Zaphodikus Realm

Goodbye Lego Universe :-(

2012-02-08T19:36:00.003Z

It's all over now, even the book is closing. I am just more than a bit torn up, that LU had to close their doors. At least we signed on soon after it launched, and had a great time and played and created, adventured and were kept safe. Is there life after Lego universe?

Green space panorama

2012-01-31T14:30:00.001Z

Since I managed to make a pretty good panorama inside a small space, I also made one near my house in a very nice conservation zone. Besides being a conservation area, the location hints at it's early history as well.

taken here:
http://maps.google.co.uk/maps?hl=en&ll=52.29161,0.123956&spn=0.002825,0.004823&t=h&z=18
Please excuse the lack of editing the border. The stitched image size is reduced to about 30% of original, from 42 pics taken on my mobile phone. The trick to getting started is to stand in one spot and turn on your heel, taking pictures with about 30% overlap. Hold the camera at the same height all the while, and rotate as if you were a tripod. In a small space the camera actually needs to rotate on a small axis- but for this one I sat on a tree-stump and just wiggled around keeping my but on the same spot. So the camera's travel arc was a radius of about 1 foot. Even if a full 360 is not your thing, you can still crop it later on. Taking the pictures is really the hardest part - remember, you will need light, and preferably no shadows caused by a camera-flash.

If you have a yuppie phone, there is an 'app' for this, but for the rest of us.... to see how it's done, click http://softcircuitry.blogspot.com/2012/01/myshed-free-image-composite-editor.html

Time machine: (Hitches, but happy)

2012-01-07T09:33:00.000Z

What you are about to read occured in the past - I believe it was 1999/2000. Flashbacks are normal for new-years.

It looks like the homeloan/bond money is going to take some time longer than expected to come through. Not really a problem, because I am hitting the highs again. I just got my Ancestry visa application all together and submitted, so now I can get on with more of my life, still have to sell the 2 cars, and find homes for the 2 dogs,

Home alone, and working
Been home-alone for a bit this week, means I got some work done on the contract, it is hard going, an unfamiliar environment like linux does slow you a little, but it is so cool when you realize what you were doing wrong, and discover a shortcut to do what you wanted to in a much simpler way. What I find so kinky is that it (linux SUSE) really does use less RAM. It is a great developer platform to work on, because most things work faster (except the help-system, which works on-line actually) because I have limited conenctivity it does hurt. Once in the UK I hope to corry on linux-ing and get totally broadband. I am still contemplating mail-bombing my buddies back in RSA the day I get fully connected. But that is all in the future, so much to get done before that time.

Oh, plug! I am building a TCP/IP gateway for Radio Transmission Services http://www.rtse.co.za/, the project is basically a small linux-box (about 7 inches across) with only one purpose, run a lightweight SUSE kernel and some realtime patches to do very precise modem-control in order to communicate back out to a very long customized RS485 network, and expose all the data via a modbus TCP/IP (open-mbus) over LAN.
I rarely dof my salesmans hat, but now I will pause to return myself to normal me.

signing off, Z

sorry, missing image.

2012-01-05T11:05:00.000Z

I think this old picture was one of the first I took once I got here. Location: Hillingdon
To find what I was doing around that time, scroll back to mid 2006