Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category

This has to be one of the best things I have seen on the net for a while and have to give the guys that put it together a thumbs up! The message you see on the display was sent accross the world so that a script could send it to a printer and then take a picture with a web camera!! If you want to see how these guys have set it up you should look at this page. Alternatively, if you want to tickle the Laserjet yourself… have a go here!

Over the last few days, I have been getting to grips with my new BenQ 23″ Widescreen monitor. One of the things that I have discovered to be vital is proper calibration. This is not to say that I have bought a professional solution for this task involving hardware, in fact, I merely used a free downloadable program and ran it to see what would happen. The results were much better than default. More experimention is now needed in this area to see what can be done. When I have settled on the best solution, I will let you all know and post details about it here and what programs I have used to achieve it.

I am currently using the internet at the Dorint Sofitel in Amsterdam. I have just been monitoring my download rates and it is about 300kbs!!! Not bad at all!!!

My webhost UH-Hosting.co.uk has doubled all the resources on their reseller accounts. Now that I have double the webspace, I had better find something to fill it with!! This webhost has been the best I have used to date and think they deserve a pat on the back!

I have decided to call my code plotMe for the time being as it seems a lot more generic and unmarketed as the names I was coming up with previously. I have also added a new category to my Blog!

More progress now. On this version you can click a location and the place you click becomes the location of the spot. Now that I have this functionality it should be fairly easy to get some more dynamic information passed to my code. I think a little tidying up is needed and I need to clean up the maths so that I can use real location figures. That will be one of many steps involved in furthering this project! I need to come up with a new name aswell… any ideas??

Okay so I have been researching and learning about the PHP GD library. I have managed to make a start on my mapping system with a lot of help from various sources on the net and my trusty PHP book. If you are interested in my prototype system have a look here… comments welcome! I have dubbed it GeoCODE but that will need to be reviewed in the future when I get some inspiration!

As I am planning to do some travelling at some point in the future, I was considering how to record the journey for people to read about and allow them to communicate back. The obvious way to do this is via a blog like this one. The next feature I felt that would be great, is if people could see my location on a map. Stories about particular areas could be marked on the map and all could be linked together in a harmony of hyperlinks. As this part is the most challenging to build, I have started to plan out how the location could be stored, how it could be displayed and how it could be updated. All manner of ideas are crossing my mind from using emails, text messages, radio broadcasts and even old fashioned phone calls! The next challenge will be to find a way of displaying these on a map. I have a lot of ideas about this aswell but some good ‘old fashioned’ googling will be needed to look at options. I think this could be an interesting winter project for a couple of years. If you have any ideas for this (Or if it has been done before!) let me know!

It is now 2am and I have just about got everything working. I am aware that it is a little slim on the content side but it will be finished off over the next few days. After hacking the gallery like a lumberjack, I am pleased with the way it turned out… just need to sort the content along with the rest of my site… hope you all like it and enjoy my random images along the top. I will detail my progress from this point on! Good Night!

After about 2 months of constant work, my new design is almost completed. The hardest challenge I have faced on this project is getting the site to display correctly in both IE and Firefox. The other part is actually creating the content to go with the site which, really, is the most important part!! I expect there to be some disruption for maybe an hour two as the change takes place but I am quite sure it will be at some late hour and no-one will notice a thing. Keep your eyes open over the next few days!

An excellent Windows shell extension that allows you to create a storage drive from your Gmail account. You can find further details and download a copy from viksoe.dk. This seems like a great use of that 1GB space that we have!!

What fun can be had with Linux. For the first time in maybe a year, I had to delve into my webserver operating system and make some changes. It has been such a long time that I had to re-download PuTTy to get access as it was nowhere in sight… it had obviously been lost in the many re-installs of my Windows PC!! As I could not remember the ports I used for VNC, I jumped into BASH and the Vi editor to make various changes to config files and the file system. You know, it was actually quite good fun. The best bit though was that I got everything working that I needed to and as of yet, didn’t break anything in the process.

My new ‘Motorola Razr V3′ is proving to be a very capable phone. I struggled with it for a day initially because the ergonomics are completely different to the family of Sony Ericssons I have previously owned. All it takes to get to grips with technology is sitting down with the, dare I say it, user manual (Honestly, I very rarely do this as can be proved by the number of problems I have!). You can personalise the phone in a lot of ways, choosing what buttons will do what and when they should do it. The phonebook took some time to convert from Outlook but now my contacts are much better organised. The only issue I am seeing at the moment is battery life. It has only been charged a few times and as such will not be at its peak but still, it has been dying after two days of heavy use. My Sony could get through at least 4 days with Bluetooth switched on. It may have something to do with the 100m range of the RAZR vs the 10m range of the T610. Either way, I tend to charge the phone each night so I don’t think I will have too much of an issue. There can be no argument on build quality, it is the nicest phone I have used in that respect and the image quality of the screen is great. The final test will come later when I get to try out my new Bluetrek G2 Bluetooth headset that I bought from Mobilefun. With any luck it will all go to plan… I will write my views here later.

