Wednesday, March 25, 2009

Quizzing

Well the quiz team returned from their holidays last week and we resumed our greatness on Tuesday!

The picture round was easier than usual for us - all Disney characters ;-)

Anyways... we won! Not bad eh? 61 points! So a free round of drinks was ours.

Now we just need to win the higher and lower game... it's up to about £150 now :-)

Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Finally!

Tom, my brother, has finally found himself a job.. It's taken ages!!!

He's going to be an environment officer working for the Environment Agency in Penrith on a decent salary too.

Friday, March 13, 2009

Playing with HDR

I've seen a few examples of HDR (High Dynamic Range) photography lately and it looked pretty wicked... so I thought I'd have a bash.

I found a tutorial on Instructables that explained the process using the GIMP. This was the result using photos of some snowdrops in the dark.


Wednesday, March 04, 2009

Touching the music

As some might be aware, my local recently closed - we're still not 100% sure why. For this reason, I've had to find another and I had a choice of two - The Windill Tavern near Clifton and The Hand and Dagger near Treales. I chose the Windmill because it's easier to get to while the weather is a bit rubbish.

The Windmill is about a mile from my house and it takes me roughly 15 minutes to walk there :-( This is about 14.5 minutes longer than it took to get to the club!

To make my walk slightly more bearable, I decided I would listen to some music. The obvious choice was to use my phone. I have a 1GB microSD card which I chuck a load of albums onto in MP3 and WMA format. The sound quality is OK. The only problem was that the earphones that come with the Touch Pro are pathetic to say the least. If you imagine a pair of headphones without the headband, you wouldn't be far off the earphones - they're huge and don't even fit in my ears!!!

The Toouch Pro only has a slightly mangled mini-USB connector or everything to plug in to so the first thing I needed was an adapter. Flea-bay to the rescue and £2.50 (inc. postage) later and I could now plug a 3.5mm jack into my phone. Bargain!

Then to choose the earphones. Only one choice really... the Sennheiser CX-range. Unbelievably I managed to find a set of CX-500 earphones for a meagre £17.50 delivered (another Flea-bay bargain - new and in the box!). Considering these earphones are £60 at Richer Sounds it's amazing!

I've been using the combination of the adapter and earphones for about a week now. It's brilliant. The earphones produce excellent sound... nice and basey and excellent top too. Background noise is irradicated too - possibly not a good thing when you're walking but as long as you're careful....