Electronic-ing
Sep0
A little while back I decided to get into electronics. I never really did much while I was at school, I was more into computers but about a year ago I bought myself some bits and a USBasp to program chips with but I think life caught up and I never found the time to learn about it properly. I still have the programmer somewhere but I never really learned how to use it.
So once again i’ve caught the bug, this time discovering Arduino. It’s an open source development board and IDE. It’s a little friendlier to use and there’s huge swathes of information about it on the internet. It’s more of a system around the chip than a way to program just the chip itself.
The IDE comes with quite a few example programs which are really handy for learning how to use it. I got my Arduino Duemilanove yesterday from a company based in Halifax called Oomlout who were recommended by a friend. They were really impressive and the kit arrived really quick. I went for the Arduino starter kit and a 16×2 LCD panel, they even threw in some extra LED’s for free 
Within a few minutes I was able to assemble a couple of circuits and modified some code I found for a cylon scanner. Take the arduino off the usb and plug in a battery instead and voila, so simple!
I’ll post the code up later, it’s stuck on my home computer.
So I have a couple of ideas and hopefully I’ll get time to make them a reality!
Liz & Chris’ Wedding
Aug0
Every wedding is unique. Everybody likes to do their’s in a personal way and that contribute to how special each one is. Liz & Chris wrestled with marriage, they seemed to want to do it, but not want to go through actually getting married. So they had planned to elope to Iceland or something but it turned out to be more complicated than they wanted. So they decided on a small civil wedding with immediate family only. There were 11 of us at the ceremony, including the photographer, registrar and of course Liz & Chris.
It was a lovely day, after pictures by the river we went back for a couple of hours to the house for champagne, more pictures and a toast by the father of the bride. The we went to a nice restaurant in Perth called ’63′ and had a 7! course taster meal.
I haven’t given out the URL for the pictures I took as yet, but if you know what you doing you have all the clues you need already to find them.
Eventful Weekend
Aug0
Just had quite a big weekend, longer than expected too, but not for a good reason.
Hopefully I’ll get some time to write it up properly. At the moment i’m still a bit bewildered by the events. Came back on Sunday evening to discover that we’d been burgled. I haven’t been burgled before and I don’t think I’ve had anything stolen from me since primary school so it was a bit of a shock. I’ve not even had all that much contact with the police so that was an experience as well. We’ve still got to deal with insurance so I hope that goes OK and we can replace the stuff we lost. I described the feeling to Kate yesterday as being a bit like treading water at the moment, there’s always something else to knock you.
I’ll write it all in parts I think.
- Liz & Chris’ Wedding
- Edinburgh Festival
- Perth Highland Games
- The Burglary
Toy Story 3 3D
Jul0
Another night at the new Vue cinema in Bury, this time to see Toy Story 3.
The Toy Story trilogy has been an important one for Pixar, uncertain at times, they probably never thought they’d get to do 3 films and I suppose it’s the kind of situation where the audience demands it. To my knowledge Pixar haven’t done sequels for any of their other films and unfortunately, while I did enjoy Toy Story 3 I somewhat wish they hadn’t done it.
It was a lovely story and it was quite an emotional ride with the usual Pixar polish, jokes and references. It also had a final feel to it, this is the end for Woody & Friends.
It’s amazing how technology has developed since the first Toy Story, CGI is pretty much limitless now it what it can achieve and I think audiences might start getting a bit jaded with it soon, perhaps even reject it prefering shots done in camera to not. I didn’t fancy going to see Clash of the Titans for somewhat that reason. This Pixar film was also in 3D, possibly a necessity these days to compete, certainly not one that completes a film. I appreciate the hard work people put into adding a third dimension for us, I just don’t think it’s worth it or worth the extra money the theatres charge to see it. The short film preceding Toy Story 3, Day & Night was probably one of the best implementations i’ve seen yet of the technology though.
3D doesn’t seem to be dying, as much as many – myself included, would like to see it. We’ll see with the take-up of 3D TV sets as compared with HD ones. I watched 3D rugby at Manchester Filmworks, I wouldn’t do it again, I don’t think people would pay extra for it to watch football at home.
As far as Bury is concerned, I think the opening of the Rock is having a great effect. It’s great to see people in the town in the evening, it was a bit dead before – and young people too! We were beginning to wonder where they all were.
Geeks
Jul0
A person intensely interested in a particular field or hobby, generally at the expense of broader social interaction. Often used with an attributive noun.
I’ve been thinking recently about how ‘geeks’ are becoming more and more mainstream. It’s odd seeing pictures of friends from school going out to Ibiza and dressing up as ‘geeks’. Often now it’s becoming a look or a badge of honour, something hard to attain. I can hardly believe that geek chic has become an accpetable look.