This is the CMOS sensor from inside a Canon EOS 10D. It is the very source of all the image information that the camera captures and must therefore be kept clear of any contaminants. There are 6.5 Million individual pixels crammed into the 22.7 x 15.1 mm area. Just a tiny spec of dust on the sensor turns into a monster dark spot on an image when viewed. I have just had the pleasure of rubbing my CMOS sensor to remove this and I really hope it wasn’t the wrong way! This is not an issue that really concerns film cameras as each time a photo is taken, the film moves along and in a worst case scenario, only one frame is likely to be ruined by a contaminant. As the sensor of a digital camera does not move, any debris that settles, has to be removed. For me, the cleaning process started out as a methodical ‘follow the instructions’ then turned into a bit of a Brehaut special with the photographic equivalent of a Brillo pad being used to clean the surface of the sensor. To get an idea of why my blood pressure was higher at the end of this operation than at the beginning… read on!!

The instruction manual clearly states that only a very small rubber air blower should be used to clean the sensor, under no circumstances should you use a brush, cloth or canned air as these may each damage the sensor. As it turned out none of these or worse appears to have done much harm to mine but I will know more over the next few weeks! Looking into the body, I could just about get my eyes to focus on the specs of dust that were visible on the sensor. I took my trusty rubber blower and started squeezing and aiming the tiny jets of air at the sensor. A few minutes of this and the dust was still there. More pressure was needed and I calculated that if I held an air can away from the camera, it would probably be ok so I tried that. This operation went on for a few minutes aswell and ended with the nozzle heading into the camera body and getting very cold in my hand. Another failure, the dust was still where it had started. Apparently, slightly more aggressive measures were needed so I reached for my ultra fine weave lens cloth and very lightly pulled it across the sensor. Yet again, the dust was still there. By now I am thinking that this is slightly more than your average surface dust and something extreme must be required. All logic apparently gone, I gave a good old breath onto the sensor to fog it up a bit and used a cotton bud to wipe the dust off. The operation actually involved a bit of rubbing followed by more rubbing to remove the smear marks! All in all… it ended up looking as good as before less the dust. I will try taking some pictures in the near future and see if I have caused any lasting damage. As Canon have just released the EOD 20D, perhaps a replacement would not be so bad!

Investigation into the cause of this problem has shown that perhaps my storage technique is partially to blame. I own a LowePro Orion Trekker rucksack that is spilt horizontally inside which my camera fits tightly with the lens facing up towards the top. This has proved to be the easiest way to put the camera in and out. What I hadn’t realized was that with the camera stored in this way all the time, the dust would follow the laws set out by Newton and fall directly down onto the sensor in the back of the camera. It is apparent that my plan for buying a new bag is now justified. The next bag will have a design in which the bag is split vertically to get to the camera. This will also allow me to get a magazine inside which I cannot currently do and should be considered vital when travelling. In the meantime, I have turned the camera over so that the lens faces down. The bag pictured here is a LowePro Dryzone bag. These can actually be thrown into water and the gear inside will stay dry. As my camera spends quite some time at sea, perhaps a model like this should be considered.

Finally got the Bluetooth hub installed and working properly. My phone has jumped to life and synchronising with the PC… excellent!

If you are having difficulty installing a Logitech Bluetooth desktop because of Windows XP SP2… you need to do the following ;

1. Remove all files starting with ‘bth’ from ‘windows/system32/drivers’ and ‘%windir%/inf’ (Type the latter into the Run dialog box)
2. Download the latest software from Logitech.
3. Connect a PS/2 mouse to the pc, remove batteries from BT mouse.
4. Restart and install the downloaded software… reboot
5. When Windows has started again, wait while the wizard thinks for a while… eventually a box pops up behind the wizard which requires you to click ‘next’ on… this is why you connected a PS/2 mouse… the Bluetooth hub will not be operating at this point.
6. Reboot again and all should be well… put the batteries back in the mouse… get back to the manual and follow the wizard!

Let me know if I should expand on this. I have put it together very quickly!!