Jonathan

Smoke – attempt 1

After seeing Ruth’s smoke photo in the Tuesday Challenge last week I wanted to have a go. I read about how to do it and bought some incense sticks. I quickly learnt some lessons: You need loads of light. I had a 150W flashgun on full power, with a honeycomb snoot but it still wasn’tContinue reading “Smoke – attempt 1”

Moving away from Windows

I’ve dabbled in Linux for several years now – I’ve looked after Linux servers at work and at home, and I’ve had a secondary desktop PC running some version of Fedora or other. Two years ago I switched over my PC at work from Vista to Fedora, and I haven’t looked back. I didn’t haveContinue reading “Moving away from Windows”

Jelly baby

This week’s photo challenge was Pink. I didn’t have any particular ideas for pink photos , other than I specifically wanted to avoid flowers because they’re too unoriginal. So I decided this would be a good time to try some of the photographic ideas I’ve been meaning to try for ages. One of these ideasContinue reading “Jelly baby”

A blast from the past

This evening I stumbled across my first web site. I put this together using Publisher 97, probably in the year 1997. It looks rather, uh, dated these days. While browsing the tree of that site, I also found my brother Oliver’s website, and a site I set up in 1999 about my year 9 classContinue reading “A blast from the past”

Deer at Ashton Court

I saw this deer in the deer park at Ashton Court, just across the suspension bridge from Bristol. Unfortunately it was the only one near enough to the fence to have its photo taken, and is the best photo of a bad bunch. For those who are interested, this photo was uploaded from Ashton CourtContinue reading “Deer at Ashton Court”

Batch conversion of images on Linux

I recently had a need to convert 3,000 scanned TIFF images to a more sensible format for distribution, such as JPEG. I’ve been using GIMP to edit the individual photos but sadly it doesn’t have a batch format conversion tool. So I wrote my own little script in bash. You will need to install ImageMagickContinue reading “Batch conversion of images on Linux”

LED sidelights

Today I replaced the sidelights in my car with white LEDs. I was annoyed by the very yellow tinge of the traditional 501 (aka W5W) bulbs. The new LEDs produce a very narrow beam and don’t illuminate the reflector as the bulbs used to. I like it. I promise to upload more photos in aContinue reading “LED sidelights”

Big – The Making Of

If you liked my Big photo, perhaps you’d like to see how it was done. Not as hard as you might think! You will need: A mannequin (mine was £6 from Ikea) A toy car (47p from Tesco) Some boxes for buildings (I used boxes of slides) Coloured-in black Post-It notes for windows Matchsticks forContinue reading “Big – The Making Of”

Big

From Stu: Back to the usual rules, this week you’re taking a picture especially for the challenge. And the theme is BIG. Good luck! Well, I haven’t put so much effort into a photograph for a long time! I had fun with this one – cutting out, painting and making a mess. If you wantContinue reading “Big”

O2 Mobile Broadband

Note: This article is under development. More info and screenshots will be added later. Keep checking back! I decided to buy a mobile broadband USB modem yesterday. For those of you who don’t know, I work as a wireless network & VPN specialist for the University of Bristol. At the time of writing, there areContinue reading “O2 Mobile Broadband”