Category Archives: randomness

Gtvone’s Top Ten Christmas Photographic Gadgets!

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It’s that time of the year, you’re manic, your kids have runny noses, your wife is buying more christmas decorations every other day, you just want to sit in a dark corner and rock back and forth muttering something evil about vixen, dancer, prancer and that fat old bastard, santa… yes, well, you can’t.. and you know why? because there are WAY TOO MANY COOOL PHOTOGRAPHIC GADGETS TO GOOGLE! here’s my Best of the Best, 2010…

…in no particular ord… oh, wait, yeah, we’ll start at 10!… (and work up to the BEST)

10. Yep, it’s the darn tasty Sony Alpha NEX 5 camera that I took to Africa with me.. Small, sexy and actually takes a really nice photo!

9. You have multiple memory cards, but there’s always one that you ‘go to’ right? My ‘Go To’ CF card is my SanDisk 16GB Extreme Pro …never failed me yet, fast as me to a tray of cakes…

8. Chase Jarvis popped a book onto the shelves recently, and I have a copy that I have been through and through and love… check it out, it’s called Seattle 100: Portrait of a City and should be on your coffee table, soon.

7. A proper compact camera, small, fast, solid… i’d ask Santa to pop a Canon PowerShot S95 in his tightly packed sack and deliver it to me, with a smile…

6. If I was going to get all this gear from Santa, I’d want to make sure I had the best darn camera bag on the planet to cart it around, so I’d have to pickup a Think Tank Photo Retrospective 20 and I’d get it in Pinestone, too…

5. For those of you that are going to insist on taking your new dSLR camera to the Christmas lunch and taking photos with the onboard flash, you should all pop out and grab a Gary Fong Puffer Pop Up Flash Diffuser to help yourselves make your guests look a little like startled dear in bright shiny headlights…

Is Simon Pollock Really Santa

No Fat Old Bastards Here! Merry Christmas

4. I’m not brandist, I hate everybody… but I’d really love a Nikon FM2 Black Body and I’d certainly like a 50mm f/1.4 manual focus lens to go with it…

3. Like the Retrospective 20, if you’re going to have all this gear, there’s no point having it without having a worth strap for your cameras, right? I’d suggest any of the BLackRapid range, but my current fave is still the RS-5 Camera Strap it’s almost a bag, and such a comfortable strap…

2. My best, Nathan Pask, delivered a rip snorted of a gift this year on my 12th birthday… the damned awesome Fujifilm INSTAX 210 …it proved just how cool it was when I took it out at a gig, walked into the pit and FOUR photographers wanted to play with it… damn analog coolness baby

1. There really is nothing else to say about the Canon EF 70-200mm f/2.8L II IS aside from that it’s sex… it’s so sharp it’ carve slices of Julian Asange… You want fast and sharp and heavy, just get one.. simple..

There you have it, an Amazon filled list of pure photographic goodness… Anything you buy means that I get a kickback, and yes, you can be assured that I will spend all 47 cents on mince pies!

Have a great Christmas and we’ll see you.. well, probably tomorrow, but you know…

Sime

5am never works

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So it has begun… I have a nine month old boy whom I love dearly, but I want to list a few ways in which my life has changed… Not complaints, just observations for any potential future fathers that currently enjoy semi-freedom. Let me just explain semi freedom; what I mean is that it’s mostly ok to go photograph a band or see a film with a mate… It could be potentially ok to go to a festival to photograph it or even go skiing once in a while (all things with or without better half) anyway, you get the point… Baby changes things, for example, he is currently trying to sweep the floor, I don’t know why it is but they never want their toys for very long… Anyway, mum is tired so I get up and pop him on for a feed (on her, not me) and sneak out to check my email in the corner of the back of our courtyard where we’re staying… It’s amazing having a little poppet, don’t get me wrong, but if you think you can sleep with her, watch her give birth and then refrain from all childly responsibility you’ve got another thing coming.. I didn’t ever for once think that and it’s still much more hardcore than I expected! But very rewarding, too… One thing I didn’t realise was that even at nine months the little monkey was going to have a strong personality and would throw baby tantrums which are like adult ones but a lot louder! See if you can work out what face matched what mood below… (another thing, the face don’t always match the mood!!)

New iPhone No more Data from o2

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O2 has destroyed its policy of letting customers use unlimited amounts of data [porn] on their mobile devices, in response to a rapid [who are you kidding!]  increase in data consumption on its network.

So, If you were the executives at o2 and you watched Stevie Jobs (as opposed to Stevie Nicks) announce that the new iPhone could manage 720p video at 30fps …and that it could be edited on the device and then re-uploaded to YouTube… Wouldn’t you start to worry about your potential bandwidth costs going through the roof?

Let’s assume for a second that o2 buy bandwidth from Level3 at say.. 0.04p per GB? How many users do o2 have? No idea… How much bandwidth is that? no idea – a LOT… but it’s still VERY cheap

From that date, new and upgrading customers will get up to 500MB of data on tariffs of £25-£35 a month; or 750MB on £40-£45 a month; or 1GB on £60 a month. Anyone who signs up or upgrades before 24 June will have no cap on their data. Those starting a new contract on or after that date will get unlimited data until 1 October, after which the caps will kick in.

The server room overheated, he died...

And, further to the iPhone, those peeps that get their dirty Apple fan-boy mits on the iPad 3G are going to gobble up more bandwidth than a porn spammed grannies computer… So, whilst I think o2 are missing a trick here, I also see their point…

My question is, what will happen wo the data plans of the other networks when the o2 plans kick in, will they follow suit? Three? Will you cap my data? Vodafone… What will you do? T-Mobile, I won’t mention you as you’re nasty…

What are your thoughts on o2 squishing their dirty hands around the bandwidth pipe?

