Author Archive

From Podcasts to Books

August 28th, 2010

Books VS PodcastsLately I’ve been feeling that I’m over-saturating myself with Podcasts. For the past few months I was listening to a podcast every night and I feel like it was getting to me. Don’t get me wrong I love all the podcasts I listen to but I was beginning to miss reading. I hadn’t read any book for about 2 months and my library of unread books is reaching a ridiculous number. So this past month I’ve started reading pretty much every night and only listening to 2 podcasts in the week.

The simple solution would be if I listened to my podcasts during the day as that would let me read and keep up with all the podcasts I listen to, but there are certain things that I just prefer doing right before I go to sleep, like reading or listening to podcasts.

» Read more: From Podcasts to Books

5 August: Dreams

August 4th, 2010
Inception

Sometimes you wonder where the dreams come from.

I don’t have too many dreams, but I thought that I might as well post about the very few I do remember.

Dream 1
For some reason I was doing a training type thing in a supermarket. We would do activities in this huge area walled off with cardboard. Basically, was a boring dreams

Dream 2
All my friends and I had moved into this dorm type complex, and everyone I know adjusted well. People were reading a lot and getting on with things, but I just pissed about with Steven most of the day, rather than doing anything of worth.
Then I had a memory of a prior dream where our school had a hall with a cage in the centre, for wrestling matches, and I saw a few of them. One of them was between John and someone else, but John wore a giant furry, rainbow mask, that was supposed to be some kind of monster.
After that the match ended and the commentators, Susan and Ross Menzies rapped up. Can’t remember one of the ridiculous jokes Ross made.
Then the hall became an assembly hall, and I walked up the seats (which were steps) and joined my friends. We were seeing the school show at Graeme High School, but the hall was. Nothing like it is in reality. Miss Carol came onto stage and announced that a small girl, whom I don’t know had composed tyhe music for the show.
Star Wars began, and twisted into a indie film soundtrack. Then Randy Newman started singing over it. I cracked the joke: “it’s like Star Wars has been mashed up with a Wes Anderson soundtrack, but I don’t think it did sound like that. Then I woke up.

Just remembered there was another dream sequence, I think it was before the second dream, but I’m not sure.

Basically I was in a dorm, but it was based on my Grandparents house and a girl visited whom I developed a liking towards. Her sister was also there, who was mean and not my type. Well, the second sister took a liking to me and I never approached the first girl. It then turned into me wandering around deciding if I should go for it with not my type, mean girl, or attractive nice doesn’t know me girl. I forget if anything else happened after that point, but I don’t think anything did.

Inopportune Spoilers

May 9th, 2010


On 2 occasions programs and films have been ruined by the advertising and regulations held by television channels.

I have tried my hardest to avoid spoilers but if you really don’t want to know anything you can avoid reading on.

The first time this happened I was watching an episode of Lost and right before one of the main characters died. Right before the section of the show where the character died, there was a little information pop-up stating: “May contain scenes of HANGING” (If you want to see the spoiler, highlight the text). Now, I was quite taken aback that this was broadcast right before the character died. Initially you’re not sure what’s going to happen, then this little pop-up comes along and TELLS you HOW the character dies. This was very off-putting as Lost is very dependant on it’s shock factor. Lost’s best quality and probably most off putting quality to new viewers is that it constantly twists and turns and creates new ideas. To have the twist of the story pointed out to you is like opening a birthday present, but being told exactly what’s inside. Yes, you still like what’s inside, but it doesn’t have that “WOW” factor that you get from not knowing what’s to come.

» Read more: Inopportune Spoilers

Getting Into Macro Photography

January 24th, 2010

Common Butterfly

I’ve been looking over most of my Photo A Day project and I’ve realised that I really enjoy taking Macro photographs. The only problem is, I don’t have a macro lens, nor the money to purcahse such a lens.

The art of macro photography is simply to take pictures of the smallest things that are in our daily lives, whether that be insects, as the more popular macro photographs are usually of, or just pictures of water droplets, and at it’s simplest, maybe just pictures of the things you use daily, whether that be a phone, a watch or even a toothbruch (If you would want a picture of that.)

I have a few options to solve this problem: I can either save up money and purchase a 60mm Macro Lens, or I could buy some magnifying filters. The filters are 30x cheaper than the lens, so I’ll probably go with that option for the moment, although I would really love the 60mm f/2.8 USM Macron, mentioned above.

Macro photography seems like it would be a lot of fun, and I already like taking pictures of nature in general, but it’s the tiny facets of nature that really fascinate me, that’s pretty much the whole reason I’m interested in Macro Photography.

Well, if you have any tips or questions on macro photography, I would be more than happy to receive/answer them,
Calum Gilchrist

Some Voice Sampling Songs

January 10th, 2010

Well, this is the first post of the New Year, so I thought I would take it easy and just make a quick post about one of my favourite artists and an album that is very interesting to me. The artist is Pogo, and the album is Symphony of Science.
These artists have one thing in common; they both make songs through Voice Sampling. Voice sampling is simply where you take voice clips and sounds and re-mix them to make music. Pogo makes his music almost entirely from music featured in films or television series, where Symphony of Science mainly uses voice clips from famous scientists, like Carl Sagan, Steven Hawking, David Attenborough, and quite a few others.

The main reason I wanted to make this post is because both artists have released a new song for the New Year, so I felt it appropriate to mention them.

