Month: February 2004

Former minutemen and fIREHOSE bass player Mike Watt spielin’ ’bout music, skateboarding and err… apple macs

If you are reading this upside down then chances are you are looking for information on how to get your display to appear the right way up. I had this problem the other day when one of my cats was wandering around on my laptop keyboard, and suddenly the display was upside down.

This won’t work for all displays as it is driver dependent, but CTRL – ALT and either the up or down arrows flips the display over on mine.

my unsupported red hat 8.0 box is becoming increasingly difficult to keep up to date now that the live update thing doesn’t work. I feel abandoned. I don’t want to waste precious time trying to resolve dependency problems. I am having problems installing things. There is no commercial work on the cards to make use of this box.

There is an evil glint in my eye because the linux box contains a hard drive and ram which would be just perfect for a windows XP box I am building for video editing. I know, that isn’t what you wanted to hear as you’ve probably googled your way to this page looking for linux info….

this has been scientifically “proven”.

which is just as well, because I know that I won’t be able to justify buying one of these flipstart mini-pcs when they come out.

i skate therefore i am.

some people might say that I have been talking about skateboarding with childish excitement recently. For the last few years i’ve also rambled on at length about the web and digital media with unnatural enthusiasm. So imagine my delight when today, whilst reading about the video capabilities of Flash on the macromedia site, I stumbled upon the bacon skateboards site including very nicely executed flash mx skate videos. I’ve linked to the swf directly here because for some reason the HTML displays only part of the movie in mozilla if you go in through the front door

Before my frontside ollie disaster disaster, I was trying to take some action photos at the skatepark with my digital camera. The results were disappointing, because of shutter lag making it almost impossible to catch the action. I’ve had the camera for about a year – it’s a Pentax optio 330 gs, and I bought it because my first ancient HP digital camera had excessive shutter lag, making it virtually impossible to use at times. When I got the pentax, the improvement was massive, but this is the first time i’ve tried any action photography with it.

I’ve read that the best way to get round this is to not use the flash and to set up your shot beforehand by half depressing the button so that the autofocus has already taken place in the area the action is going to occur. Using no flash means daylight only or incredibly blurred shots. You can also use "continuous mode" to take pictures in quick succession, but I was unimpressed with the results of this, particularly with a sport like skateboarding where timing is everything to get the optimal shot.

I guess now it is starting to sink in why high end digital SLR’s are still so expensive. In the meantime I might dust off my old olympus 35mm compact for my next trip to the skatepark.

I’m sitting here with my arm in plaster. some people are being sympathetic, most aren’t. after all, I am too old to skate

I had some wrap rage the other night whilst trying to extract a tin of baked beans from a shrink wrapped four pack. Actually I think it was more a case of “wrap slightly annoyedness”.