WebCam Recordings

Posted on May 9, 2011 by gaz

I have been toying with the idea for a while about taking an image of something every 5 or so minutes over a long period of time and creating a time-lapse movie. However nothing really came to mind.

Then I thought why not create a time-lapse movie of the block of flats being built across from my house. Yes, it may be a little boring but its either that or my back garden or clouds in the sky. Plus I can see how our current lovely view slowly disappears behind a 3 story building.

So I have a WebCam, currently a Logitec Pro 4000 or something, and a freeware piece of software called Dorgem. I have setup Dorgem to take an image every minute and store a copy on my computer and another every 5 minutes and store it on my FTP server.

Hopefully once the flat is complete I can put a time-lapse movie together which shows the building of the flats in a shorter space of time.

I have setup a dedicated page on here to show the latest image from the WebCam, plus any history or movies I create. So go check it out of you are at all interested!

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WordPress as a CMS for Natasha Buchanan MUA

Posted on January 23, 2011 by gaz

So I have just finished migrating Natasha Buchanan’s Website completely over to WordPress, and I’m happy to say it was a breeze and the results are brilliant.

It was original built using .NET and hosted on a separate Windows Server with a MS SQL 2008 server supporting the database requirements, which was costing a fair few pounds each year.

I have been looking at various CMS solutions recently to find which is the easiest to stand up a complete site within, and are not to complicated to use and update. I looked at the main leaders such as Drupal and Joomla but to be honest they were overly complicated.

I took a look at WordPress and got the results I needed in half the time (or even less) it would have taken to do in Joomla or Drupal. Yes the other two are far more powerful but if you are simply looking to stand up a basic site with a few pages then WordPress is the way to go.

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Recent iPhone Alarm Bug Solved

Posted on January 8, 2011 by gaz

With the coming of the new year of 2011 brought a very annoying bug with the iPhone that rendered the daily alarms useless.

The problem made owners wake up late for the first days back to work for 2011 and some missed plains or trains as the alarms failed to go off.

Apple said however these problems would rectified from 3rd January which was true for some people, but not all, including my girlfriends iPhone.

So in true IT fashion I basically “turned it off and back on again”. Meaning I deleted the currently alarms and recreated them, which appeared to solve the problem.

So if you are still having problems with your iPhone try giving it a go, delete all alarms currently entered and recreated them.

Hope it helps.

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Tidy Up Windows Files and Folder

Posted on July 15, 2010 by gaz

So I noticed my harddrive is getting pretty full and I wanted to move some of the larger files off to a usb harddrive.

First though, I need to figure out which files are taking up the most space and where abouts they are on my harddrive.

There is a really cool application call WinDirStat which scans your harddrive and calculates the sizes for all the folders and identifies where the largest files are.

If you need a similar tool take a look. Link below.

http://windirstat.info/

Hope it helps.

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No Blog Updates for some time… There is a reason.

Posted on July 15, 2010 by gaz

There has been no updates on this for some time, but there are many good reasons why.

In the time of my last blog, Tash and I have moved home, and that not only takes up alot of our time, but induces lots of stress. So the blog seemed to take a back seat.

Not only that but I have always been wondering how I can best use this blogging software. What I do not want to do is be like write lots of content and tutorials for people. There are way to many out there, and most of them do a far better job than I ever would.

How I see myself using this blog is really to just write down my day to day findings. There is so much stuff I find out everybody which I just cant retain in my head, so I think the best way for me to document this would be here.

This “knowledge capturing” blog could be anything from the Lillie Beatles I have found on the littlies in my back garden and how to rid the Lillies of them to how I can implement a custom Members/Role/Profile provider in .NET.

So without further a do, I will start to blog more frequantly now just to simply my day-to-day findings.

Recently work actually involved publishing of my girlfriends website. You can check it out at www.natashabuchanan.co.uk. There may be more to come on this shortly.

Gaz

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Blog Now Linked to Twitter

Posted on February 2, 2010 by gaz

As previously mentioned I linked my blog to my LinkedIn account, and decided to take it to the next stage which is linking this blog to my Twitter account. Which in turn is also linked to my Facebook profile. This is getting complicated.

I’m hoping to achive integration across the various social networking sites but may look at removing such integration to Facebook as I am still not sure whether I want t bombared my profile on there with the ramblings I have here.

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Blog Linked to LinkedIn Account

Posted on February 1, 2010 by gaz

Just updated my LinkedIn account to show all posts from here that are tagged with “linkedin”.

This ensures any information I want to be displayed on LinkedIn can be done so very easily.

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Virtual Revolution

Posted on January 31, 2010 by gaz

Just watched the first episode of Virual Revolution, which was shown on BBC2 on 30th January 2010.

The program discusses how the Internet and World Wide Web was form and how it has changed the way we as a society have changed since its creation. I still can not believe it has only been just over 12 years since our household got our first personnel computer and now it feels I would be lost without the Internet.

The program talks about how the World Wide Web is the 21st Centuries version of the 1950′s/60′s  hippy revolution for freeh speec. It gives people the power of free speech and publish what they like much more easily.

One of the things the WWW tried to accomplish as it was being formed was that everybody were to be classed on the same level, no dictatorship or goverments say what you can and cannot know, a place for free speech where anybody can write about whatever they like. To share knowledge.

The program highlighted nowadays however that the internet is majorly controlled a select group of companies, in the UK we have Google for search, eBay and Amazon for purchases and Facebook for social communications. With these companies having such a firm grip on the internet I find it hard to believe how any new company could compete with these.

In todays sociaty we have Honda, Ford, BMW etc with good market shares in the automotive industry and the goverment ensures no single company has complete control over the market. This can be seen with the recent law suits against Microsoft and its anti competive practices. How is going to control the giants of the Internet? Are we still able to regard the internet as a free for all? Can we even control these companies if such a governance was put inplace?

One a side note I took a look at Top Sites in United Kingdom and it pretty much sums up the majority of web browsing habits for the British people… Was a little suprised to see spot 18 taken up by some adult site though. Or was I? It is reported that 40% of male activity on the internet is adult material related.

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A new year, a new blog

Posted on January 10, 2010 by gaz

With everything changing in my life recently since finishing university nearly 3 years ago I have completely removed any web presence I had!

Here is my first blog on my newly installed wordpress installation. Now I am not hoping to a major contributor to this internet blogosphere, but at least I have a place where I can just record my thoughts.

Who knows if I every find myself having more time i might even write something interesting.

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