Posted on April 19th, 2010 by Brian
I recently got an email from somebody I hadn’t heard from for ages. She had made contact 3 years ago or more about a common ancestor and we established that she was descended from one of my remote cousins. All well and good and it was nice to fill in a few gaps in my [...]
No Comments »
Filed under: Family, Hobbies, Home, Isle of Wight
Posted on November 25th, 2009 by Brian
The single thing which causes most problems for the WordPress users I know is uploading and positioning images in their posts. Hopefully I have found a solution which will make things quite a bit easier – it’s called “Freebie Images” and is a WP plugin – you can get it here. I just installed it [...]
Comments Off
Filed under: Cars, Hobbies, Isle of Wight, Photography, Software, Techie
Posted on November 2nd, 2009 by Brian
For my birthday this year, Sue bought me a copy of The Geek Atlas: 128 Places Where Science and Technology Come Alive. Not only is this book a list of interesting places to visit, it’s also a condensed mine of information about each one, describing why it’s worth a visit and providing weblinks for further [...]
2 Comments »
Filed under: Books, Hardware, Hobbies, Techie
Posted on July 27th, 2009 by Brian
It seems I missed all the fuss about the free music site Spotify – in an effort to cath up, I visited the site and downloaded the software earlier today and have been enjoying all sorts of stuff this afternoon. A quick search for an old favourite, Ivor Cutler displayed 198 tracks (yes, I know [...]
1 Comment »
Filed under: Music, Software
Posted on June 11th, 2009 by Brian
Taken from the website: A quick guide to the DHRFestival What is it?….. A festival for those who like to play and listen to the didgeridoo. Where is it?….. The Water Mill, Calbourne, Isle of Wight When is it?….. 7th to 9th August 2009 How much does it cost?…. £45 adult week-end camping ticket … [...]
2 Comments »
Filed under: Hobbies, Isle of Wight, Music
Posted on May 26th, 2009 by Brian
After a plaintive cry for help in the local media, yesterday I visited Keith just along the road from me. He had been having problems with his wireless broadband connection and I’d offered to help solve them. Turned out to be down to a Netgear configuration programme being used instead of the Zero Configuration thing [...]
Comments Off
Filed under: Astronomy, Hardware, Hobbies, Isle of Wight, Software, Techie
Posted on April 23rd, 2009 by Brian
About a year or so ago and all in the interests of genealogy, I had a Y-DNA (follows the male line) test done. At the time there were only a couple of matches to mine and they were already known to me through more conventional records. After a few months, as more people had tests [...]
Comments Off
Filed under: DNA, Genealogy, Hobbies, Techie
Posted on April 5th, 2009 by Brian
These three fantastic pictures were taken from Brighstone during the recent Isle of Wight Star Party – they show what can be acheived if we can manage to keep our beautifully dark skies. Click a pic (and keep clicking for the Hi-Res versions) Details of the equipment used and the various exposure information is included [...]
2 Comments »
Filed under: Astronomy, Hardware, Hobbies, Isle of Wight, Photography, Software, Techie
Posted on March 29th, 2009 by Brian
Had a great long weekend out at Brighstone at the IOW Star Party. Loads of good friends, brilliantly (?) dark skies and wonderful viewing – I even won a prize in the raffle – now it’s time to sleep! Got to bed at about 2am Fri, 4am Saturday and 3am this morning (still on GMT) [...]
Comments Off
Filed under: Astronomy, Hardware, Hobbies, Isle of Wight, Photography
Posted on March 11th, 2009 by Brian
I have now moved the webcam stream to its own page. The whole thing is a little resource hungry and slows the PC down a fair bit even when it isn’t actually serving the stream – the next step is to move the application to another machine and stream from that. I may even up [...]
Comments Off
Filed under: Hardware, Hobbies, Home, Isle of Wight, Photography, Software, Techie