We really don’t need one of these dept…

No really, I don’t want a USB powered air conditioned shirt, I think I preferred the home made air conditioner

But I have thought about a device for the back of the car to relay messages to drivers behind you, but the more I think about it, the more I would use it to anger following drivers. Actually, what is really annoying me at the moment is the number of drivers that I follow that have one brake light not working, or have their fog lamps on incorrectly, so the device would have to work to drivers in front, rather than behind.

This digital photo frame from Samsung looks very nice, but I’d rather have a big one to go on the wall, but when the 7 inch version is over $300 in Korea, I think it’s a little pricey.

Now for something cute – the new Macbook Pros have a backlight for the keyboard, so thhat you can type in the dark, and someone has now written a little plugin called iSpazz which pulses the backlight in time with the currently playing iTune.

Finally, I really don’t know what to say about this nasty looking thing

Scrapheap Roadshow

Well I spent most of the weekend building the Scrapheap vehicle, and tonight we took it out for it’s first real road test, which was competely successful.
We did break a couple of bits, but far better to break them now and be able to repair and strengthen them before the Sofa Speedway next Sunday down at Beaulieu Palace.

It’s been a somewhat tiring few days, and we’re all looking forward to being down there on Sunday, but are not really relishing the drive down there towing an unusual vehicle on a trailer.

Of course there are some photos – do you know what it is yet? 20060606Scrapheap/DSC_0751.jpg

New Laptop

Yes, Chris has got himself one of the new Black MacBooks, so that means I get his old G4 powerbook. 😀
Wahey … whoo hoo. It’s really nice to have a laptop again, and have dual screens and true portability that a laptop gives.

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New Camera

I finally got hold of a Digital SLR – a Nikon D70 second hand to go with my existing Nikon lenses. It produces some great results, but shows some inconsistencies in software implementations – especially Gallery.
The D70 has an EXIF tag it adds to pictures if they are taken rotated to portrait orientation, and it then displays those pictures rotated on the rear LCD screen. If you open those pictures in Nikon’s photo editing software, they are shown in the correct orientation. If you load them into other photo editing software, they are shown in landscape orientation, requiring rotation.
OK, so I can live with using the Nikon software for now. I’ll look into writing a filter for Photoshop to rotate the image, and delete the EXIF tag at a later date, or see if there’s some other piece of software that will do that for me.
I then tried to upload them to Gallery, and admittedly I’m still using Gallery 1, so that might be a cause of my problem, but it might lie elsewhere. Anyhow, I loaded the photos into Gallery Remote, and that rotated the images correctly – so I didn’t need to hit the rotate button – I proceed to upload the images, and they display all in Landscape orientation :-S – Doing a search on the Gallery site tells me that the version that I am using 1.5.1 should support auto-rotate, but it’s not working, so it looks like I’ve got more searching to do.

Ebayers beware

An intrepid eBayer with the nick caitlincutie has cashed in on the current trend for Xbox360s on ebay and sold a picture of one for £470.00!
Since selling the picture the seller has decided to make their feedback profile private – probably something to do with the feedback that the unfortunate (or not very observant) BillySpeares left for them.

Of course the listing does look a bit dodgy – you have to read right to the end of the extensive blurb to find out the it is a picture you are bidding on. I bet the other bidders are feeling a bit relieved. Anyway, if the items disappear from ebay there’s a story on The Register about it with screen captures of it, showing before caitlincutie made her feedback private.

New Bike

I really should have got round to blogging the new bike earlier. My largest purchase from that global car boot sale that is eBay. It’s a Suzuki GSX1100F from 1989, and is just a little bit scary fast. I need to take some photos of it to put up soon, when the weather gets slightly more amenable to biking, then I’ll take it out somewhere nice and take some photos.

Pain in the butt

Went to do a little more archery practice to let off some steam this afternoon, and took my longbow along – I was shooting it only a couple of weeks ago at home and getting some good groups – much better than I’ve been getting with the compound.

Anyway a couple of people were admiring it, and I drew it – “crack” the back of the lower limb had splintered – not a single arrow off it today, and now I’m going to have to look and see if I can find a nice replacement for my beautiful Albion longbow that I’ve had for about 15 years.

The closest that I can seem to find with a quick search is the AW special longbow from Archery world, but I’ve not managed to get in touch with Severn Products, which is where I bought it from in the first place – I just hope that they still do the Albion, as I’m rather partial to mine.

Still, it really does put me in a great mood for writing exam questions – knowing that to replace it is going to cost about £250!