Monday, January 29, 2007

A Question

Which of the two images below do you prefer?
A)

Or
B)


Both are images of the same area, but one has people and the other more vegetation. The colours on the second may be a little bit better as I did a bit more post processing on it, so take that into account.

So it would be much appreciated it you could leave a comment stating which you prefer and why if you don't mind.

Sunday, January 28, 2007

Butterfly? Moth?



Saw a lot of these up in the port hills on saturday. Not sure what they are or even if they're a moth or a butterfly. On that note I should also mention that Speculum has been updated with some images from the walk.

Friday, January 26, 2007

Kitty Washing Machine

Kitty Washing Machine Something you definitely should watch, very funny!

Thursday, January 25, 2007

SPAM

With 7 (active) email addy's I've been tending to get a decent amount of spam, Thunderbird would catch about 90% of it though that ment 2-3 would still get through a day this was primarily all from my pop3 account with the ISP and Uni account. My webmail accounts (gmail, yahoo, hotmail) with there own built in filters would catch about 99% of the spam that went there way, and any that got through them seemed to have a 50:50 chance of getting through thunderbirds filter.
In an effort to cut down the spam I looked at setting up spamassassin, unfortunately tough it became apparent that thunderbird while a reasonable email client in most cases has absultely no support for working directly with spam assassin.
As a result instead I decided that my main gmail account would also collect my maxnet email which I'd then retrive from gmails pop acceess, so a which visit to gmails setting and it's done.
Over the next couple of days I noticed a significant decrease in spam happily enough. Now checking my gmail account I note that the spam folder had gone from an average 70ish spam to 130, a quick look showed that I was averaging 2 spam a day to my gmail account and 25+ a day to my isp address.

So I'd suggest if your getting alot of spam through an email account thats not gmail see if you can set it up so gmail checks it for you, seeing there spam filter is rather good!

Moral of the story is:
Gmails spam filter rocks!
Gmails fetch other mail is cool!
Thunderbirds is meh!
Thunderbird should directly support spamassassin!

So if you don't have a gmail account get one and start using it, so instead of worrying about spam you can worry about gmail scanning your email! :)

Monday, January 22, 2007

Comet McNaught

Heading back home after heresy I finally spotted comet McNaught, it's quite impressive. Any way like many others seem to I managed to get a some "reasonable" photos of it had to quite heavily process the images as my camera is not the best for long exposures (8sec max), low light and low noise. Any way here they are:


10x Zoom


Zoomed out


There are a couple more images on my flickr page.

Sunday, January 21, 2007

Speculum

Speculum has been updated again. If you don't have access let me know what your google account is and I'll add it to the permissions list. As always full size copies of all photos are available if you contact me (highly recommended if you want to print them!).

Western vs Eastern Gaming


Clash of the Cultures from 1UP.com An interesting look at Japanese vs Western computer/console gaming and the way the various cultures affect what the gamers expect in the way of a game.

Is google going to take over the internet?



Google wants to be your internet. An interesting article that makes a certain degree of sense. If bandwidth demand continues to rapidly increase, then local peer exchanges will be critical to managing it, and if some company like google owns the rights to massive amounts of interconnected bandwidth and the datacenters needed to manage it they could quite easily end up controlling to a large degree most peoples internet access. With protocols like bittorrent adding cache support for there file transport such a system would work rather well for most types of content.

Thursday, January 18, 2007

Politics Secondlife style



New World Notes: FIGHTING THE FRONT You think political protests are crazy in real life? Well how about having a look at it in the virtual world! It involves exploding pigs, Chain guns, and European Techno!

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

Gaming your way to better shape!



Gaming your way into better shape : An interesting article on using a mix of console games and diet to improve fitness and reduce weight! It seems to have worked fairly well for the guy in the article.

Personally with regards to the listed values on the US websitesBMI and waist size I'm a bit underweight (18.4) and have a waist that is well under the Max safe value they list there (80cm vs 102cm) I wonder what the difference in average BMI and waist size would be for Kiwi's vs Americans.

Walking

Is any body interested in going for a walk on the Crater Rim, or Godley head walkways next time we've got weekend with reasonable weather, Sunday afternoon might be suitable?

Monday, January 15, 2007

Speculum

Well Speculum Conlectio is working again so I've uploaded some of my collection of New Years images to it so enjoy!

Wednesday, January 10, 2007

Copyright and Journalism

An interesting look at the effect of the internet and 'Citizen Journalism' on professional freelance photographers and journalism.



How the anti-copyright lobby makes big business richer

Sunday, January 07, 2007

Saturday, January 06, 2007

Free Classical music

If your a fan of classical music then these two wikipedia pages should certainly be on your list of sites to visit. Both offer a large number of classical music files for free download. If your running windows you'll need winamp (warning link to download page) to listen to them.

Wikimedia Classical Music
Wikipedia Classical Music

Monday, January 01, 2007

New Years 2007 - Media

Well I seem to have a decent collection of media from this New Years. However with Speculum not working properly due to issues at bloggers end it may take me a bit to get the pictures all posted.

In the mean time though here is a couple of tame ordinary images that you can show to you parents if they ask you want you did this new years. The rest will go on speculum once I'm able to post to it again!
New Years group photos


Also here is a certain video clip from New Years!
Note: It's on googlevideo as that allows me to keep the clip private (youtube doesn't allow that), only available to those who have the link/access my blog. If there are no objections I may consider moving it to youtube to see what sort of response it gets :)

Hobbit House

A low impact hobbit like house! Looks rather interesting though I'd bet that sort of design would not be legal in NZ due to earthquake concerns. Still an extension of the basic idea would be sweet!