There are few simple pleasures more enjoyable for me than waking up and watching the dark turn to dawn then to day while it rains solidly. Awesome sound, and the slow revelation of a world being refreshed by rain is wonderful and nourishes my soul!
The Force is with Me…
2015 -
05.08
Well the week may not have been particularly cheery, motivating or anything much for that matter, but at least a long overdue delivery (5 weeks to get here) has finally arrived.
Imperial Assault now joins “the Cupboard of Craig’s Cardboard”! I must confess I can’t wait for the first game! There is however an even more anticipated arrival on it’s way, but more on that next week I hope.
Stack It On…
2015 -
05.03
Normally a post on photography would be going on Shards of Arcadia but in this instance I’ll put it here for the moment as it’s more a summary, and I think I will be adding a “Techniques” page to Shards of Arcadia when I want to expand on it.
I suppose the important point for me today about this is that I was reading some photography sites, and stumbled across a technique for enhancing the Depth of Field (DoF) for Macro & Landscape shots. Now this technique’s probably no surprise to the more experienced Macro shooter than myself, but I was blown away by what it will offer me. I’ve struggled with how to achieve “maximum” DoF with my Macro shots, and have often been wondering how others achieve considerably better results. Was it the gear? Well no, they were using gear of a similar calibre. Was it far more light? Once again not particularly. I’ve bought a flash ring and although it helped to some degree, it brought with it some other problems even though it resolved the difficulty of lack of light and using small aperture. It seems that there’s a technique / process that’s called by a number of names, but I found it first as “Focus Stacking”.
Without going into a too technical diatribe that most of you will be completely bored with, I’ll simply outline the process. Some of you may be familiar with High Dynamic Range (HDR) Photography. It produces a striking image by the crafting together of multiple shots of the same scene or subject at different exposures, to create a composite image with a greater dynamic range overall than any single original shot. It creates some very powerful and wonderful shots. “Focus Stacking” is conceptually similar in that you take a number of shots of the same scene but shift the focus point ever so slightly for each individual shot. Once again software is used to “composite” all these shots into one image that reflects the multiple focus points thus representing a greater DoF.
So what you say? Well for those of us who enjoy Macro photography which is probably most notable for it’s “detail”, it’s a boon! You’re able to present the viewer with an image which has more of the subject in focus and more of that interesting detail to be seen. Of course outside of the software to combine the images, not much is really needed to make this happen. However to do it extremely well, I see a number of additional pieces of hardware coming down the track. More on that later.
I’m excited!
Brain Fade…
2015 -
04.27
Given that I’ve not been able to do much for the last week or so, and the only outing I’ve had in about 10 days was with Stefan weekend before last. Nothing much to write about this weekend, other than I’ve spent a few days ironing the wrinkles out of the Virtual Infrastructure changes. At this stage Web and Email servers are finished, the old windows file server has been decommissioned and the requisite files and network share been remapped in group policy to keep what’s left of the windows Virtual Environment happy.
So just so that it can be seen that I have been out at least once in the last fortnight, I’ve attached a photo taken by Stefan while we were at the Trenthan falls and I was puzzling over which switch turned on the remote I was about to use since I’d not used it in months and had forgotten without looking.
Yes tragic isn’t it!
Wait was that SLES Slipping Out the Door…
2015 -
04.22
Well it’s finally time to say goodbye to SuSE. I’ve been a staunch supporter since Version 6.3 but SLES 12 has finally put me off the distro completely. After messing about for a couple of days trying to get it to do what I want I’ve decided to move over to Centos 7. So far it’s only been the Apache server that’s been migrated, but the mail server and the DNS will be done over the next week or two. I think the most annoying thing was that when I was trying to migrate the Mail Server SuSE just have in the administration documentation. There’s currently no supported configuration modules for dovecot in SLES 12. But they took out Cyrus! Argh!
