Regular readers may know that my 2023 Christmas project was to make this 120 year old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens fit on my µ4/3 cameras and actually capture some pictures with it. Unfortunately, at the time, the weather was too wet to take the thing outdoors. Fortunately by early January the weather became…
Over Christmas I set myself a little task of trying to make a 120-year- old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens fit on a fairly modern camera. The lens was given to me in the late 1980’s by one of my very first models. It was a nice thought but to be honest, I came…
Merry Christmas 2023 from GarfNet, in a cold, damp, wet and windy Old Blighty. Like last year, its all a tad dull and gloomy here and many folks here are not exactly brimming with festive cheer, this year. Nevertheless, merry Christmas anyway… 🙂 About the picture The photo is entitled “The easily LED geese of…
I always rather fancied a decent 500mm catadioptric lens. I bought a cheap Korean one off eBay a few years back and frankly it was not very good. But the old Tamron 500mm mirror lens has quite a good reputation. And as luck would have it, one turned up cheap on eBay a few weeks…
EDITORS NOTE 2025-01-22. BBC changed its streams, yet again. Consequently, most of the BBC of the streams on this page no longer work. New streams that do actually work can be found at:- Internet radio player URLs Following the fiasco at the end of last week, when the BBC killed all its HLS internet radio…
Editor’s note: a list of new BBC AAC HLS internet ratio streams can be found here. Over the last few hours, some new BBC streams have appeared. At the moment I don’t know whether these are official BBC streams or if some public-spirited person is re-streaming. Though I’m pretty sure the ones coming from the…
Editor’s note: a list of new BBC AAC HLS internet ratio streams can be found here. Seems the BBC has decided to make all its AAC HLS streams only available to wealthy people who have Apple or similar devices. And the good old-fashioned “shoutcast” MP3 streams have gone altogether. Seems that if you can afford…
Date Trial 2023-10-02 Start of Trump’s civil trial where AG Letitia James is seeking $250 million. 2023-10-23 Start of Kenneth Cheesebro’s and Sydney Powell’s joint trial 2024-01-15 Start of E Jean Carroll’s defamation trial 2024-01-29 Federal class-action trial against Trump 2024-03-04 Trump’s federal criminal trial in Washington DC 2024-03-25 Start of Alvin Bragg’s Stormy Daniels …
Lots of conspiracy theories abound. And there probably is a lot more to this story than meets the eye. However my own gut feeling (and it is just that): This was essentially a massive cock up. I’m reminded of Hanlon’s Razor:- Never ascribe to malice anything that can adequately be explained by stupidity… Russia managed…
Wagner Group rebellion presents further serious difficulties for Putin Seems that Vlad the Invader and the leader mercenary army he hired to bolster his own failing army in Ukraine have had a major falling out. Wagner Group leader Yevgeny Prigozhin claims that Russia bombed his Ukraine HQ killing 2000 of his men and has vowed…
My experience of street photography is to make oneself looks as insignificant and unprofessional as possible – which comes rather too naturally to me, TBH! 🙂 Kit should be small, light and ideally somewhat battered looking – a “distressed” look that most of my kit usually acquires after a few weeks’ service. No expensive-looking kit…
Amongst his many sackings for lying, he was sacked by the Times for making up quotes. So yes, the Daily Heil does indeed seem to be the perfect place for Boris to get paid stupid money for making up more asinine far-right crap. A more detailed list of Johnson’s more egregious lies… And as ever,…
Is AliExpress any good is a difficult question to answer in a single word. It is ‘a pig and a poke‘ to some extent. Having spent quite a lot of time in Hong Kong, AliExpress has many of the attributes of a Hong Kong street market. I.e. quite a lot of junk, some quite good…
Bought a bundle of multifunction USB rechargeable LED lights from a supplier AliExpress. I actually a bought batch of both types shown below because I like them so much. I paid a bit over a fiver each for them. Quite amazing for their size, weight and cost. Tough, water-resistant and rechargeable via USB C, c/w…
Seems during the wee small hours of this morning, our little blue planet had a very near miss, as we narrowly avoided a collision with a speeding asteroid. At 2023-01-27 00:29 UTC, an asteroid codenamed “2023 BU” came within about 3,589 kilometres of the planet’s surface, around the southerly tip of South America. To put…
I don’t quite know how I managed it but my personal/business dataset has now grown to around 17 Terrabytes. Most of it is spread across multiple smaller disks. This is becoming increasingly difficult to manage. In fact, we are decommissioning our 4TB drives. This is partly because they are well beyond recommended end of life,…
Nurses’ noisy but good-humoured protest outside Southampton General Hospital today as first ever major NHS nurses strikes in British history take place. Something about this touched me. Perhaps it was the sadness that these hard-working decent people have to do this. Or perhaps it was the gentle considerate way they did it. Every bus and…
For my little IT business, the possibility of power cuts is very bad news indeed. So we invested in one of these things – a “UA1101l” power storage unit. On paper, it stores about 3.6 MJ (megajoules) or 1 kWh (kilowatt hour) in EV (electric vehicle) grade LiFePO4 (lithium iron phosphate) batteries. My tests suggest…
Merry Christmas 2022 from Garfnet, in a cold, damp, gloomy, strike-riddled, post-Brexit Britain. Seems we really are going back to the seventies this year. This is a Winter of Discontent that rivals that of 1978-79. In fact, there are so many strikes happening here at the moment that the Guardian newspaper has published a regularly…
We’re busy replacing a customer’s ageing Sonos distributed sound system with a Linux Media Server (c/w SAMBA for remaining Sonos kit) c/w these tiny Linux-powered SBCs (single board commuters) as replacements. Granted, this is merely a prototype. This unit us based upon a Raspberry pi 4B c/w 8GiB RAM, a capacitative touchscreen and an external…
Here on the central south coast of England, it is rare for temperatures to drop much below freezing. This cold snap we recorded -4.5 °C at night and barely rising above 0°C during the day. And thanks to economies we’re making due to the ridiculously high price of natural gas, the house itself seldom rose…
I just bought a Geiger counter from a seller on AliExpress. Well it’s actually a Geiger counter and EMF (electromagnetic field) meter, all combined into a single device. I have no idea who actually makes these things. There is no branding other than a model number “BR-9C”. Though I did discover that the enclosures used…
So it seems we have yet another unelected Tory prime minister. In addition to being Britain’s first British-Asian and Hindu PM, and the youngest PM in over two centuries, Rishi Sunak also has the distinction of being our third PM in seven weeks! This time there wasn’t even ballot for Tory Party members. He just…
A lot of buzz on the interwebs about Samsung mobile phone batteries. Whilst Samsung devices do seem particularly problematic, it can be an issue with lithium polymer batteries generally – especially the super skinny type. They really don’t like getting hot. I confess I documented this repair rather badly but I did remember to capture…
As Britain reels from the effects of Chancellor of the Exchequer Kwasi Kwarteng’s 2022-09-23 budget, and the pound plummets towards an all-time low against the US Dollar, Mr pie has a sweary but succinct analysis of the shitshow in which we now find ourselves, here in Old Blighty. A less sweary and less amusing analysis…
