sun

I consider the sun to be a powerful symbol and rashbre central uses it in the main blog logo (stonehenge at summer solstice). So imagine the delight of visiting the land of the midnight sun. Admittedly, the trip is first via the delightful Denmark (of which I am sure there will be more), but then on to a place which manages to keep the sun in the sky throughout July even if it does have to pay it back in December.

So on the way, it was a great pleasure to see what were effectively two sun-sets, one behind some clouds and then a short time later one against the horizon of the sea.

harwich to esbjerg

Next stop, Esbjerg. That's after travelling to Harwich to catch a ship across the North Sea. I'll be in Scandinavia for the next few days and probably have limited access to internet and so forth. The bags are packed and I'm ready for a 'port out starboard home' crossing and then some unstructured time in Denmark and Sweden.

tiger tattva

Now that I've found that streamclip thingy, its so quick to recut some old videos onto iMovie. This was something from 8mm video, which I originally edited ages ago on a PC with Adobe Premiere and now I've just dropped it back into iMovie, rebalanced the colour and added some quick titles.

Five minutes and a mini tiger epic.

I was editing it at DV quality but have squished it down to 3Mb on disk so that it loads quickly. That's smaller than the original mp3 soundtrack for the whole movie.

Harry Potter plot ending spoiler dilemma

Someone sent me the seventh Harry Potter ending.

It was a few weeks ago.
I don't know whether its true.
The whole thing may be a hoax.

Gabriel allegedly hacked the Bloomsbury Publisher website and archived the story ending found on an employee computer. I decided not to publish it at the time it was sent, back on 19th June. Of course it would have rolled into my June archive by now...

Don't look and I'm not giving you a link.

tags technorati : rashbre harry potter harry potter spoiler

sunday morning mug of tea

Early morning visit to the shops to buy some milk, oh, and a newspaper to read.

The Observer.

As well as another newspaper to get the free gift of the Prince album, which was inside a plastic bag with the magazines.

UPDATE: The CD is pretty good too. Prince fans won't be disappointed!

tags technorati : rashbre prince Daily Mail Mail on Sunday observer

streamclip

I'm getting ready for some vacation during next week; heading North towards Scandinavia. I've decided to take a camcorder in the back-pack and thought it would be interesting to experiment with a hard disk based system. So I'm using a very small Sony DCR-SR72E which is not supposed to be compatible with Apple computers. There were warnings all over the box.

Of course, I threw away the box at Heathrow airport to simplify carrying the bits and then did the same with the manual and the rather basic software provided when I got home. Instead I just plugged it into my iMac to see what would happen. "Hello", it said, "I'm a Sony camcorder". Then it showed me a directory structure and all of the little MPEG2 sections of test video I'd recorded. Yippee.

So I dragged them into iMovie just to see what would happen. Much faster to edit than tape, and more selective too.

They all played, but no sound. So I looked at the file type - MPEG2 (muxed), it said. Hmm.

So what can I use to unscramble the perfectly good sound from inside the files?

Streamclip.

I then dragged the files from the camcorder onto Streamclip. "what format would you like?", it asked, and gave me about 50 to choose from, including High Definition upscaling.

I settled for a simple, morose, broken down frankfurt.mov made from a few of the test clips and Yay, everything worked with conversion much faster than realtime playback.

You can enjoy me having a hotel breakdown in the video but, hey, I now have a perfectly fine hard disk based camcorder thats smaller than my SLR and works brilliantly with my Mac. Even if it says it won't on the box.

Expect Nordic video later!

sign o' the times

rashbre central likes the music of Prince and indeed we have tickets for the upcoming concerts at the O2 dome in August having been too jetlagged to see him at the Rio Hotel in Las Vegas earlier in the year.

In the UK Prince sold around 80,000 copies of his last CD, so its kind of interesting to see that the new one called Planet Earth is to be given away on Sunday in the Mail. The normal circulation of the Mail on Sunday is about 2.4M and this time they are printing 3 million, of which 50,000 have been ordered by the HMV Shop.

With the structural changes to the music industry, this is an interesting development, although we don't want music to become so free that it eventually stops being created.

Purple Rain sold sold more than 11m copies and with the gigs the artist formally known as Prince was doing in Vegas every night and the upcoming 21 nights at the Dome, I don't think he is short of a fan or two.

tags technorati : rashbre prince Daily Mail Mail on Sunday

hofbrauhaus

My second trip to Germany this week, this time to Munich.

No visit would be komplett without a visit to ein Bierhalle and we managed to get along to the Hofbrauhaus at around eleven in the evening.

We stayed long enough for 'ein Prosit der Gemutlichkeit' and then wandered on to a nearby club Brenner which seemed to be suitably lively for the rest of the evening.

speedtest

Somewhat asymmetric.

what was I thinking?

Clearing some files today, I stumbled across this old 'home movie' from a trip to Disney. Most people are content to do something with family and friends, so I smiled when I saw this slightly bonkers edit from 2003.

radio planet

Bizarre good luck today when I was buying a couple of light bulbs. The local Curry's where I bought the bulbs (halogen specials not sold in Tesco) also had a pile of these little radios on sale- reduced to 1/3 of their original price. The interesting thing is its an Internet radio. As rashbre central is bathed in enough wifi to fry a chicken, I thought I'd give it a try.

In the store I looked at the deceptive lack of sockets aound the back, noticed the little bass duct and a headphone socket, so I took a punt and brought one back to base.

And its plug and go. It found a stack of the local wifi signals, asked for the WEP passwords and then proceeded to download about 6,000 radio channels of the entire planet, sorted into countries and genre.

So I dialled a couple I knew: KFOG of San Francisco and Whole Wheat Radio of Alaska, then listened to a few at random from Tokyo and SWF3 from Germany. Sound quality is fine for a small radio. Tuning so many stations is a little laborious, but its kinda fun to have quite good quality world radio for less than a tank of gas in the car. And it somehow found my iTunes library too and lets me select from that and build playlists.

I like the sort of analogue pioneering spirit of it- only less than 10,000 users globally at the moment. Three years and all radio will probably be like it.

clearly

I have a new windscreen!

Yes - the man with the van arrived today (actually two men in two vans) to fix the windscreen on my car. A motorway hazard nowadays seems to be that little loose bolts and bits fly off of other vehicles and occasionally clip the windscreen of the car. Sometimes they bounce off without incident, but occasionally they leave a little dink.

I've already had the autoglasiers out once to re bond the windscreen from small chips, but this time it was too much. Something hit the car and bounced away and at the time I didnt think more of it. When I parked and looked at the passenger side of the screen, there was a 20cm crack in the glass. Well beyond the prescribed safety limits. Its laminated glass, so no immediate worry that it would break, but I needed it fixed.

So my car was going into the garage for a service, but my insurance wanted me to have it done via a roadside service. No problemo. I called them up and they arrived at the appointed time. Excellent. Slight problem. It was raining. No worries, I could move the car underground at the multi story in our office. Ooops. The van was too tall to get into the car park. Then we checked the glass. Wrong type. It didn't have the 'rainsensors' and 'headlight sensors' on it. Bye-bye Mr van man.

Two days later, a big van like the last one and a small van that was car park compatible showed up. It wasn't raining. They had the right glass. And in less that one hour I have a shiny new Pilkington glass windscreen.