Anyway Centos all the way now. And to be honest, I can’t say I feel particularly sorry. I’ll take the bagging from a few mates for finally seeing the light, and hope I don’t have to see the SLES again.
I’ve also configured an OS X server for the wiki at home now. This pleases me too.
Maintenance Time…
2015 -
04.12
Well no photography this weekend, been trying to stave off this cold that keeps “pecking” away at me. Weather’s been a little cool for me to feel comfortable about wandering about the countryside even if it was going to be both fun and productive. There’s alway next weekend. I did notice a few fungi in the backyard, so maybe they’re going to be early this year. It’s not been much of a summer from a weather perspective.
While I have spent much of the weekend on other technologies, I have at least done a bit of maintenance, and checked all the gear. Lenses have been cleaned, exteriors of lenses and cameras brushed clean, batteries charged up, and flash batteries checked too.
On the software side, updates have been applied, firmware checked on the cameras and flashes, and there’s been a bit of a clearing out of some old photos not really coming up to scratch now days. I also made sure that backups are up to date, and that there’s an extra one for offsite.
I’ve collected receipts for tax time as that will be coming up on me quickly, and I really need to be motivated to get that in early.
Virtually Transitioning…
2015 -
04.12
So as it stands, the Furbags and I have spent most of the weekend around home and keeping warm.
I took the opportunity to do a couple of things in the study I’ve been waiting for some “significant” reason to make the time to do. Rebuilt a lot of the virtual environments on VMware. I bought a copy of Fusion for the iMac, then decided I liked it so much I could make use of the “Pro” version. The additional features, at least a lot of them were worth having it seemed to me. I’ve been a supporter of Virtualbox for many years, and was quite happy with it most of the time, but every so often it’s bitten me in the arse in some way or another. The Server environment is still sitting on Virtualbox, but perhaps not for much longer. There’s need for some adjustments and that may just entail using VMware for the next incarnation.
As much as I’ve been a fan of Virtualbox with it’s consistency across platforms, even to the point of using it over HyperV in my work environment, things have started to creep in that have left me wondering whether it was time to look at other options. So far I don’t feel I’ve lost anything, and gained quite a bit.
The Daily Grind…
2015 -
03.30
Well it’s been a tough couple of weeks at work, but I’ve managed to plug out over a hundred tickets over the last fortnight. That’s damn good work even for me! Still does make me feel good about that side of things to know I’m in there and pulling my weight. This week is a four day week for me, and I can’t say I’m too upset about that either. I’ve been working hard at working off the 40 hours of leave I had over my sick leave. and just about to hit single figures this week. Won’t clear it all I don’t think but end of next week I should be square.
Cardboard Everywhere…
2015 -
03.30
I’ve been on a board games spree this last month, catching up on all the titles I’d been putting off last year. But now that I’ve cleared those credit cards, I’ve been catching up. Latest to join the cupboard of “board gaming goodness” are the following titles listed below.
Descent: Journeys in the Dark Version 2 and all the expansions for it.
Descent: Journeys in the Dark Version 2 conversion kit for Version 1.
Android.
Merchant of Venus.
Battle of Five Armies.
Eldritch Horror and Mountains of Madness Expansion.
Last weekend the Photography took a second place to the gaming. Speaking of Gaming, I have finally got to play what will most likely be the last computer game I buy: Pillars of Destiny. I’ve been looking forward to this games for months. The wait is over and it’s every bit as good as I’d hoped. For fans of the BG I & II, Icewind Dale and Torment games, look no further for you reprise of a dose of good old fashioned RPG.
And as an aside there’s a nice new Macbook Pro on it’s way too. The PC is being donated to a friend who no doubt will relish every windows moment! The PC hasn’t been used since over a year ago when I bought the 27″ iMac.
“Enfant Terrible”…
2015 -
03.21
Clearly Chemoux is catching birds too. She brought one in at about 06:00 that was the size of a mouse. Just like her “aunt” she likes to show off the hunting skills but not hand over the prey. Still bloody dark! How do they do it?