This year I mostly… Learned something new about shops: Had a good view of Birmingham from my bedroom window/wall: Got some Nextweb stickers: Bought my bazilionth pair of Nikes: Bought an Olly Moss print: Had some spare blood so exchanged it for some squash and a Club bar: Made an animal out of desktop sundries: Had a (few) free coffees: Made unusual clocks: Played in the snow: Received a gift from the dog: Saw an electric car: Saved some money at Tesco: Designed and made [...]
Another photo-blog! I visited the athletics stadium to watch the Paralympics on Sunday night, to say the least I was totally blown away! Being a Games Maker with the right accreditation I decided to try to find the best seat possible to ‘fill’. (One of the perks of being a Games Maker is you can usually sit in an empty seat in the venue you’re working in providing you get out of the way of any paying customers if they arrive). I was really keen [...]
Yesterday I took a trip to The Royal Hospital Chelsea for the annual car show, Chelsea Autolegends. I arrived at 8am with my friend in his Vauxall VXR8 and my other friend in convoy in his Porsche 911. We took a look around before the public arrived, but the real highlight of the day was the supercar parade. I managed to snag a decent spot right at the gate to take some photos of the cars as they drove in. All the photos I took [...]
Having recently gained my IMC rating I decided it was time to embark on a longer trip now that I’m not so restricted by by weather conditions. The destination was Stornaway routing via the Isle of Man and Machrihanish; this route covered extensive amounts of open water but the advantage was we could cruise at a higher altitude because we were clear of the restricted airspace over the large airports on the mainland, plus we got a fantastic view of the Outer Hebrides on the [...]
Upon upgrading my Mac to Mountain Lion I was pleased to see that the highlighting of running apps in the dock had been toned down a little. Perhaps a little too much though? This is how they look by default: But with a little modification you can get them to turn into little arrows like this: This little modification is really simple, here’s how to do it: Download this .zip file containing the replacement graphics Unpack the .zip file, which contains two files, indicator_medium.png and [...]
They say the best lens you own is the one on your camera right now; well I certainly learned that lesson yesterday when taking these photos of the Olympic Torch as it passed through Denham. I turned up with a 70-300mm zoom lens expecting to be at the roadside some distance away from the action, instead I was greeted with a mass crowd of people standing, well, everywhere and anywhere they could! I must say I was slightly disappointed that the road wasn’t closed off [...]
In the slightly ongoing tradition of ‘finding things on the internet and sharing them on my blog’, I’ve decided to share another video. I’m slightly late on this one as the videos date back to 2011, but none the less, I thought it was worth a blog post. The Sagen Series is, to quote directly: …a collection of tribute videos dedicated to the late, great Carl Sagan. Breath-taking cinematography and a mesmerising soundtrack lends a powerful scenery to Sagan’s narration from his hit TV series, [...]
While I was supposed to be busy doing a few other bits this morning, I came across this video. It’s strange how a video on mechanical principles from 1930 set to music can be so hypnotising. [source]
So, I needed some professional looking photographs taking of my current little side project – The Wordclock. I realised pretty soon that hiring a professional to take the photos was unfortunately out of my budget, hiring the equipment to take the photos was also out of budget and that any photos taken out of a studio environment would look frankly rubbish. Having grown up in the age of Blue Peter, cardboard boxes and ‘sticky back plastic’ I’d consider myself to be quite resourceful. So, off [...]
Yesterday NASA released a ‘Blue Marble’ image captured in high resolution from the Suomi NPP satallite – NASA’s latest earth watching hardware. The full 8000x8000px image is available on Flickr, along with some other fantastic images in their photostream. But here’s the reduced size version, pretty beatiful isn’t it? A ‘Blue Marble’ image of the Earth taken from the VIIRS instrument aboard NASA’s most recently launched Earth-observing satellite – Suomi NPP. This composite image uses a number of swaths of the Earth’s surface taken on [...]