If your looking for a detailed review of the camera written by professionals I recommend the article on dpreview.com. Its detailed, horribly technical, massivly geeky and generally very good. This article is just a collection of my initial thoughts and some sample photos taken this weekend and last.
In a nutshell: It’s an excellent camera though obviously weighted towards the amateur side of the pro-sumer category. Continue Reading…
I’ve done a fairly large overhaul of both my blogs and changed the way I’m using them from now on.
blog.TheIlluminatedEngineer.com is expanding to be my main personal blog. I’ll post anything about work, technology, holidays and my photography there. If your a member of my family that’s the one you want to follow. Any software projects I work on will also be covered here.
As part of this I’ve moved most of my image hosting on to Flickr which should make it easier for me to upload larger numbers of images. Keep an eye on the recent pictures widget for new photos that don’t warrant a post of their own.
blog.TheCircularSnake.com will be reduced down to just geek and gaming topics. It’s where I’ll cover rpg and computer games, movies, comics, music, found videos and web-sites. Gaming projects, like the GEAR setting or my Artesia system updates, also go on this site.
Hopefully this means both blogs are more likely to be active and have a clean delineation of content.
I’ve recently setup a VPN server on my OSX box so that I can connect my iPhone and iPad to my home network securely. This lets me use tools like Air Video (to stream my video collection to my iPhone) without having to make them available to the internet as a whole. It may also let me view sites like BBC iPlayer when on holiday abroad (though that is still to be tested).
OSX ships with a VPN server but the configuration GUI is only present in the server edition of the operating system. Some digging around shows that everything you need is already installed and waiting to be configured. There is a shareware tool called iVPN that offers to do the configuration job for you at the low low cost of $15. There is also an older version of iVPN that’s open source. Something sits wrong with me about these tools that I can’t quite place so I decided to do it from first principles.
I’m back in the UK now, have been for a couple of day. Looks like I took more than a 1000 photographs over the entire holiday. I’ve already deleted about 300 as duplicates or just no good and I’ll do another pass through as I sort them in to albums for the various locations and events. Unfortunately while the circular polariser I used for a lot of the blue sky shots in Yellowstone has given amazing photos it’s left shadows in the corners of any photo taken with no zoom, I’ve got a lot of cropping ahead of me to repair the shots. I’ll have to be more careful using it in the future to make sure to zoom in every shot just a little bit.
Last post was on Yellowstone so this post is for San Francisco, my favourite American city. Not sure why; it just seems to have nice people, excellent views and a good blend of culture (both art and people). We had 3 days to see the city and while the weather was meant to be “meh” for all but the last we lucked out again and it was clear skies for most of the visit. Continue Reading…
I’ve spent the last three days bouncing and jolting across uneven snow covered roads at 35 miles per hour on a snowmobile, the sun and wind in my face (for most of it at least), looking at some of the most stunning scenery in the world.
Yellowstone in winter definitely ranks as one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen. When the skies are clear and blue the views are stunning, when they close in and visibility drops to less than a kilometre it becomes mysterious and haunted. Continue Reading…
So the flight out was a bit of a pain. Virgin advertise this big fancy economy plus class ticket with nice big seats, on demand entertainment systems and so on. What they don’t tell you is that the good stuff aint on all of the flights yet. I think there’s a complaint letter going in about that once we get back.
First full day in Vegas was good though, spent most of it out in the desert at the Valley of Fire (state park page). There’s a lot of old petroglyphs, probably Anasazi in origin. Amazingly stark, amazingly beautiful scenery (see the photo above). Back in the city for a buffet dinner. Looks like the prices have gone up a bit since last time I was here. Before they were amazingly good value, now its just an okay deal. The second day was for exploring the city itself.
Continue Reading…
I’m getting ready to head off on holiday for a couple of weeks. Having to be careful how much entertainment I carry.
I appear to have a phobia of boredom.
My gran passed away last week and the funeral was this morning. Small affair just 5 of us. Played a CD of music she had me create a few years back for the occasion and then there were a couple of readings. Nothing religious, the family is pretty much all atheist anyway.
One of Kit’s favourite poems was Warning by Jenny Joseph. I read it this morning and for those that don’t know the poem I’ve attached a recording of it to the post (do I really sound like that?).
Full text of the poem (if you don’t want to hear my dulcet tones) after the break. Continue Reading…
According to Google Analytics the SSS breached the 1000 unique visitors mark last night.
While this is a tiny number of people in terms of the internet, or even in terms of the Spotify user base it’s still significant to me as probably the most widely seen thing I’ve ever created (bar job related stuff).
Pushed up a new version of the SSS tonight.
This version adds a history tab to the interface. Your previous 10 queries will be stored in a cookie in your browsers cache (thanks to Klaus Hartl for the jQuery cookie code). There’s no identifiable info in there, it’s just the queries.
On top of that there’s a few small interface tweaks and clean-ups.
Enjoy.
UPDATE: 2.2.1 pushed up. Had to change the layout a bit due to a bug in firefox causing graphical corruption and an issue with IE7 handling of div tags with scroll bars. I’ve switched to a cleaner layout that causes less problem, theres a few other little clean-ups and optimisations in there as well. Assuming we don’t find any issues in the next few days this is likely to be the last update for a while.
A little later than expected the SSS has been updated to V2.1.0. This is just a small bump to add a few missing features I wanted in V2.0.0 but didn’t quite have time for.
This version adds support for auto complete style searching on the genre list (thanks to Ryan McGeary
for that code) which makes the newly updated genre list (now sitting
around a 1000 entries thanks to a definitive list from Spotify) more manageable. I’ve also included Afront’s how to video (which will hopefully soon be updated for the new UI).
The search should now work on IE 7.0 and later, Chrome, Safari and Firefox.
UPDATE: Pushed a 2.1.1 up at lunchtime, turns out a couple of the genre entries had been merged together. This should fix this. Also a minor UI update to make the right bar look a little cleaner.
Web App: Spotify Super Search
Spotify is an interesting (I’d like to say wonderful, but it has too many flaws for that category yet) application that lets you stream a large catalogue of music directly to your PC for free.
“Free” costs however and you pay in terms of advertising, a single advert every 30 minutes or so inserted directly into the audio stream. 30 seconds every 30 minutes isn’t much to ask and its less than most radio. Personally I can’t see how the service can survive on that level of advertising and their current subscription service isn’t worth paying for. I really hope I’m wrong however (and I know what they’d have to add to get my money each month).
Spotify is missing a lot of features that would take it that step beyond the competition. The biggest problem is the search feature; it’s limited in scope, full of inconsistencies, has no documentation and lacks a cohesive UI. It’s fine for the basic searches you’ll do 90% of the time, but that one occasion where you want 90s rock metal by 3 different artists you’re in trouble.
Here then is my solution: Spotify Super Search. Based on the original SSS by Afront and incorporating his input on the new UI this web app provides a shiny GUI for building spotify queries. Click the query and it launches in Spotify. I’ll try to keep this up to date if (or hopefully when) Spotify updates their search capability.
