by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 11, 2007 | Usefull Things
I bought a Sagem PVR6200T Freeview PVR back in August from Comet in Greenwich.
The device was OK at best, it was noisy and a bit slow to respond sometimes, never coped well with playback of something while recording something else and often just crashed randomly. This was after a software upgrade that took away the repeatable crashes and reboots leaving just the random ones.
Most annoyingly it’s only means of upgrade was Over The Air broadcasts so even though a upgrade was out to fix some of my problems I couldn’t download it and fix them, I had to wait for Sagem to schedule a OTA again.
Night before last it’s HDD packed up – much ticking and retry sounding noises at bootup and it never displayed anything on the screen.
I immediately thought it is going to be hell to replace this thing, probably involve me sending it back to Sagem myself, being without a PVR for months and then getting a refurb version of the same crap back. Had a look on the Comet site and they said one can just bring it back to them for repairs – so still much waiting?
I drove to the store I got it from – Comet Greenwich about 10 mins from me – and put it on the counter with a very quick explanation of what was going on. The guy behind the desk just looked at it to ensure all the bits where there and asked me if I wanted the same type again or a different one for replacement? I was shocked it was totally painless, no hassles, no questions asked, just go pick a new one.
So I looked at the various options and settled for a Humax PVR-9200T – had to pay the 20 pound price difference – my first impressions are that this is a great bit of kit. It’s fast, the UI is much prettier, it supports upgrading via RS232 port and OTA. It has a USB port and some software that lets you download recorded video to a PC for viewing. It also has double the storage of the old Sagem and a 2 year warranty.
So major kudos to Comet for getting customer service right, totally unexpected and unique in my experience with high street electronics places. I’ve bought many things from them in the past this is the first one thats broken, but it does inspire confidence.
by R.I. Pienaar | Jan 6, 2007 | Photography
I’ve always loved panoramas ever since I got my first Olympus camera that had the on-screen display for composing panoramas. It required – and Olympus still stupidly have this requirement – that you use only over priced Olympus memory.
Things have come a long way since with almost every point and shoot now having a on screen guide for doing panoramas and give away free software for it, but what to do with a DSLR?
There are several methods, you can do them yourself in photoshop or any of a number of apps that require you to carefully line up your photos and make little dots on them etc. but none of these compare to Autostitch in ease of use. You literally just point it at your photos and it does it all, you don’t even need to tell it what form the panorama takes.
The end result is a good quality JPG (quality is adjustable) that only requires cropping, below are some examples of what I’ve done with it in the past. It can not be easier to shoot them, no tripods or anything, just line them up.
Click on each for the flickr page, then click on All Sizes to see big versions of each shot.
I’d definitely suggest giving it a try, it’s a great way to get more detail in shots, look for example at the last one in detail you’ll see Emma in the shot bottom left to give you a sense of scale, that is 6 x 10 meg pixel images stuck together. More examples by me can be seen here and there is a Flickr Group as well with some excellent examples.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 28, 2006 | Code
After my recent release of version 1.6 I realized you wouldn’t always want to have a clickable point at every line point so version 1.7 introduces a fix for this.
First a sample:
You can see there are few points and the line just gets drawn through points that aren’t clickable. This is a much more practical approach to it since with version 1.6 you’d have had 2000 clickable markers on that map, not good.
To activate this feature there is now a special type called none, if you specify this as the type for a point it won’t get a marker, no comments, not clickable etc. You can also therefore not define your own types using the word none since they just won’t work.
As a side note, the image you see above is from a map with very close to 2000 points on it, the map works on my iMac with 1GB RAM but I’ve seen it fail on other smaller machines, it seems the problem is related to the time the javascript takes to run so the browsers kill the javascript. This is the first time I came across limitation in this so all I can say is if you intend to make huge maps, test it on smaller machines as well.
This version also fixes a small error in the HTML that my code produce, this didn’t break anything but it’s best to stick to what GMap EZ expect.
Version 1.7 is available at http://www.devco.net/code/gmapsphp-current.tgz as always and the docs at http://www.devco.net/pubwiki/GMapsPHP have been updated.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 24, 2006 | Front Page
We are now back from holiday after driving 1065 miles (1713 kilo meter).
We decided to cut 2 days out of our plans for the trip due to the persistent fog. First few days we had great weather, when the fog first set in it was fine as well as we were at Fountains Abbey where it added great atmosphere to everything, then we visited Emma’s sister so no big deal. Last 2 days where primarily days for seeing the beauty of the lake and peak districts and we had zero visibility, so we decided to cut the Dean Forest days out out of the trip.
I used my trusty old Magellan GPS 315 to record the trip, one day I didn’t use it as we were mostly just driving around New Castle, also didn’t record short trips to restaurants and the like, therefore it’s total distance is a bit out, only 947 miles on the track.
Average Speed: 63 km/hour
Max Elevation: 450 meter / 1473 feet
The car behaved perfectly, no hitches or complaints at all and overall I had a great time on the holiday.
I made the track using my GPS track management application that I’ve blogged about before, I’ll turn it into a interactive google map with links to places, pictures etc and link it here later.
by R.I. Pienaar | Dec 15, 2006 | Front Page
Last night while packing for my holiday it struck me just how bad things are today with all the gadgets and stuff we carry around. I guess the list of things I packed says it all:
| USB Cable for WM5 phone and photovault |
Laptop + Charger |
| Lensbaby |
DSLR Cleaning kit |
| USB card reader |
GPS data cable |
| Backup mobile phone on a different network |
4 x AA batteries and charger |
| USB Speakers for watching divx |
6 x Ilford HP5+ films |
| Spot Meter |
2 x Ilford FP4+ films |
| Nikon FM3a |
Nikon FE |
| 12 to 220 volt adapter for car |
D70 + Battery + Charger |
| Road Atlas |
TomTom Navigator with latest speed cams loaded |
| WM5 Phone + Charger |
Tourist books, reading books |
| D80 + Grip + 4 x AA Adapters + 18-200VR |
Flash Light |
| 5 x Memory Cards |
Tri-Pod |
| Notebook + Pen |
Photovault |
That’s about it, all of this before even starting on clothing and other such things. Insane.
Anyway, so a bit about the holiday, we’re just doing a bit of a road trip to test out my new car, I only have 6 days leave this year after changing jobs and loosing 16 days worth in the process so this is all we really have time for ๐
The major stops are basically Cambridge (today), Bolsover for a castle there, York, New Castle, Lake District, Peak District and Royal forest of Dean, we’ll be back around christmas day.
