Posts
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More Blender
After my ‘success’ with Blender yesterday evening, I had another play tonight, producing a hill landscape, and a rather tasty looking gingerbread man. I’ve just finished this die, which is also my first colored work. Click on the image to get the big version.
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Blender 3D
You might remember me mentioning an open-source app called blender 3D, well today I finally got round to giving it a shot. My previous experience of 3D apps was limited to playing around with Maya, not really doing that much. Following one of the tutorials in the Blender 3D Wikibook I created this:
I won’t be giving DivineError a run for his money anytime soon, but it’s a start!
Had my first of two exams this week, Astronomy. Seemed pretty easy to me, but we’ll see what the results say!
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Books for Sale
Being a student I enevitably end up with textbooks that I no longer require. For this reason I have the following books available in amazon z-shops:
All books now sold, sorry
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Gzip Enabled
I’ve enabled compression of text documents on my server, so they should come down the line a bit quicker than previous. If this causes any problems, get in touch.Disabled!
I’ve disabled this for the moment as it was causing me several issues. Will re-enable it when I have time to play around with it.
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Sony Ericsson k750i Mobile Phone Review
I got my new phone a few days ago, and decided to write a small review of it. I got it as an upgrade on my contract (And got an awesome deal on my contract at the same time) from O2. Being my first Sony Ericsson I was interested to see how it shaped up to all my previous phones which were Nokias.
First Impressions
Out of the box the phone is pretty tasty looking. The buttons seemed well spaced out, and the large screen is of a very high quality. It feels robust, despite being light. This is probably due to the sheer amount of componentry packed into it. A lot of people have complained about the lack of lanyard on this phone, a point I don’t understand as the phone has a lanyard mount on the bottom right corner. The don’t provide a lanyard, but surely people must have something that would do lying around! I scratched my screen lightly ont he first day I had the phone, so be careful when putting it in your pocket with keys. I’ve ordered some screen protectors for mine, as I don’t fancy having to polish scratches out on a regular basis.
Keypad and Buttons
At first using the small joystick rather than a thumbpad seems rather fiddly, and I often found myself moving let or right while trying to click it. You soon get used to this though, and develop a more subtle touch. The interface of this phone is fantastic. A simple icon style menu leads you to all the main functions, and customisable shortcuts make getting to your most often used features very fast. Texting was slightly different from a Nokia, but once I turned off the rather annoying ‘T9 Spelling Suggestions’ menu that kept popping up, I got on with it a lot better.
On the left side of the phone is a rubber cover that protects the Memory Card Duo slot from dust, and the ‘Music’ button. Pressing this takes you into the phones inbuilt media player. On the opposite side there is a ‘+’ and ‘-’ button. These are used for adjusting volume on calls and media, changing tracks in the media player, and operating the digital zoom of the camera.
Camera
The camera of this phone was by far the most appeal feature of this phone for me. Protected by a sliding cover on the back, it is kept free of the grease and dust that often afflicts other camera phones. When the phone is on standby opening this cover starts the camera mode, and closing it again returns the phone to standby. The 2 Megapixel sensor is backed up by a fairly powerful LED flash which gives a good flooding of light in dark situations. A menu shortcut lets you use this as a torch if you wish. Options on the camera include a nightmode, several different resolutions, and a macro mode. The pictures outputted are impressive, especially where the ambient light is good. I’ve put an example photograph using the macro mode here
Accessories
The phone comes with a wired headset, a USB cable, a charger, and a 64MB MemoryStick Duo card. The Headset is a basic affair which I am going to mod to allow me to plug any earphones in, rather than using the cheapish earbuds provided. I was slightly disappointed with the charger, which uses the same connector as the USB cable. It seems slightly flimsy for plugging in and out on a regular basis.
Connectivity
The connectivity options on this phone are pretty comprehensive. Triband, GPRS, Bluetooth, Infra-Red and USB. The Quickshare features make it super easy to send and receive media between Sony Ericsson phones. The phone plays a variety of music and video formats, and has reasonably good sound quality considering this is not the primary consideration for a phone.
Rating
Overall I’m very happy with this phone. It has a few niggles, but these are fairly easily resolved. Definitely a 10/10!
Update
After looking a few forums and from the comments and emails I’ve had on this review, it seems a few people are rather unsatisfied with the Mac compatibility claims of this phone. The only issue I am having is that iSync on my Mac doesn’t find my phone on the USB cable. Other people have iSync working fine on bluetooth though. The other issue is that the firmware cannot be updated without a Windows PC, so all those with a Mac or Linux system are left out in the cold. Hopefully this situation will be resolved soon.
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Improved Image Resizing and Site Move
After much playing around I decided that my image resize script was chewing up too much processor time and memory, thus making page loads a lot longer.
The solution? Cache the thumbnails, and each time the script is called, check to see if an image with those parameters has already been created. If it has, return that image straight from storage, no waiting for it to be re-rendered.
But what happens if the original image is changed, surely the cached thumbnail will be out of date? For this I check that the last-modified date of the thumbnail is greater than that of the original. If not, it renders a new one.
Pretty spiffing. I’ll probably release this script when I’ve cleaned it up a bit
Anyone sharp eyed will have noticed that the URI for this page has changed slightly, I moved my site to the root directory, just felt like it really. I’m getting a lot of things not working because of this, so email any errors you come across to dougal@shearfx.com. Thanks.
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Testing Image Resizing
This evening I made a script to allow the resizing of images on-the-fly. Is pretty nifty. The Image below is created from a 1024*768 .PNG file, resized to a 200 pixel wide .JPG with quality of 50. The original file can be seen by clicking the thumnail.
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Stirling Bike Club
Currently I’m developing a new site for Stirling Bike Club.I’ve set up a blog page specifically for it which you can check out here.
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New Haircut Sir?
Decided to cut my hair the other day, no.8 at the top no.4 on the sides. So I did as much as I could myself in the mirror, then called the wonderful Ms Keri to finish the rest off for me.
I gave her the no.1 guard thinking that she would use it blade first into my head to trim round my ears. So guess what, she cut blade across! Doh! I shaved the whole lot off, so I’m now a no.1 all over as you can see in the pic.
Got my new Howies ‘Play’ t-shirt today, took my mind off the essay I spent the whole day writing. On the upside I’ve finished it 4 days early, and can concentrate on all that other work I have, bah!
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Knee Warmers Rule!
Yesterday I went to meet the uni guys for the usual wednesday afternoon ride around the Pentlands. Being sensible I didn’t take a jacket, hoping that the sunshine would be out for the rest of the day. Sam turned up with his car, and had 3 free spaces in it heading for Innerleithen. Quick off the mark, Adam, Tim and I jumped in with our bikes and off we went.
So we get to Inners, it’s raining, bah! Sam and Tim went to play on the DH tracks while Adam and I went round the red route XC. Was really good fun despite the driving rain, and Adam’s front brake giving up the ghost. We were soaked from head to foot by the time we got back to the car in a fairly impressive 1hr 28mins.
Was the first day I properly wore my knee warmers, and despite being blue, they keep you really warm and comfortable around the knees (Duh!). Well worth having for those days where it’s not quite warm enough to wear longs.
In the evening we met up with the rest of the bike club, and had a rather healthy pub crawl. The highlight was undoubtedly Sam and Matt downing 9 shots of Tequila in a row! Each! Crazy peoples.
Thanks again to Sam for the lift.
