They’re baaaack!
Now all the UK airports are open airline operators are rushing to get things back to normal, which means the beautifully clear skies of the last six days have been vandalised to:
The birds have won!
Communication from Air Chief Marshal Seagull,
This is a great day.
Over many long years we have been struggling against the humans and their aircraft filling our airspace and at last our efforts have paid off. Yesterday, at 1200 hours, the humans admitted defeat and grounded all planes over the United Kingdom.
Long may this continue now that we have, at last, regained our air superiority and are again masters of the sky!
ACM Seagull
Black Franke Kitchen Sink
When we were having our new kitchen designed we found very few places on the Internet where we could see an oak kitchen with dark worktop and a black sink. So I’ve decided Continue reading
Entanglement and an Infinite Universe
It is said that if the universe is infinite, then there must be an infinite number of universes; each one different from the other. If that’s true, then somewhere there’s a universe where earphones never become tangled when removed from your pocket.
It’s clearly not this universe! Continue reading
James Cameron’s Avatar
I’m looking forward to Avatar, James Cameron‘s latest feature film since Titanic and which débuts on the 17th December.
I’m particularly interested to see how special effects and motion capture have moved on since ‘Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within‘ and Gollum in Lord of the Rings. Will this be the start of a new season in cinema once the new effects become available to other film makers? Who else can afford the costs involved?
I’m also interested to see if the story matches the incredible cinematics. From what I’ve read so far, it’s a tale of adoption, redemption and salvation, mingled with violence and love.
NextGEN Gallery Border
If you use the NextGEN plugin and want to have a border (or frame) around it, I have found that the following code seems to work well:
<div style=”border: 12px solid black; width: 600px; height: 450px;”>[ slideshow id=2 ]</div>
(Note: In the example above I have put an extra space after the opening and before the closing square brackets to stop NextGEN from actually showing the slideshow in this post)
To get this to work for me, I also have the Slideshow settings in NextGEN set to 600 x 450 and ‘Stretch Image’ set to False.
The Dyson AirBlade
We have had Dyson AirBlade hand dryers installed at work recently.
I had only use an AirBlade once before at the Goonhilly Satellite Earth Station on the Lizard peninsula and was impressed with its effectiveness.
They’re a very noisy hand dryer, but as you tend to only use it for around 10 seconds it’s not too bad. One thing I don’t like about it is that there is nowhere for the water from your hands to go except onto the floor (it falls to the base of the dryer then down either side). After an hour or so, the floor under the dryer has developed a small puddle.
However, they are effective and you always feel like your hands are very clean and dry when you’re finished.
Media Equipment Set Up
This is the set up in Lansdowne’s media room. Continue reading
Podcasting – Creating the feed
Every podcast needs an RSS feed that describes the podcast and its ‘enclosures’ (audio or video files). The feed is actually just a simple file in XML format, but this can be quite difficult to edit and set up and will require someone with specialist knowledge or a software tool to do this easily.
Thankfully, there is an easier way to create a feed.
Continue reading
Podcasting – Source Data
Each service at Lansdowne, we record the following:
- The audio of the message on cassette tape x 2 (for disaster recovery)
- The message on CD via an audio CD recorder
- The whole service video (and audio) on DVD via a DVD recorder
- The whole service video (and audio) on Super VHS tape (for disaster recovery)
We used to rip the CD as the main audio source, and if you’re interested in producing just an audio podcast Continue reading