Blog of Hamlesh

I’ve been unhappy with the standard flash on my camera for a while now, and from time to time find myself in dire need of a flash gun which can be pointed at the ceiling (think indoor shots, no natural light, etc). Instances of need however are not frequent enough for me to invest in a Nikon SB-600 (yet), but they are frequent enough to be a cause of great irritation and sleepless nights.  Ok, perhaps not sleepless nights, but you know what I mean.

So, while looking around the shed for a hammer (all 3 of my hammers seem to have grown legs – don’t ask!), I came across an old flash gun that I picked up many many years ago from eBay for a few quid.

(Yes I know its a rubbish photo, taken using my phone)

After excitedly fitting it to my camera, I decided that its “intelligence” was very limited, and I mean VERY limited!  There was also no way to point it upwards – so out came the cardboard, scissors and sticky tape.

Ta da   I’ve set it to full power manual mode, the camera can only tell it when to trigger, but at least its brighter than the standard flash, and its firing light upwards.

Here is an early test shot, taken indoors, my desk lamp was the only source of light in the room.

(Isn’t this just a lovely little espresso cup – recent present from the better half)

Ok the shot is blurry, but the result I’m looking for is the gauge and quality of the light, which is spot on (for a cheap little flash gun and some cardboard).

(Odd box of cables and bits I need to put in the shed)

Again the only source of light in the room other than the flash gun is my desk lamp.  I’m somewhat pleased with the result

Naturally, give it a few months and I’ll be blogging about how this setup was rubbish and I invested in an SB-600   Then again, this “natural” hardware progression is the better way to go in my opinion.  Fudge/Bodge it until you know how to use the tools, then get good tools.

I’ve heard from a few of my friends/readers in Canada that they’ve all been finding the UK’s total inability to cope with the recent “snow storms” absolutely hilarious, of course, looking beyond the mockery at our expense, thanks to the UK mainstream media, calling the recent snow a “storm”.

A lot of people have been enjoying the snow, and its the first time in many years that we may actually stand a chance of celebrating a “White Christmas” in the UK… although currently, its looking like the weather in yee old Blighty will return to its normal programming, ie, rain, and we’ll all enjoy a nice gray and slushy Christmas. It remains to be seen.

Personally I’ve not enjoyed the snow, beyond my initial school boy excitement, which lasted a whole 5 minutes, a long time considering. The snow “storm” has caused havoc on the roads, journeys that normally take 15 minutes have taken near on 4 hours recently. Apparently the warnings that the UK MET office had been issuing for weeks never reached the highways agency, and yet again they were “caught unaware”… as my girlfriend keeps asking, upon observing the competition ice rink style road conditions, “so why exactly do we bother paying taxes?”.

Humbug I say!

Ah well, on the bright side the snow did give me something to shoot.

If you are reading this post on a syndicated site, you’ll need to view the slideshow directly on flickr, here.

Well I know its been a long time, and I don’t seem very active – I have been working on a few projects, and hopefully they’ll come to fruition soon and I can talk about them… well at least blog about them.

You can always keep up or engage with me on twitter

On another note, I’ve had a few blog comments complaining about some broken download links, so those have been fixed.

CISCO Lab Software – PacketTracer: now available for download again. Please post a comment, it helps with my page rank (shows activity and relevance), and takes about 2 seconds to do.

Photo Booth (for osx): my solution/fix to the common problem of photo booth not initializing the inbuilt camera is available once more for download.

Enjoys

Recently, I’ve been playing with my camera more, making an effort to get back into the swing of “shooting” things and events. I was out the other night, “shooting the moon”, and out once again tonight.

It took me a little while to realize that the best way to keep the camera stable was to lay down on the driveway! My tripod won’t support the weight of the 80-200mm lens.

Was made by combining;

What do you think?

Post a comment or tweet me.

Ecademy.com is a business networking site, its been around for a long time, but is lesser known than the likes of linkedin.

I often get asked by people, “why are you a blackstar, you don’t seem to be very active, isn’t it a waste?”. Phrased slightly differently, but usually the same gist. Blackstar’s are the highest level of membership on ecademy, and you pay what to some seems like quite a high membership fee for said membership.

Well for me, heres why.

02:46am – post market place advert offering deskspace in mayfair.

03:06am – search google for “mayfair deskspace“. SECOND result on the FIRST page.

From no where, to the first page of google in 20mins. Now what would that be worth to your business – enough said, now stop asking me stupid questions!

For a while I’ve been thinking about the importance and relevance of sounds in our daily lives, the sounds we notice, and the bulk of sounds we simply pay no active attention to. Like many geeks and techies out there I can sleep with computers whirring and beeping in the background, amongst my techie friends I am known for my very weird ability of sleeping in a loud datacentre environment. For most people this isn’t normal, they need quiet to have a good restful night sleep – perhaps all of these sounds are affecting me in my sleep somehow, that was the thinking, so I started to research.

I came across this TED lecture by Julian Treasure on the 4 ways sound affects us, its worth a watch as a starting point.

My office (like many others) has lots of servers and computers running in it, and lots of background noise.  According to Julian this kills productivity by 60+%… very worrying!  So I started to look for ambient sounds that can play in the background while I work, this was harder than I thought it would be.  Finding high quality both in terms of bit rate (audiophile that I am) and in terms of content was quite difficult.

This is a very nice MP3 and long enough to have in a constant loop without becoming mechanical and repetitive.

Download Ocean Sound (8.16Mb – 5:56 length).

I also came across this podcast on iTunes (iTunes link), which is a regularly updated podcast of bird songs.  One of the issues I found with podcasts and iTunes, is that although there are many ambient sounds and relaxing sounds podcasts listed in the directory, many are no longer updated, and many have broken links within them.

MakeUseOf.com (a blog I enjoy reading regularly) have also detailed some nice free iPhone/iPod touch soundscape applications.  Although they’ve taken a slightly different slant on it, by looking at applications that can help you fall asleep, but still worth a read, and a good resource for direct links to the apps.  My personal favorite, after having tried all the listed free apps, for its sheer simplicity is Naturespace (iTunes link).

Its been two weeks now, and while working, rather than having the news or music on in the background, I am mainly using the ocean mp3 listed above.  Its working well for me, and as long as it does, I’ll continue to do it

Check out this video of a flexible OLED prototype, by Samsung, its a 2.8″ display (166ppi), and it’s just 20 micrometer thick.

Want to know just how durable these new OLED screens are, watch this;

If you can’t see what a big deal this is, and the impact it will have in revolutionising the devices of the future, well all I can suggest is that you stick to your sundial.

Vodafone NZ’s Symphonia features 1000 cellphones syncing 53 different ringtones, alerts from 2000 sent messages to reconstruct Tchaikovsky’s 1812 overture.  This is just brilliant

And here is how it was made, part 1, part 2.

Enjoy