Just Uber

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Ah what fun, I’ve finally moved to my new house. It’s got to have been one of the most stressful moves ever!

As you’re no doubt aware, it’s been rather wet over here in the East Riding, especially in Hull! Whilst driving back to our old house today I decided to take some footage with my cameraphone:

After battling through floodwaters to rescue my 3 year old from my mothers house as she’d totally lost power (and it isn’t expected back for three days), I picked up my younger brother. He’d taken a couple of videos on his cameraphone too:

I also uploaded a video that had been taken of emergency services attending affected areas. Motor boats where being used to reach the really inaccessible areas:

Climate change anyone?

Inspired by this post, I decided to have a bash at converting an old webcam to infrared.

The camera was a cheapy Phillips (one with a lens that completely unscrews exposing the ccd). Don’t use a camera that you care about. This process may knacker it!

First the infrared filter needs to come out - In this case I had to use a knife to prize the end away from the lens housing. There’s a groove around the top which gives way allowing you to pull the filter (a tiny square piece of glass) out.

Next, you need to filter out the visible spectrum. I used the really dark bit that you get at the beginning of a strip of negatives (the blacky/blank bit that comes before the pictures). Cutting out a small square of that, I popped it back into the lens housing (in place of the infrared filter I’d removed) and forced the end bit back on trapping it in place.

That’s about it. It seems to work reasonably well, although of course you loose quite a bit of quality. I’ll add any photos I take to my infrared experiment gallery here. I’ve attached a couple here too.

Check out the coke - It’s transparent when viewed in infrared!

Not a very good shot, but the grass looks pretty wierd.

Strange I’d not noticed this before, but /etc/hosts.allow and /etc/hosts.deny are missing on my Feisty laptop and a basic install of Edgy server that I’m running.

Turns out that they’re missing due to bug in netbase which removed a dependency on tcpd (which in turn installs hosts.allow and hosts.deny).

To get the files back simply sudo apt-get install tcpd

This bug is fixed in Gutsy.

I thought I’d eaten the wrong kind of mushrooms for breakfast this morning, imagine my amazement as I discovered that Microsoft has been distributing Ubuntu via its Windows Marketplace website for the past couple of days.

Obviously, MS has taken the link down now but for a few golden moments 11000 users visited for an upgrade and went away with a copy of Ubuntu Linux.

But how, I hear you ask has this error occurred? As of this moment no-one is sure, but my money is on a disgruntled employee. Whichever way it happened, I’m guessing one MS employee will be seeing his/her P45 on Monday. Any jobs going Mr Shuttleworth?

Footnote: The page has been taken down but is still resident in Google’s cache at the moment

Dell’s at it again. A Slashdot user writes to explain why Dell wouldn’t sell him a PC

Dell cheerfully explained to the surprised caller that their Ubuntu PCs are offered to personal users only, and that they are not available for sale to businesses.

Kick up a bit of fuss, it won’t be long before they state it was a mistake. I think Dell needs a kick up the arse now and again to keep them on track.

Reading the Windows Vista Team blog today I came across an article that made me chuckle.

Nick White - a Microsoft product manager - describes how the images present in the DVD hologram are designed to make counterfeiting Vista more difficult:

“…one of multiple images contained in the hologram design, all of whose inclusion serves to make it more difficult to replicate a Windows Vista DVD. The other images are of old master works of art that are in the public domain.”

I wonder if anyone over at Microsoft saw the irony of using work in the public domain to protect proprietary software and intellectual property?

LugRadio Live 2007: be there!

Night Shot

Originally uploaded by leftcase

I don’t share a lot of photography stuff here, but for some reason this picture appeals to me (even if it doesn’t to you!)

An eerie layer of mist hangs over the back field.

The shutter speed was set to three seconds for these shots. I’m going to have to buy myself a tripod though as I had to rest the camera on my car roof!

Sorry the photo isn’t much bigger - it pushes the layout of this blog out… Click on the photo to see it on flickr.

BBC News is carrying an article today about VECNA Technologies latest project, The BEAR: Battlefield Extraction and Retrieval Robot.

The BEAR is designed to enter into dangerous situations to retrieve injured soldiers, carrying them to safety in its forklift truck like arms.

Bizarrely the robot features a teddy bear like head, designed to reassure patients that he really is a nice guy. As Gary Gilbert, from the US Army’s Telemedicine and Advanced Technology Research Centre puts it:

“A really important thing when you’re dealing with casualties is trying to maintain that human touch.”

I don’t know about anyone else, but if I lay injured on the battlefield as a 6 ft tall robot with a bears head started coming at me I’d be rather worried…