The first 6 months of Oscar’s life. Read the rest of this entry »
Oscar’s first six months
August 5th, 2012
Playing with The Tardis
August 4th, 2012
Matthew’s brother had The Tardis visit for his wedding renewal. Here’s some pics of the fun.
More wedding pics will follow soon… Read the rest of this entry »
DIY Panoramic Head
August 4th, 2012
I’ve been trying to figure out how to make interactive panoramas for the web. One of the problems is capturing the images.
I have a tripod and fisheye lens, so I was most of the way to shooting perfect panos, but you get parallax issues. As you rotate the camera its perspective changes; it’s position is moving in a circle, so you can see past stuff in one shot that you couldn’t in another. That causes glitches in the stitched-together panorama.
You can buy a head to help you shoot perfect panoramas, or even get a robotic one that does the whole thing for you. I’m too tight for that, so I made one out of wood and leftover pieces of Ikea furniture.
It has 3 holes for the camera, allowing me to point the camera up, down or straight. By using up and down positions, I can get a fairly good vertical field of view from my lowly non-fullframe camera. Read the rest of this entry »
Impressions of the Olympic Flame passing through Hertford
July 29th, 2012
These three pictures perfectly capture our trip into Hertford for the Olympic Flame Relay. Read the rest of this entry »
Spring
July 25th, 2012
Mummy and Oscar enjoying the Spring at Cousin Andrew and Pip’s wedding.
The wedding was lovely, and we enjoyed taking some pictures in the grounds, with the flowers.
Daddy practiced using Aperture’s brushes to balance out the shadows, and wants to show off this picture.
Dark Knight Rises soundtrack
July 13th, 2012I’ve been listening to bits of the soundtrack for Dark Knight Rises over the last couple of days. It’s really good. It’s very familiar from Dark Knight’s soundtrack, but more aggressive and soaring.
Batman Begins had a fairly restrained soundtrack, reflecting Bruce Wayne searching for Batman’s identity. Dark Knight felt more complete, and introduced Joker’s uncertainty. Dark Knight Rises takes that solidification of Batman’s identity a step further, embodying Gotham’s Dark Knight.
I found Dark Knight’s soundtrack left me wanting. The aggressive tracks ended just as they felt like they were going to get going. Dark Knight Rises brings that conclusion.
Bane’s influence is good. Joker gave the soundtrack a reckless, unsettling feel. Bane brings a solidity, and sometimes military precision.
If the soundtracks reflect the progression of the movies, the final installments of Nolan’s Batman trilogy is going to be awesome.
Tiny Wings 2
July 11th, 2012This is the best teaser trailer I’ve ever seen.
Almost home
June 28th, 2012
We’ve had a relaxing holiday, mostly chilling by the pool and eating. We think Oscar loved it. Everyone we met loved meeting Oscar. Apparently his name is very Spanish. Swimming was good fun.
We’re on the flight home (actually we’ll have landed by the time this post posts). Out the window is the moon; it’s the bright spot in the picture. Caroline saw how low it looks and asked if we’re flying as high as the moon?
We found out how high we are (38000 ft) and worked out that that’s about one 33000th of the way there. So, nearly.
Andrew & Pippa’s Wedding
May 28th, 2012
We went to Matthew’s cousin’s wedding at the weekend. We had a lovely time, with beautiful weather, a gorgeous location, and a very intimate wedding service.
Matthew used his iPad, with iPhoto, to give the photos a quick processing, pick out the favourites, and throw together a Journal, to share with the family at the barbeque, the day after the wedding. They aren’t very high res, but the result was pretty pleasing.
Vanilla Forum
May 9th, 2012I recently set up a forum using Vanilla Forums, and have to say I’m impressed.
I started with phpbb and found it confusing and ugly. It has a million configuration options, and is probably very powerful, but even adding a new forum is confusing, with lots of permissions settings etc. And the plugin architecture is nightmarish.
I deleted that and had a look for another option. Vanilla Forums is so simple. It’s pretty, and seems to be pretty sensible right out the box. The forum I’ve been using it for is an internal project, with not that much traffic. Maybe it’s simplicity is no good for a busy forum, but the admin side of it is straightforward. It’s easy for users to navigate around. Even the way drafts are saved – it autosaves as you type, and next time you view the page you were adding a comment, everything you’d typed before is ready for you to finish.
Also, turning on
Markdown support made
me very happy. Since it isn’t well document, I’ll note here: add
markdown support to your vanilla forum install by adding the following
to conf/config.php
$Configuration['Garden']['InputFormatter'] = 'Markdown';