On twitter people profess to be geeks or nerds and low and behold they end up asking about how to recover a lost document or don’t know how to plug in a mouse. It’s not enough to know what lolcats is or to use a hashtag. It’s not enough just to wear big glasses and slag off Comic Sans. That’s just web culture and as good and fun as that is, geek culture is a whole other level up.
Or am I completely wrong? Am I just annoyed that my precious little world is being seen for how great it is and should welcome all the newcomers? Even if they didn’t spend years at school getting looked at funny because you knew what hexadecimal was or what all those other buttons on the calculator actually did? (The picture above is the one of the calculators I had doing my A-Levels, a casio fx-9750g).
8710103363859.jpg (600×600)
Jul0
Bought one of these with money for my birthday last month.
Might be one of the best things I’ve ever bought. Seriously.
Senseo Latte Select HD 7850/69
Ed & Meleri’s Wedding
Jul0
On Friday we travelled down to Oxford to attend the reception of Ed & Meleri’s wedding.
We had a lovely time and it was nice to see some friends that we don’t often get the opportunity to see. Ed & Mel met whilst at University and I met them about a year after first going out with Kate? Something like that. It’s funny the difference in them between then and now, back then they were wondering whether or not to move in with each other and whilst to us it was clear that they were in love with each other and a couple that were very very good together it seemed to me like they hadn’t quite discovered it for themselves yet (I have no idea how long they had been seeing each other at that point). We used to all meet up for parties at Kate’s sisters flat in London and seven of us would be staying in her 1 bed ground floor flat, having had some good food, lots of drink and silly games.
After a bit of a palaver in trying to find out what name our room was booked under we check-in to the lovely hotel (which had a spa! If only I’d checked beforehand!) We had some food in our room and went down to the reception for 8.
life, the universe and everything
Jul0
I just wrote a big old post about life the universe and everything. It didn’t make me feel better and I’ve decided it’s not something I want to write up for everyone to see. Hmm.
Inception
Jul1
It’s been a while since I’ve done a movie post (or any sort of regular post) but I suppose it’s been a while since i’ve been to the cinema.
Last week the new shopping centre/street opened in Bury, this meant that our old cinema in Pilsworth closed down and moved to it’s new premises at The Rock along with the bowling alley and a couple of restaurants that were there. I think that it makes a lot more sense for them to be in town. It always felt a little quiet in Pilsworth. We were meant to go on ‘Cheap Day Tuesday’, we turned up for the screening and the place was packed. We were only ten minutes away from the start time so we thought, you know what? We live about 5 minutes away now so we’ll just come back another time. Parking is free after 6pm so nothing lost.
I bought the tickets online for the next day for the 1640 showing (you get 25% off tickets where the showing starts before 5!). Now it takes me about 40 minutes on average to get home from work which I finish at 4 and yesterday it was pouring down which always helps the traffic.. I managed to get to the cinema car park for ten-to and after a bit of an ordeal queuing for popcorn (don’t think people have quite got the hang of it there yet, instead of one big queue that moves quick there’s lot’s of little queues that all move differently, so go to the wrong one like Kate did and you just watch others fly by). Kate’s journey to the cinema was massively simple, she works next door to it.
And so to the film, we managed to get there in time for a couple of trailers which kept me happy (I hate missing them). A-Team, Harry Potter and then the film started just after 5 o’clock.
I’ve been a Christopher Nolan fan for a long time, since I first saw Memento. It was probably around 2002 I saw the DVD and I’ve watched it over and over so I look forward to any film he’s got coming out. The recent Batman films have been especially enjoyable, not so much with The Prestige. I kept getting shown the trailer for Inception at work the effects look great and the cast awesome.
It’s funny how Leonardo DiCaprio is becoming one of the greatest actors of our generation. He just keeps making cracking films, I really liked Shutter Island – anytime he gets with Scorsese you know something good will happen. Cillian Murphy was great and Ellen Page was really good in it. Oh and Tom Hardy (Handsome Bob in RockNRolla, Praetor Shinzon in Star Trek: Nemesis and Charles Bronson in Bronson) he’s really underrated I think, one of Kate’s favourites.
But I think what I liked the most about it was despite the story being complex and full of meta and what is reality really, which is probably one of my favourite concepts to explore the laws of the films universe did make sense and you could quite easily accept what was going on and I didn’t find that it jarred my suspension of disbelief.
Cobb’s (DiCaprio) inner struggle of course drives the film, his desire to get back to normality whilst getting dangerously getting close to driving himself crazy in order to do so. It’s a classic story really, told in an innovative way. It had shades of Old Boy in it where the protagonist has spent a lifetime within a lifetime (also the basis for a Star Trek: TNG episode). But that’s not the central tenet to the film.
Anyhoo, I would fully reccomend it. I look forward to it coming out on Blu-Ray.
Ebert Review 4*
Empire Review 5*
Kermode Review (youtube)