.
Before his “baptism” he measured 36 mm in height. This means that with proper care and attention he could grow up to about 21.5 cm. Readers, focus your prayers on Grow Jesus over the next 72 hours and let’s see just how big our Mini Lord can get!
Stand by for an update this evening!
Technorati Tags: grow Jesus
Yeah, I just descended into an “OS Wars” kind of a discussion on the Facebook Wall of a totally innocent friend. Sorry about that Ryan.
It all started because I spotted a reference to “MS folks” and couldn’t resist the bait. My friend was asking whether he would be able to upgrade his Vista Business license using a Vista Ultimate license, so me being a troublemaker piped in “Just get OS X – one version, does everything, lower price *ducks and runs* ;^)” which I think is pretty obviously said with tongue firmly inserted in cheek. However I did follow that up with a second comment regarding the apparent silliness of the many different versions of Vista available and the confusion I know that causes for many consumers.
From there things rapidly degraded into comments regarding comparative price points for products etc etc. All of which is very silly, and I was totally to blame for having taken the “bait” of seeing the words “MS folks” mentioned.
I have no idea whether I was actually having this conversation with an MS employee, it doesn’t really matter, other than the fact that it would be nice for people like MS and yes, Apple, Google et al to really sit up and listen to what their customers really want.
Do I want a desktop operating system that seems to take twice the resource to accomplish the same job and at the same time doesn’t seem to offer me any actual advantages?
From my own experience I would say that Vista has been less than a huge success for MS. Yes, I’m sure they’ve sold millions of copies of the thing. But how many of those are OEM licenses, bought with machines where the end user doesn’t have a choice? And how many were bought with a license enabling the purchaser to “downgrade” to Windows XP? How many businesses have bought in to using Vista on the desktop? How many people have, like myself, decided that it was one step too far and jumped ship to other platforms altogether?
I really made my decision to move over to Macs when I first played with a Vista beta. I couldn’t see anything there which was an advantage to me, and then I started hearing all these stories of god knows how many different editions of the thing. Add to this OS X’s reputation for security and robustness and I was ready to switch. I could have gone to Linux, maybe I should have gone to Linux – but I wanted to run Photoshop natively. That was my killer application. Want to run Photoshop, then it’s a choice between Windows and OS X at the moment, sadly.
The point of all this waffle?
Not sure there is one. Maybe frustration at big corporations (not just MS) not listening to their customers or seeming to take the piss with the prices of their products. I mean, £200 for a single Vista Ultimate License? What are they on? When I bought my first “PC compatible” the price of the OS was insignificant compared to the price of the hardware. Now the equation has jumped the other way. The biggest chunk of the price of a “bog standard”, “low end” PC compatible desktop is the OS. And all that does is enable you to start up your computer and run the things you actually want to use.
I’m very happy I made the switch to Macs 2.5 years ago, but to be honest how much of what I do day to day can be done in a simple web browser? Quite a lot of it.
Vista, OS X, Linux, BSD, Solaris, OS/2, DOS… does it really matter any more?
Okay, so I now have a working video camera again. It will come as no surprise then to hear that I’ve finally made my first proper upload to YouTube. However, all is not as it seems. I have an all singing, all dancing, spangly new camcorder and my first YouTube upload is a slideshow of still photographs taken at Leicester’s Welford Road Cemetery.
I’ve written about this place on previous incarnations of this blog. Welford Road Cemetery is Leicester’s answer to Highgate. It was one of the first of the new municipal cemeteries built in the 19th Century. I’ve had many a happy hour wandering the quiet paths of these few acres of land with my camera. The “video” I uploaded is a “photographic appreciation” of the place.
Well worth a visit if you’re in Leicester and appreciate this kind of thing.
Technorati Tags: Leicester, Welford Road Cemetery
I have recently replaced a totally knackered 10 year old Canon MiniDV camcorder with a Panasonic HDC-SD9. It’s a great little camera and I’m happy at the idea of waving bye-bye to tape. I loath tape. Having to wind through it and always having the possibility of a tape chewing incident. The HDC-SD9 records high definition video to an SD card (as the name suggests).
Where tape did have an advantage was ease of archiving. If you wanted to keep the original footage then you just kept the MiniDV tape you shot it onto. Simple.
