I’m going camping in Pembrokeshire tomorrow. Hannah and I planned to visit a number of picturesque places, and of course I shall be taking my camera in hope of finding some interesting pictures.
However, I’ve just checked the weather forecast for the next few days…
Not looking so good. Then I looked at the weather map, and have you ever seen so much blue?!
I will still be taking my camera, but don’t get your hopes up for photos of anything except wet grass, wet people and wet wetness.
I was just looking through some old (circa 1998) backups to see which ones were safe to throw away. I came across a text file containing some monophonic ringtones that have to be typed out on a Nokia phone! I don’t remember downloading them but presumably I obtained them for my Nokia 5210[1].
Of course 1999 wasn’t that long ago but I’d totally forgotten that ringtones ever existed in such an inconvenient format. I bet today’s children wouldn’t believe it, either.
Darude: Sandstorm
D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/8) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/8) G2(1/16) G2(1/16) G2(1/16) G2(1/16) G2(1/16) G2(1/16) G2(1/8) F2(1/16) F2(1/16) F2(1/16) F2(1/16) F2(1/16) F2(1/16) F2(1/8) C2(1/8) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) D2(1/16) F2(1/8)
[1] Incidentally, this handset is still going strong and used daily by my dad! He has no need for a colour screen; he sees in monochrome.
Recently at work I had to go out on site to visit a comms cabinet. I followed the directions to the cabinet, but when I got there I found it was in a tiny closet, not deep enough for a rack.
So it seems that whoever installed the network improvised. There’s an ancient 10Mbit hub, a 48-port Cisco switch and an 8-port Linksys power-over-Ethernet switch all suspended from their network cables. The PoE switch even had its heavy power supply hanging from it, too.
Switches hanging from their cables
Switches hanging from their cables
And if that’s not bad enough, check out the telephone patch panel in the same cabinet…
Telephone patch panel
The title “On not buying cheap crap” was a close runner up for this article.
A few months ago I bought a set of flashes from eBay. The price was very low, and obviously I wasn’t expecting miracles. For around £130 I managed to get two 150W flashguns, two tripods, all the power and sync cables, wireless triggers, three photographic umbrellas, a softbox and a carry case. Delivered. Not bad!
The build quality of the kit isn’t brilliant, and would quickly break if I lugged it around everywhere like a pro. But it seemed fine for occasional home use and I’ve used the various pieces several times with good photographic results.
The other day I used one of the flashes with a snoot to take a series of smoke photos. I kept the 50W modelling lamp on so I could see what I was doing. After I finished taking the photos, I turned the flash off and went to bed. In the morning, the snoot (held onto the front of the flash by one bolt) had fallen off and was lying on the floor. I didn’t think anything of it until I inspected the flash.
It seems using the snoot had significantly reduced ventilation to the modelling lamp, causing it to get hot enough to soften the plastic. The weight of the snoot (hardly anything!) was apparently enough to cause the front of the flash to sag, where it has now set.
Two flashes and a snoot
The snoot now doesn’t bolt onto the flash properly, so I will have to use it on the other flash. With great caution.
Lessons learnt
After seeing Ruth’s smoke photo in the Tuesday Challenge last week I wanted to have a go. I read about how to do it and bought some incense sticks.
I quickly learnt some lessons:
Nonetheless, here’s some of the better shots I managed. I’ve crudely given the smoke plumes false colours to make them interesting.
Smoke
Smoke
I will most definitely be revisiting this idea in the future 
I’ve dabbled in Linux for several years now – I’ve looked after Linux servers at work and at home, and I’ve had a secondary desktop PC running some version of Fedora or other.
Two years ago I switched over my PC at work from Vista to Fedora, and I haven’t looked back. I didn’t have any particularly unusual requirements of a work PC; just an ssh client to configure servers. I actually prefer the GNOME desktop to a Windows desktop, and I’ve been getting on with Fedora very well indeed.
A couple of months after this I decided to install Fedora on my main PC at home. I felt that I’d learned enough about desktop Linux to be able to get it going satisfactorily. And while it’s all good and well having a secondary Linux PC, you get any good at it unless it’s your primary.
The transition went very smoothly on the whole – I got most of my hardware working and I was very pleased with the usability. But it still nags me that there are a handful of things that don’t work (either satisfactorily, or in some cases at all) on Linux, so I’m still forced to keep Windows.
I’m a massive fan of home audio production. I play a few musical instruments and I own a set of decent recording equipment (see my Equipment List), including a Phonic Helix Board 24 firewire mixer. I purchased the mixer when I was still running Windows XP as my primary OS, and it worked very nicely. I used to use Syntrillium’s Cool Edit Pro (now Adobe Audition) and I got on very well with it.
When I moved over to Linux, I was keen to get the mixer working. There exists a project named ffado which strives to get firewire audio devices working on Linux. Unfortunately it doesn’t offer full support for Phonic devices. I did have it working at one point, although it was iffy at best, and a pain to configure each time I wanted to use it.
And while Ardour is a pretty decent piece of software, I had grown used to Cool Edit and Audition and didn’t see why I should move away. So I still boot into Windows for my audio work.
This is one of the most common complaints from individuals who migrate to Linux. Their games don’t work.
I’m not a massive gamer anyway, but I did often enjoy spending the odd hour on Age of Empires or one of a number of driving games.
Of course some games work under wine, but many don’t. Of the ones that do, they often have missing features or oddities. So I still return to Windows for my occasional gaming.
Unfortunately, since upgrading my Windows installation from XP to Vista, I’ve discovered that Age of Empires doesn’t work on Vista either. A Microsoft game… on a Microsoft OS. Quality. I don’t play Age of Empires any more.
For those who read my review of my slide scanner, you’ll recall that it doesn’t work on Linux (at all) or Vista (at all) so I had to use the XP installation on my laptop to scan in 3,000+ slides.
I also have a Canon LiDE 25 flatbed scanner which is detected and apparently works out of the box on Fedora – but unfortunately the colours are funny and broken. I haven’t found a way to remedy this so I still scan on Windows. At least it works on Vista on my desktop PC.
And of course, there are always the rare occasions when you encounter the need to use a specific application that is Windows-only, or a file format that somehow ties you to Windows. Recently, I’ve needed to use Windows for…
Overall, it’s a shame I can’t drop Windows completely. The vast majority of my needs are satisfied by Linux, and Fedora in particular has come a long way since I started using it at Fedora Core 5.
So who’s to blame for this dependence on Windows? In my opinion, the blame must lie with the application developers who write their applications and games for only one OS; the hardware vendors who don’t bother to write drivers for any but the most common OSs.
Linux developers work hard to provide drivers and applications for new devices and new file formats. Their task is made harder by manufacturers who stick to closed formats and proprietary devices. It’s a shame, because it ruins my life!
This week’s photo challenge was Pink.
I didn’t have any particular ideas for pink photos , other than I specifically wanted to avoid flowers because they’re too unoriginal. So I decided this would be a good time to try some of the photographic ideas I’ve been meaning to try for ages. One of these ideas was taking a photo through a magnifying glass, which I bought specifically for this purpose a couple of months ago for 99p.
The only “unusual” pink object I could think of was a jelly baby, and this is the rather abstract result.
Jelly baby
Never realised how ugly these gelatine infants are until I studied them closely. Yuck.