Cloudmade who do a great deal of work with the OSM community have given me a grant to get a GPS set for this purpose.

The device has been shipped off to Shetland where it is being driven around by a friend of mine. I received the first batch of data a few days ago, and save for a few small issues, the data is good, clean and ready for proper processing.

On completion this project will allow the addition of very accurate mapping of central Shetland in OSM maps.

I don’t know it’s all well researched facts, I know some of it’s true, and it has only one tiny fact I know to be wrong (so tiny I’ve forgotten what it was), and I put that down to over simplification.

Yes, It’s a little long, but after the first 10 mins, it’s all good stuff.

This last weekend I went to London to visit my good friend Heliomass (and a few others in the process) many interesting things were seen including Kew Gardens (all 300 acres there of) and the main point of the trip: Station X.

Station X, AKA Bletchly park is an extremely interesting place, known for it’s WW2 code breaking efforts. It held some of the foremost mathematical geniuses of it’s time, and was so significant it housed some operations only declassified in 2002. Many believe the efforts there turned the war, or at the least shortened it by up to 18 months.

It was the birth (and death) place of Colossus, the worlds first electronic programable computer, which was (depending on who you ask) either 1 or 4 decades or more ahead of it’s time, and has been rebuilt from photos over the last 15 years, I have seen it running in full working order.

project homepage

Photos:

We are thinking about having a flatwarming, it should be some time soon, we don’t know the details yet though. In the mean time if anyone wants to come visit, give me a buzz.

Atached are photes of 2 of my 4 flatmates:

I have discovered that it is really tricky to photograph a fast moving rodent that doesn’t like flash guns, when there is about 60 watts of non-flashy lihgt available. I hope to get some decent lihgt on the subject and get some much better photos later.

In other news, I have just clocked over my camera’s counter, which means i have taken 10000 photos since February.

register

The question remains — If you identify something as a UFO, it ceases to be unidentified — right?

Therefore it isn’t a UFO — right?

Therefore UFOs cannot exist

(edit: i put the wrong link in the first time)

This is a vast area to cover, and can’t be covered in a single comment. I spent about 2 weeks working 10hours+ per day over the Christmas holidays 18 months ago purely doing research into what route to take when upgrading to a DSLR from a compact, and found out a great deal. If doing it again, I’d have sat down with someone and gotten a good grasp for more of the basics of the theory of things and the techniques involved first. The vast research is mandatory if you are to be even vaguely successfully however, the following 3 items are the gotchas that are not immediately apparent:

1) This was more relevant in the film days, and has been diluted in the digital age, but the principal still applies. When the shutter is open and the photo is being taken, the only thing between the sensor and the outside world is the lens, the lens forms the image — therefor it’s the most important element of the whole setup. If buying a DSLR, make sure that you budget at least as much for lenses as you do for the camera — and also budget for getting more lenses in the months/years later as your skills grow. I currently have 9 lenses, 4 of which have been totally superseded.

2) Lens reviews are fantastic — there are many online, and the online stuff is orders of magnitude better than magazine stuff. However a lens is reviewed against it’s competitors. For similar lenses, a $200 kit lens that is reviewed “great” is much worse than a $600 lens that’s reviewed “ok”. I fell foul of this one, and bought a cheap tele zoom that turned out to be a complete disappointment.

3) This is the killer, brand loyalty — it’s rife in the SLR scene because it’s so proprietary accessory based (see above for my 9 lenses) — you have to pick a system and stick with it (or spent obsurd amounts of money changing systems). Ask virtually any photographer and they will tell you thier system is better than all the others, infact this is not true (however hard they try to persuade you) every system has it’s advantages and disadvantages, but most of the major systems are very close overall. Shop around and don’t be pressured into one camp by anyone.

One final tip — don’t overlook the second hand market for lenses — in can be a minefield for the uninformed, but a goldmine for the informed — become informed and reap the benefits of 20 year old glass that’s as good as new, at quarter the price.

I am going to be adding stuff to my blog in the near future. You may not like the quantity of stuff there, but there will be a way to non-destructivly opt out of most of the new bits.

It’s a little difficult to tell how this stuff will come out before I actually impliment it — such is the nature of this technology, you can’t really test changes without making them, or arsing about with it for way too long.

However if all goes to plan I intend on including a whole bunch of web links to interesting stuff I’ve found, this will lead to information overload in the case of some of the readers here.

I have considered the virtues of reducing content to keep viewers interested in everything, but I believe that is bad practice, and reduces creativity. Instead I beieve in alowing users to filter out the noise that is of no interest to them.

If you want a hastle free way of doing this, email me, or comment on this post, and I’ll specifically tell you what you need to do in your case.

At the change over there is a posibility there will be a swamp of anything up to 10ish posts that will come through at once, I will try to avoid this, but if it happens I appologise in advance.

Ideas? sugestions? requests?

If you want some more technical details, or you are on LJ, please read on…

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The stuff that I plan on adding is an import of my del.icio.us links, and my google reader shared items, these consist of mainly interesting news items/ humourous websites that I’ve found online, a more apt description of the content would be “random crap”. My username on both services is thingomy if you want to go for a preemptive poke around, but the character of the feeds will change once I am awear that somone other than me is actually reading them.

Provided (already) is:

Overal RSS feed — all posts;

RSS feed per catagory — these are an arse to find, email me;

RSS feed of comments on each post seperatly;

Email updates of selected catagories on a per user basis — cusomisable here: http://www.thingomy.co.uk/blog/wp-admin/users.php?page=subscribe2/subscribe2.php ;

An option to be emailed of any new comments on a post you have commented on — I think this one works…;

A feed of everything to LJ, (including all of the new stuff when it comes) — this is likelly to be the most problematic issue, as it cannot be tuned per user at my end. If I judge the LJ thing right, It could do with an injection of as much interesting stuff as it can get, so I intend on feeding through everything. I can however see merit in the attitude that it’s a blogging environment, and should not be filled up with other stuff. If I get a significant number of comments, I will look into alternatives. Such solutions as users using filters based on tags may be feesable after further investigation. Opinions?

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What a bloody mess, you couldn’t pay somone to come up with a situation as messed up as the naming conventions of the Brittish isles:

http://qntm.org/?uk

On other matters, I went to a gig tonight as official photographer, heard some good music, took a good number of good photos, a large number of bad ones, and am now completly, totally and utterly out of disk space — this is what happens when you take 12GB of pics in 4 hours.

Americans only measure one thing in metric: 9 milimeters.

We had a long (13 hours long) day of filming that only ended soon after the light died (then we moved onto car headlights…)

We have someone in our midsts that is a masters student at Edinburgh uni, so managed to gain access to some of their studios — mac G5s with lots toys — few of which work …

This is going to be a long weekend