The SD card is great, but until 8GB SD cards are as cheap as MiniDV tapes are now then it’s not viable to keep the original footage on the SD card.
I’ve only shot a few test sequences with the HDC-SD9 so far, getting used to the camera and getting a work flow sorted out to deal with importing, editing and archiving the high definition video. I’m more of a still photographer, video is fun of course, but the main reason I want a video camera is for footage of my 5 year old daughter. I would have been happy to get a standard definition camcorder, but it seemed a retrograde step to me. In years to come I would have been kicking myself at the low quality of the standard definition footage. The HDC-SD9 was way cheaper than the old Canon standard definition camera was when I bought it ten years ago.
I did do some reading up before purchase and discovered that to stand any chance of dealing with the AVCHD encoded footage on a Mac I needed to have and Intel Mac with iLife 08 installed or a tool called VoltaicHD which would convert the AVCHD files to .MOV files (albeit pretty slowly).
I had an Intel Mac with iLife 08, so I was away, right?
Well, sort of…
Yes, I could plug in the HDC-SD9 and iMovie 08 saw the camera and offered to import the video clips. Hurrah! It was all working as planned. I was able to edit together some very short and simple test movies and export them in various formats – excellent!
Until…
With my still photography I like to keep all my RAW files archived, I have them on a big external HDD and also on DVDs. If I ever want to work with the original data at some time in the future then I have my digital “negatives” and I can re-process as I want to. I can fit quite a lot of RAW images onto a DVD – it’s manageable.
With my old MiniDV camcorder then I could keep the tapes, as mentioned above. Simple.
So, let me see where iMovie has imported my video to and then I can just bung that out to a recordable DVD for archiving. Sounds nice and easy…
Erm. This 8 minute clip I was playing with seems to have produced 6 gigabytes worth of data? Okay, I knew that hi-def would generate some large files, but my SD card is only 8GB and will hold about an hour recorded at the highest quality settings.
What’s going on?
Well, iMovie is reading the original AVCHD files from the camera and then transcoding the video to a .MOV file. The original AVCHD file is around 1 gigabyte for this 8 minute clip, so it has expanded by a factor of around 6 times in the process of importing it into iMovie, admittedly at the highest size and quality settings.
This is all fine for producing a finished movie, but for archiving? A full hour of footage is going to be many tens of gigabytes and how am I going to archive that realistically?
First thought – find the original AVCHD files on the SD card and copy them off to DVD. Much smaller files, much more workable. Well, yes, but… iMovie 08 will not then open the original AVCHD files on their own, it insists on only importing them from the camera.
I finally twigged a solution at this point. If iMovie wouldn’t work with the AVCHD file (stored with a .MTS file extension) alone then there had to be something else it needed on the SD card.
So, my solution :-
1) Connect the camera.
2) Camera appears on desktop as a disk called “no name”.
3) Make a disk image (using Disk Utility) of the complete file structure of the SD card.
4) Remove the camera.
5) Open the disk image.
OS X complains at me that it might be a damaged disk image (not quite sure what that is about, further investigation required) and gives me dire warnings of potential damage and loss of life etc… However once that disk image is open I can fire up iMovie 08 and it sees the disk image as if I had plugged in the camera. It needs the whole file structure in order to work.
Now I can save the disk image file to a DVD and keep my archive of original footage. Of course when I want to use that footage again I have to accept that iMovie will inflate the files to something like 6 times their original size, but that imported video can then be deleted once I’m done working with it.
It feels a bit strange to find myself in a situation where OS X has some catching up to do when working with video files. Macs are supposed to be the multimedia platform of choice, right?
AVCHD was developed by Sony and Panasonic who traditionally have tailored their products for the Windows platform, virtually ignoring OS X. I’m just glad to have found a solution that will leave me with my original footage in a usable format without the outlay of more money, well no more than the price of blank DVD media of course.
Technorati Tags: AVCHD, HDC-SD9, hi-def, ilife 08, mac, OS X, Panasonic, iMovie 08, video
We’re just back from a week in North Wales. And no, we didn’t stay in Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, but we were just the other side of the Menai Straits in a lovely cottage near Llanllechid.
