Offroad skills

Been off to wales for 2 day offroad skills course with BMW. Great course. I think this is the 4th or 5th time I've been. This time i was on the level 2 advanced course.

Video is from a 1080p HD helmet cam (see vholdr.com). Great quality recording. I've encoded it at 512k QT movie, but blogger seems to step the quality down as well, so the playout is a little grainy. Trust me we have this in 16:9 on HD TV playout and it's great.

Bike control and skill not up to much. Watch the video to see why!

Ukplugged....you better believe it!

so we went mac's in the house. We ditched the windows desktop and purchased an imac and macbookpro. In the end i had to upgrade the hub as most things needed "n" bandwidth. I still use a windows PC. That's when the unplugged problems started and why i thought this was a good post to re-kick my blogging! I've struggled with the wireless hub BT sent over. It just keeps dropping the signal and everything just hangs. Annoying but it got serious when our eldest got kicked out of Disney's Club Penguin online game. That spurred me on! I spent an hour with BT on the phone. The solution.....manually set the channel selection to channel 5 on the hub! Why i ask? "its the best one for your configuration". What? why should one channel be more suitable than another, surely the frequency range is not that different that picking up another channel is just about segmenting the airwaves for use. According to BT it's not, so if you have mac's in the house and you want a good connection out of your BT hume Hub 2.0, select channel 5, you know it's best........i suspect this thread might repeat over the next few months, but for the time being, Club penguin gets to the end of it's session without dropping it and its been 5hrs since we set this up without the hub resetting itself!

Resistance is futile!

Over the past month we have gone over to the other side! Yes, finally after lots of talking we are now the proud owners of not 1 but 2 Macs. It all started with me buying a MacBook Pro. It went well and i moved 18k photos onto it and about 10K music tracks. I then went out and bought time capsule to back it all up. It was so easy to setup and use, that we binned the 6yr old Windows desktop that was on it's last legs. It was replaced by a 21.5" iMac, which is just very cool. We have both Mac's backing up wirelessly to the time capsule and are sharing all our music library between macs, ipods etc. Why did i move? was it because i admired Steve Jobs back turtlenecks? Did i want to join the cool kids? No, simply i save time setting up and running kit. As the house amateur sysadmin i used to spend lots of time managing the windows PC. I spent less time managing 2 macs and i now have a much better and robust backup strategy. So there you have it. Give Steve Jobs your credit card now and he will save you time!

Apple....get it sorted

Upgrade itunes to v9. Worked well. But working late on 2 computers i looked up and hit upgrade ipod firmware. Duh! I did this back in Feb trying to go to version 3. It didn't work and i had to revert back to version 2.1. The apple support was rubbish then as it was last night.

In the end i found some hints that work. If you get error 1602 on Windoes XP/ipod combo don't follow the help on apple.com

0. take backup if it hasn't happened already

1. Look in recycle bin for old firmware. Open properties, hit restore to place file back in right place....c:/documents and setting/{your name}/application date/Apple computer/Itunes/ipod software updates

2. version that was working for me was ipod2,1_2.2.1_5H11a_restore

3. Force itunes to tell you ipod is sick and needs restore. Shutdown itunes, unplug ipod, restart itunes, insert usb into ipod

4. itunes will figure it's sick and ask you if you want to restore....now heres the trick

5. hit SHIFT and the restore button on the itunes app. It will open a dialog box and you can select the file from steps #1 and #2 above

6. it will reset the firmware

7. you can restore you backup

this is more a reminder for me for the next time i hear myself say "duh, why did i do that?", which will be in about 6-7 months time!

Lotus back in F1 in 2010

How cool is this? Lotus and Mike Gascoyne return to F1. Wouldn't it be great to watch Brawn and Lotus slug it out at the front of the pack next year???

www.nicolalitson.co.uk

Well the websites now live and looking great.

Take time to have a look through and if your thinking about family photo's in the UK - London or the Home counties - we know a girl who does a great job and is now taking bookings.

Please contact Nicky through www.nicolalitson.co.uk

The march of technology

So my last post was about Nicky leaving college and entering the big bad world. Well along with her website we have made some investments into some camera technology. We had a look at Nikon and Canon - but the deciding thing was talking to the guys at York Cameras. Nikon have some full frame cameras - very nice, but the range of lens to take advantage is slim. So we plumped for canon (which i have used for a number of years) and have a much wider range of lens. I have 4 of the L series high end glass so that makes a difference. So which camera body do we splash the cash on? We ended up with Canon 5D mark II. Full frame. 3.9 fps and a 21M CMOS. Also you can shoot HD 30fps movies. Go figure! Put some L series lens in front of it and you've got a nice setup.

Class of 2009

I "re-blog" with great news. My niece - Nicola - is featured in Professional Photographer this month in the "class of 2009" feature. She was 1 of 5 students covered and led the article. She also managed to get the most coverage as two of her photo's were splashed over 1.5 pages. One photo is full page. Comments include "taking on this kind of beauty work when you're just starting out is a tough call.......remarkably mature and elegant images. Commercially aware and just what the market is looking for."

Nicky's building a site at the moment see www.nicolalitson.co.uk

All we can say is we are all very proud and extremely happy for her. What great coverage for someone who is just about to finish her degree and start out in the world of work.

Now, lets hope her brother becomes the rock star he so has the talent to be! Wouldn't that be cool?

London Bound

It's Monday tomorrow - so must be London!

Found a report that says that there are 109 journeys on the tube that would be quicker to walk it, so if the weather is good tomorrow I might just burn some shoe leather.

I disagree!

Spotted on the side of a restaurant in London.

The sign should say "Eat and drink yourself happy"