Back in 2015 I bought 3 pairs of studio flash heads (one pair 400 joule, one pair 360 joule and one pair 200 joule). They were supplied as bargain bundles, complete with stands, brollies etc. via sellers on eBay. They were quite a bargain. Each flash head worked out at approximately £50 per unit, They…
Our Floureon pan tilt and zoom external IP camera has shipped a bit of water. It lives on the south west corner of the building and gets battered by the strong south westerly prevailing winds we have here. So I took it off the wall this morning and dismantled it on my work bench. General…
Seems it’s time to buy another laptop. My trusty old Thinkpad has seen better days. Worse, a company with somewhat ironic name of “PCSpecialist” made a total pig’s breakfast of repairing my new Clevo N141ZU I had purchased from it earlier. “PCSpecialist” also lost my hard disk, then denied having it. And what “PCSpecialist” laughingly…
I recently purchased an unlocked Chinese Ulefone Armor 3W ruggedised smartphone – c/w Mediatek chipset, 8-core 64-bit CPU, dual unlocked SIM slots, 256GiB TF slot and 10300mAH battery. I have quite a soft-spot for cheap generic Chinese phones. Of course, one has to choose the product quite carefully. You need to ensure your preferred device…
Like in that old Kraftwerk song, I have a bit of a penchant for small pocket calculators. These are a few of my oldest examples. In fact the Sharp Elsimate dates back to 1973 and belonged to my late father.
Discussion came up on a forum to which I belong whether it is better to use NAS (network attached storage) or external hard drives for backup. My answer is why not use both? Effectively I have three NAS servers. One is a media server. The others are purely backup – though they can quickly be…
A few snaps of my old Roamer Ten kit radio in the garden and in the shed, on a bright sunny day. Well, it seemed a relatively enjoyable way to spend a sunny COVID-lockdown day.
I recently treated myself to a laser gobo. The patterns it makes remind me of the speaker grille on my old Roamer Ten kit radio. So I thought it might be interesting to combine the two and capture a few snaps.
Just bought an RGB laser gobo cheap on eBay. So I thought I’d have a little fun with it around the studio and garden.
I had a bit of interest in my Linux media servers recently. In fact I recently completed four Linux media or Zoneminder builds. Here are a few snaps… The machines are based on basic Novatech business PC’s. Nothing special. The media server versions have KDE Neon GNU/Linux. This is a very attractive KDE based desktop…
I have always been rather fascinated by the fractal-like properties of the romanesco. It really does look like it is not of this planet. SO I thought it would be fun to team up a romanesco, some cheap RGB LED lighting and a couple of broken silver coloured mannequins. Just in case anyone is wondering:…
Slightly off-the-wall experiment with a pair of broken mannequins and some cheap but effective RGB LED lighting.
I decided to have a go at repairing the HF tweeters unit in my vintage Tannoy Monitor Golds. It was a tricky old job. More pictures to follow.
More LED experiments – this time using some small daylight LED and a 12 volt DC power supply to light the Dexion racking.
I had a lovely model called Onna come down from London today for a retro technology photo shoot. While she was here, she posed with some of my favourite radios, including my Icom IC-R20 and my AOR AR 8200 handheld communications receivers. Which I continued to photograph long after she had gone home. Here are…
Well it’s a cold bleak miserable Southampton winter’s day outside. Decided to take a few “library” snaps of some current favourite bits of kit, including a rather nice pair of wideband communications receivers.
These days I am more concerned with bangs-per-buck rather than the latest, greatest technology. This kit is so disposable nowadays and the technology changes so quickly that I think you need to adopt a completely different purchase strategy. This is my strategy for consumer durables such as digital cameras and computers… Do some research and…
A client has lent me a Palm Treo to play with for a few weeks. The Palm Treo is quite an interesting device, it combines the functionality of a mobile phone with a Palm Pilot. It’s built in camera is rather poor and its design needs some work. But I suspect what I have in…