I mention Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch simply because of my embarrassment at not being able to get my tongue around the Welsh language at all. When I visit a foreign country I like to do my best to learn what I can of the language and to enjoy as much of the local culture and, let’s admit it – food and drink, as I can.
Why then do I find it so hard to pronounce a Welsh place name, not just the one mentioned already in this post (and which I promise I will not mention again), but even a nice short one like Llanllechid?
And I’m also wondering why it is that when posting my photos on Flickr I use the English “Rome” rather than “Roma” and yet the Welsh “Conwy” rather than the Anglicised form, “Conway”?
And speaking of Conwy (there I go again) – what a wonderful place. I’m generally not too keen on “seaside resorts”, but Conwy really appealed. I think it might have been the rich tapestry of history that you can feel oozing out of the place. Conwy still has a remarkably intact set of medieval town walls and a wonderful castle, not to mention Plas Mawr, an incredibly intact and splendid Elizabethan town house.
Randomly looking through some old bookmarks earlier this evening I happened upon the web site of “The Musical Box“. The Musical Box are a Canadian band who recreate the live performances of Genesis. I suppose people might call them a “tribute band”, but I would say they are a lot more than that. They do an incredible job of recreating the original shows, down to the finest detail.
I saw them play in Nottingham about six years ago, performing a recreation of the “Selling England By The Pound” tour. It was a spine tingling experience and the closest I could imagine to traveling back in time to the early 1970’s to see the real thing.
Tonight I noticed that they are going on tour this year with their recreation of the “Trick of the Tail” tour from 1976. “A Trick of the Tail” is the album with the distinction of containing my favourite Genesis track – Squonk, from whence my long used pseudonym derives.
I’m wondering if there is any chance at all that I might be able to get up to Nottingham to see them again…
Technorati Tags: A Trick of the Tail, Genesis, music, The Musical Box, Squonk
A few weeks ago I saw a photo from one of my contacts on Flickr which intrigued me. The photo in question was taken in the churchyard of St. Luke’s church in Newton Harcourt, Leicestershire – just a few miles from where I live.
Today I managed to dash out there, between the showers of rain and take a few photos.
The memorial is to one Christopher V. Gardner who died at the tragically young age of just eight years in 1924. A nearby grave is that of his father, George, and the inscription states “Maker of his son’s Christopher’s Little Church which stands here”.
I am very curious as to why this little lad had a model church built as his memorial. I entered the church in search of more information, but was unable to find any. The model doesn’t really resemble the church who’s yard the grave stands in (see photo of St. Luke’s, Newton Harcourt below).
In 1992 I was given a book as a present from my aunt : Timpson’s England. After all these years I still take it down from the shelf for an occasional browse. It is full of curiosities from all over England and yet, despite the fact that it features quite a lot of curious tombs, and even features a few curiosities from Leicestershire, there is no mention of this grave. However this struck me as a reminder that there are out of the ordinary things to be seen, even very close to home, if you just take the time to look.
Note : The photo I originally saw was taken by RATAEDL and can be seen here. My thanks to him for drawing this unusual monument to my attention.
Technorati Tags: curiousity, Leicestershire, Newton Harcourt, St. Luke’s Church, tomb
I took Monday and Tuesday of this week off from work to spend some time with my daughter. On Tuesday we took a trip to Leicester’s New Walk Museum which is currently hosting an exhibition about animation. There is a heavy Wallace and Gromit theme in evidence.
After looking at all the various sets and props used in “The Curse of the Were-Rabbit” we walked to the back of the hall where there were several workstations set up for us to try our own hand at some simple animation. I had great fun spelling out my daughter’s name in “fridge magnet” letters, making them move around and then watching the magic of the movie as it played back. I loved it and spent about half an hour making various silly little movies up.
Ever since I got my first digital camera I had been wondering about trying some simple stop motion animation and seeing this exhibition might just get me to have a go at something. I might not use my DSLR for this, I have an old Olympus compact that I think should be up to the job. Something to try when I have some time free one of these weekends.
Technorati Tags: animation
Bloody hell! Just over six months without an update to SquonkyBlog II. And it’s not that I’ve been doing nothing. Just the opposite. Lots going on at work, busy at home – but just not the kind of things I want to report on my blog I suppose.
