These are a few general observations that might be of interest to some people.
Tories have just been well and truly trounced in the UK. Labour has officially won the 2024 UK General Election. Results still coming in but it’s set to be an absolute landslide… https://www.theguardian.Com/politics/live/2024/jul/04/general-election-2024-uk-live-labour-tories-starmer-sunak-results-exit-poll Not so much that Labour won, than the Tories lost. Granted, this time it was more about people voting out the Tories,…
Happy July 4 to all our American friends, celebrating the fact their ancestors had the good sense to rid themselves of our awful Royal Family. Here in the UK, it’s General Election time again. For some strange reason, it was called for 2024-07-04. Hopefully the results of this election should be cause for celebration here…
I was pleased to note that our collared doves have returned after several year’s absence. Of course I have no way of knowing if they are the same collared doves. But whoever they are, I’m rather fond of them and delighted to see them back in the garden again.
I suffered my first hard disk failure way back in 1987. Fortunately I recovered 99% of my data. However, successful recovery required quite a lengthy struggle and a somewhat inelegant bodge. Since then, I’ve held something of a fascination, some might even say an obsession with backup systems. Over the years, I have tried all…
Today I decided to make my own affordable detachable camera and equipment lanyard straps. I used some cheap generic “Peak Design compatible” buckles, bought direct from China via Ali Express, together with some generic anchors from the same source. I also used some 25mm nylon webbing I’ve had kicking round for ages. Granted, perhaps bright…
Problem is that memory cards can and do fail – even the expensive ones. And of course the world is littered with fakes. Being a bit of an old skinflint, almost all my memory cards have come from Amazon or similar. But I always add one extra precautionary step to the process between purchase and…
Driving through the West Sussex countryside on my way back Chichester, I spotted this tiny stone Chapel, literally right in the middle of nowhere. The board outside read St Mary’s Church Sennicotts. But the odd thing is there is no other building near. Nearest building I could see was about 400 metres away. The church’s…
The subject of monopods was raised recently in a photographic forum to which I belong. As it happens, I was already flirting with the idea of using a walking stick as a monopod, to avoid the need to carry two sticks. I’m a lazy so-and-so at the best of times. I also have a habit…
Several people have contacted me privately and asked for information regarding how I actually mounted my 120-year-old Bausch & Lomb + Beck lens on my µ4/3 camera. I hope in this article to shed a little light on how one can make such an old lens and seemingly-incompatible lens actually stay on a modern mirrorless…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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 have just been listening to Mr Trump and his supporters explaining the situation concerning all those crates of secret documents that the FBI found in is house at Mar-a Largo. Apparently, the documents were all planted at Mar-a-Lardo by the FBI, they were not at all important, and Mr Trump had declassified them all…
Puzzles me why Brexiteers still conflate use of International System of Units (SI) with the EU? Or why these people still think that the metric system is some how “not British” and kid themselves that they are being “patriotic” by refusing to use it? British Engineers and scientists have been pleading with various British governments…
Today we take a little trip back in time to one of the internet’s oldest and most famous memes: “All Your Base”. AKA “All your base are belong to us“, this internet meme was based on a badly translated phrase from the opening scene of a video game called “Zero Wing“. The phrase first appeared…
Seems that as London and the midlands – not to mention much of central Europe – sizzle in 40°C temperatures, our planet is to be hit with unusual weather of a different kind: a solar storm. Activity in the upper atmosphere of the sun, known as the ‘corona’, creates huge ‘solar flares’. These generate powerful…
I have been a tad distracted by some rather serious political events that have taken place here in Old Blighty during the last few days. Basically our Prime Minister has decided to “do a Trump” and stay in power even though over fifty members of his government have now resigned in protest over his various…
A few folks have asked me what I use to keep our various networking and internet connectivity kit neat and tidy, yet reasonably service friendly. Well, I have to admit that it was rather a muddle for a many years. That was until I decided to make a simple multistorey stainless steel router rack. Moreover,…
Some readers may remember that during lockdown, I wrote an article concerning the large stag beetle grubs I discovered round the back of my shed? Well, it seems the stag beetle grubs have grown up now – well some of them have anyway. I discovered quite a few adults in our garden lately. Yesterday, I…
“Hey, Hey, Rise-Up!” released on 2022-04-08, is Pink Floyd’s first new song since 1994. It will be used to raise funds for humanitarian causes associated with the warin Ukraine. It samples Andriy Khlyvnyuk, a member of one of Ukraine’s biggest bands, BoomBox, singing in Sofiyskaya Square in Kyiv, in a video clip that went viral….
According to Reuters, Britain is looking at whether it can use properties owned by sanctioned individuals in the country for humanitarian purposes. “I want to explore an option which would allow us to use the homes and properties of sanctioned individuals for as long as they are sanctioned for humanitarian and other purposes,” housing minister…