Chris Rose | Iron Man – needs your support!

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A CCNA student we know called Chris Rose has taken it upon himself to enter  the 3 city triathlon.  To do this he needs people to vote for him. Only the 50 entries with the most public votes get considered, so he can’t do it without our help!!

HERE’S THE LINK

Apparently he will go for a very long swim in Paris, an extra-long bike ride in Brussels and then run around in London, sounds like a normal day at the office to me!

Chris is a top guy, likes chips and burgers and we are all amazed that he is doing it, but hey! who are we to deny the man the opportunity to knacker himself! Just look at his photos… Does this look like a sane decision?

You need to log in to vote, but you can do so with Facebook, please do visit the link below and show your support for Chris!! Well done Chris, you’re a better man than I!

HERE’S THE LINK

Sime

iPhone, You Phone, We all Phone…

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Well then, Jobs has finished his chat, Apple fanboys everywhere are drooling over the new 9.3mm thick piece of sheer love, and, I have to say that I think I am too… Not because I think it’s the “best” device I’ve ever seen, but because it has everything that I want in a phone…

It’s thin, though that doesn’t excite me.. it’s very sexy… it does video calling (yeah, so does my BluRay player) if your mate has the same phone and you’re on wireless… sorta cool… where it does get my “techytype” juices flowing is when you start to talk about multi-tasking, which I realise isn’t new – my iNQ Chat 3G does it (badly) but with the new A4 processor, the multi-tasking in the iPhone 4 may actually be seriously useable!… Being able to Skype and get something from your email at the same time? Yes please… What else floats my boat? The camera… It’s been called “class leading” and I tend to agree that the iPhone 3Gs already had a semi-decent “camera phone” camera, so the new version is going to be better… I’ve not seen an actual still from it, but there you go… Also, 720p HD (30fps) editable on device video… You’re serious? Yeah, that’s RAD… video your kid doing something amazing, edit it, upload it, watch it… call your mum about it, tweet someone, facebook it… all right there…

So, will I be lining up to get my hands on one of these? actually… I probably will

If you’re in the UK, get notified here If you’re in the USA, you can click here if you’re anywhere else, go play football…

Oh yeah, you can watch the keynote chat with Steve and Co here if you like.

Rock me to sleep with a shotgun

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It’s Friday, and you know what that means!! …well, actually, no, you don’t… But anyway, let’s pretend you (and I) do.

gotta live in sh*t town

I’ve not listened to “Throwing Copper” for a long long time, but I’d suggest you get a copy and have yourself a little rock-out! (<- That link is for mp3 download at Amazon)

our love is like water
pinned down and abused
for being strange…

So, it’s Friday as I mentioned, and I want to touch on a couple of news stories from this week…

Continue reading “Rock me to sleep with a shotgun” »

BP’s Black Gold Strangle Hold

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Inspired by the blog of someone else, I’ve decided to take a bit more interest in what BP are doing to the planet with their “little spill” and whilst I understand it’s quite difficult to just swim down and stick a cap on its leaky protrusion, as it’s more than 1 Mile under water, I wonder if there’s more they could have done? What would the Stig do?

Let’s look at the current oil spill, it’s pretty darn big.. infact, let’s imagine you’ve spilled the chip oil in your kitchen and it just kept flowing until your country looked like this… (check yours out here)

One hell of a chip oil spill!

So that’s out the end of the bay, up to Shep, across into the Alpine National Park and out as far as Hamilton! (Look out South Australia, here we come!) I popped across onto the BP website and this is the latest statement…

Update on Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill – 02 June. BP today announced that it supports the U.S. government’s decision to proceed with the construction of six sections of the Louisiana barrier islands proposal. The company will fund the estimated $360 million it will cost to construct the six sections.

360 Million dollars!! What would you do with that?

So, what can we do to help? Raise awareness? Stop filling up at BP? Burn our cars and dress in grass skirts?

(all images from flickr are cc and link to their respective owners)

Comments please…

iPhone, iPad, iNeedaCoffee!

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Much interweb chatter about the whole “Steve Jobs gave Adobe the bird” “Flash is heavy and slow” …blah blah blah! Well, Let’s take a look at how NOT having flash on your iPod / iPhone / iPad is going to screw your life.

iPod from Apple without Flash from Adobe

Suddenly the top began moving, rotating, unscrewing...

So, when I say FLASH you say VIDEO when I say FLASH… oh, you get it, yeah… So, flash and video hold hands and skip, that means that you can’t watch.. well, YouTube are letting you watch their stuff, and many other commercial video sites are jumping on the wagon as well… So, what video can’t you watch? That’s right – PORN! don’t deny it, you sneak a little bit of the Swedish goodness in from time to time… “everyone” does it… you’re just cut that you can’t go straight to redtube and… oh, wait, you can… (blushing now) how ruuuude!… So, there you go, you can watch video…

What else? Games? Suck it up game boy, do some work!! Plus, there’s a gazillion games you CAN play – let me introduce you to the App Store!

world-without-flash-on-the-ipad

iPad in a Flashless world

This image came from Cult of Mac and I’m not sure if it is theirs or Adobes, if it is, sorry

OK, so you’ve got games, porn.. oh, err.. I mean video… you can view pictures, you can listen to music, you can tell the time, check the weather… learn about first aid, check the footy scores, tweet, read the news, call your mum… What’s missing? What can’t you do on the iPhone / iPad / iPod without flash?

That’s right – You can’t view FLASH WEB SITES… Well, maybe it’s time for some smart cooky to build “an app for that” …something that, when you go to a flash website, it springs out onto the website, grabs all the flash in its teeth, munches it into html5 on the fly and spits it back onto your poxy little screen in all its ex-flash glory… there’s not a flamin’ APP FOR THAT yet… (Dave? Get busy)