As I write, I am on my second day off ill from work. Again, something that I don’t want to write about in detail publicly, but at least it is forcing me to sit here and have some time. I’ve actually been using a VPN link into work to get a few things done today, but at least I can sit here doing that listening to some music over my headphones.
What am I listening to? Right now Coldplay – Parachutes. One of my Twitter buddies updated earlier today to say that they were doing a comparison of Coldplay albums while catching up with work and I thought “Good idea”. I still think that Parachutes and X&Y take some beating.
Looking outside I’m wishing that I could get out with my camera, but although I’m well enough to sit here typing on the laptop then I know I’m not up to that yet. Soon!
Just about a week ago my wife informed me that she wasn’t happy about having WiFi in the house. We’d been using WiFi for the last few years, and we both use laptops around the home so it was a handy thing to have.
Having said that, WiFi did have a few problems. The router was upstairs and signal strength in our living room was not great. In other rooms in the house it was virtually non-existant. Out in the garden I could pick up a signal close to the house, but if I wanted to sit out in the middle of the lawn with my laptop on a nice summer’s evening then I’d struggle to get any kind of a signal.
I had been thinking about Homeplug technology for quite a while, so this announcement from Linda that WiFi was now “Technology Non-Grata” prompted me to look into it seriously.
I have a mixed environment of machines here. A Mac Mini (running Tiger), a MacBook Pro (running Leopard), an old Dell Laptop (Windows XP Pro) and a home brewed “PC” (Mandriva Linux). I needed something that would work on just about any operating system you could throw at it.
Normally I would hunt around online for a while before taking the plunge, but on this occasion I just took a trip down to my nearest PC World outlet to choose from what they had there.
I ended up choosing the Devolo dLAN Ethernet Highspeed 85 adapters. They support Windows, Linux and Mac, have security built in and the quoted maximum throughput of 85 mega-bits per second sounded adequate as a WiFi replacement. There are 200 mega-bit per second units available, but at a price premium.
Talking of price, these things set me back £39.99 per unit – so not exactly cheap.
Installation was a breeze, though a note for Mac owners – go download the latest software from the Devolo web site before trying to set this up. I had no luck using the software supplied on CD with the unit, maybe due to my running Leopard (the latest version at time of writing is dated October 1st 2007, so that could well have been the problem).
You just plug the unit into the mains near where you want to use your computer, connect your ethernet cable to the adapter, plug the other end into your computer – and away you go.
The supplied (or downloaded!) software is only required for setting up the security on the adapters, although I notice that for Windows users there are some extra tools – none of them are really necessary. It does appear that firmware upgrades have to be applied via Windows, I could only see a Windows executable for performing this task, but I haven’t attempted to upgrade the firmware yet as it all seems to be running fine as it is (if it ain’t broke…).
No device specific drivers are required, so once you have any security set on your adapter, you’re away. It’s just standard ethernet from the computer to the adapter. The encryption is applied within the adapter. I have heard that it’s possible to pop into a neighbours house (or I guess any house up to 200 meters away) and pick up a signal if they’re on the same circuit as you. Now, I don’t really understand electricity, and I have yet to try this, however setting up encryption on the devices seemed like a good idea to me.
So, I now have one of these Devolo adapters connected to my ADSL router, and others wherever I want to connect a PC to the network. The adapters are small and light enough to just pop into my laptop case when I’m not using it. That way if I decide to use the laptop anywhere in the house, I have my adapter with me. They claim to have a range of up to 200 meters over power lines, which is actually twice that of standard CAT 5 cabling. I have yet to test this out in the garden, it being January and typically wet and cold here in Leicester.
Performance seems good, certainly better than WiFi and all in all I’m happy with the change. I always used to find signal dropouts using WiFi frustrating and I just don’t have to think about that any more. Okay, so I have to plug in an ethernet cable to my laptop when I want a connection, but that isn’t really any big deal.
I guess I’m bucking the trend in Apple’s eyes; they have after all just released their brand new MacBook Air – a computer designed to work in total harmony with WiFi. Heck you’re even supposed to upgrade or reinstall OS X (should you need to) using an optical drive located in another computer over WiFi with that thing.
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