Month: July 2012

July 28, 2012
On my Kindle today, I finished All Tomorrow’s Parties by William Gibson and gave it 5 stars http://t.co/YikYpmi
July 27, 2012
Listening to Radio 4 on the radio today, unsurprisingly heavy with articles about the Olympics. Now, as the Games start, there appears to be a new phraseology being used – that the site of the Games was a “barren wasteland” or an “empty brownfield site”.…

July 24, 2012
July 23, 2012
July 22, 2012
On my Kindle today, I finished Idoru by William Gibson and gave it 5 stars http://t.co/7DBGqew
July 17, 2012
On my Kindle today, I finished (re-read) Virtual Light by William Gibson and gave it 5 stars http://t.co/ZlLBFQj
July 16, 2012
A while back (before I bought the cheap ceramic) I said that I really didn’t need another grill. But I was in the local Van Hage garden centre today, and they had 25% off everything. Including the Weber Smokey Joe Premium, at £40.50. It is…

July 14, 2012

G4S

Listening to an interview on Radio 4 with Nick Buckles of G4S. He has said a large part of why they only identified their inability to provide sufficient numbers in the last “9-10 days” was because the people they were employing were only available for…

July 10, 2012
I wrote about this on the filk_uk mail-list, but it amused me sufficiently to write about it here, too, as not everybody here is there, and vice versa.

On Sunday, I went to a house filk hosted by and . While there I shot some video, to get some practice with my Bloggie 3D.

On getting home, I had something to eat, and decided to quickly check out the footage, by plugging the camera into the back of my TV.

After switching the TV to 3D mode, I was most disappointed, as skipping through the footage it looked like everything I shot was badly blurred. This was not the case with stuff I had filmed at other times, where the picture had appeared quite sharp. I wondered if perhaps I had smeared a lens, or whether I had over-estimated the light levels in the room, although I couldn’t see why that should affect the focus (as I believe this camera is fixed focus)

July 9, 2012
People reading this blog will think I have two obsessions – BBQ and 3D. Believe me, I have a lot more than that!

One of them, of course, is music; and I’ve been fond of Peter Gabriel for quite some time. So I don’t know why it has taken me so long to get hold of this Blu-Ray disc of his 2011 Hammersmith Odean concerts, shot over two night in 3D HD.

July 8, 2012
I can’t help but notice that – in the media – Andy Murray has once more become a “British” hero. One can only hope that by this evening he isn’t relegated to being a “Scot” again.
July 7, 2012
I find that spending money tends to make me spend even more money, and this story is no exception.

I have been having fun with my Bloggie 3D camera, but it highlighted something – that I lack a computer capable of doing any kind of useful video editing.

In the (distant) past, I used a desktop I had built for gaming and music, but that has long been superceded by modern requirements. It has actually been sitting under a variety of desks and shelf units for the last 3 years, and I know that it isn’t capable of anything by today’s standards.

Because I work from home, I now tend to use my work computer for most day-to-day stuff. This isn’t as naughty as it sounds, as for some years, my personal requirements have been mostly just for a browser and email (both of which I need for work, anyway). Any gaming I did was now on the Wii, and my Pokerstars account runs from either my smart phone or my Asus Eee.

Anyway, to cut a long story short, I thought I would look for a high-end laptop, with a decent built in video card. That way, I could use it downstairs, in front of the TV, as well as in my office. I was looking at a mixture of AV-spec machines, and gaming machines, both of which would do what I wanted.

Then I saw the Toshiba Qosmio F750-12P.