Symphony of Science: The Unbroken Thread

“”The Unbroken Thread” is the fourth video in the Symphony of Science series, and it features David Attenborough, Jane Goodall, and Carl Sagan. The clips used in this installment come from Carl Sagan’s Cosmos, David Attenborough’s Charles Darwin and the Tree of Life, The Life of Mammals, The Living Planet, BBC Life, XVIVO Scientific Animations, IMAX Cosmic Voyage, Jane Goodall’s TED Talk, and a clever Guiness Commercial. The themes present in The Unbroken Thread attempt to explore the wild diversity of life on our planet, the intricacy and origin of its mechanisms, and its close relation to all other life forms. ” – Quote from <a href=”http://symphonyofscience.com”>Symphony of Science Site</a>

Pogo: Upular

Upular is made from voice samples and sound samples from Pixar’s Up.

Well, I hope that you enjoy the videos, if you have any other Voice Sampled songs I would be more than happy to hear about them in the comments,

Back soon,

Calum Gilchrist

Happy Pac-Mas

December 11th, 2009
Pac-Mas Cake

Run Away!

Some of you may know that I ended up doing Cooking for Independent Living at High School. I do not like the subject, but I guess it’s been a little useful in showing the proper methods of doing things.

Now the only reason that I mention it is because I made a PacMan themed cake. Now it’s not the exact way that I wanted it, but I still have some pride for it.

I wanted to basically make the base, cut a slice out of it and then put yellow icing on the top. We didn’t have enough time to do it, so I may do it some other time. Cake decoration is actually kind of fun. You can see the whole cake after the break, but the cake got damaged in transport so it’s not as good as it was when it was fresh.

Update: It actually tasted alright. I’ll probably be able to make a better one if I make another cake.

» Read more: Happy Pac-Mas

AMP Uploadr

November 7th, 2009

Well lately I’ve been working on a simple file uploader, mainly for the mobile platform. I thought that I would take the time to talk about how it’s doing and what I hope to do. In the future I’ll probably get a blog going on Amp to make life easier.

Right now you won’t find much on Amp, in fact you can’t even sign up to the service yet. I will be changing this in the near future. At the moment you can upload the standard image formats and view what files you have uploaded. The UI and look of the site are horrible and need a lot of work, and a few basic features need to be added, but right now I’m quite happy that it works.

File List

One of the first things I’ll need to do is make a page in order to view your uploaded content and share it. I would also like to integrate Twitter into the system, as that’s pretty much the whole point in the site. I am trying to think of interesting ways to seperate my simple file uploader from the big daddies like: Imageshack, Flickr, TwitPic and Photobucket.

Later on I will be adding (hopefully) video and audio support, maybe even support for reading documents you have uploaded on your phone, but it’ll be a while before I start thinking about that. I am thinking about making it open source, but I am unsure whether to do that for a web application, so we’ll see where that goes.

Well, I’ll try to keep you up to date with the development and will mention when sign-ups are open, if you’re interested in helping test or even use the site in its current state.

If you have any suggestions or ideas at all please e-mail me at: Calum@Homelinen.org all suggestions are appreciated.

Calum Gilchrist

In Twilight

October 25th, 2009

The reason there have been no updates to the site’s theme or even any posts is because we’ll be moving web-host next month. Once I sort all of that out expect posting to resume semi-regularly as I want quite a few changes to the site, in content and looks.

October Holidays 2009: Paris

October 11th, 2009

Yeah, I’m going to Paris for about a week tomorrow. I’ll probably be Tweeting quite a bit, or I’ll at least try to. If I have nothing to do I might try and blog from an Internet cafe or something, although I doubt we would be doing that, what with all the historic buildings to visit in Paris. I will come back with a TON of pictures as there’s so much to see in Paris and I’ve never been before so it would be nice to have photographs of the lovely place.

Until I get on a computer again,
Calum Gilchrist

PC MOD: New Fan

September 18th, 2009

New Fan Front

Well I got my new fan yesterday, and I’m really happy with it, but I thought I would take the time to talk about it’s performance and installation for anyone that wishes to know these things.

Performance

Well it works perfectly, I’m incredibly happy with it. The CPU is 20 degrees cooler and it’s a heck-of-lot quieter, I can actually hear the HDD whirring away, it’s so much more quiet than my previous, stock fan.
My only gripe is that my room is freezing now, due to the coolness of my computer. It used to be rather toasty in my room, but now it’s freezing. I guess I’ll just need to put the heating on from now on, or wear a woolly jumper.

Installation

New Fan Right
The installation is a completely different matter. I’m not really good with the hardware side of computing, but I eventually got everything to work.
I had no problems removing the white solid substance from my CPU, that is hopefully dried thermal compound, or Pc World messed up, big time. I bought cleaning solution and it took the stuff off after about 6 applications.
I stupidly removed the thermal paste from the fan, because I had paid for some Arctic Silver 5 thermal compound, only to find that the stuff on my Fan was actually better than the stuff I bought, and it would have been so much easier to just leave it.
Now onto the thing that I had problems with – Actually fitting the fan to the motherboard. My old fan + heatsink was a screw in one and my new one has the little plastic heads that fit into the holes on the motherboard. (I know how that sounds…) I spent about 2 hours trying to fit the plastic heads into the threads of the screw holders (Don’t the term I should be using). Eventually I figured out the problem and removed the whole motherboard and removed the little Intel screw holder thing. Then I put the motherboard back onto the case and attempted to try and put the cables back. I forgot where half of them went and it was difficult to fit the last few plugs as there were big chunky cables all over the place – actually used a a pair of tweezers to get some of the plugs in.
But after that, it worked first time and it’s working perfectly now. I don’t know if the thermal paste is on it correctly, but the CPU hasn’t melted yet, so it should be fine.

Next for Calum’s PCMOD: Buying and installing a Soundcard – Because my onboard one is dying.

Calum Gilchrist