Friday, 14th July 2006

Thefts and Complaints

Bandwidth thieving gits now see this!

I'm becoming increasingly miffed by people who try to rip off graphics and images from my websites, but without giving credit and without even asking permission. So, I thought. Time to do something about it....

I did think of adding something like my mate Rich's cockmonkey image, but then I thought that some readers with a sensitive disposition might be offended, so I settled on the nice polite image you see here. That will teach people to steal my images and bandwidth!

Oh, and it looks like someone has written a critical review about me.

Thursday, 13th July 2006

Night of the Full Moon

Having just bought myself a new digital camera, I thought I'd experiment taking some night time zoom shots by capturing the recent full moon.

My first attempt was reasonably successful and I've stored the fullsize image here. I mounted the Canon EOS 30D on a tripod in the back garden, pointing into the sky with a Tamron 300mm lens.

Despite being in the centre of town and subject to pretty severe light pollution, the end result is quite pleasing.

1/320th second exposure on shutter priority for those who want the techie stuff, then loaded into Photodesk on a RISC OS machine and slightly sharpened.

Tuesday, 11th July 2006

Floor reinforcements....

HP 9000 (click on image to view full size)

Well, as you can see from the picture, I've managed to inherit a rather large computer system. I'm not entirely sure what I'm going to do with it yet, other than check it out and discover what (if any) version of Unix it has on it.

As you can imagine, it's not the most portable of devices, and the bottom item is a seriously heavy UPS. The unit above that is an eight disc storage array and the whole thing stands some 6' tall nearly - so I'll let you guess the weight of it.

I've not managed to blow all the fuses in my house yet because the UPS appears to require a non-standard mains cable, so unless I can gauge a notch out of an ordinary kettle lead, the electricity company may need to wait a bit before their share price goes up.

For those who can't read the logo at the top, it's an HP 9000 R Class enterprise server, in a Rack System E. Not sure if this is good or a pile of rubbish (I suspect the latter, considering I rescued it from a skip!), but it looks quite impressive anyway - until it disappears through my floor.....