Homelinen.org

Portal 2

Ross — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 22:01:24 +0000

Valve have recently announced Portal 2, the sequal to the original Portal – a game originally included by valve in the Orange Box.

To describe Portal breifly, it is a short game based on the Source engine (very much like Team Fortress 2 etc) where the objective is to complete various puzzles, with the aid of your Portal Gun. This is a gun that can open two portals (Blue and Orange) so that you can cross large voids, climb large gaps, and many other physical challenges. Portal is also where the phrase “The cake is a lie” came from (just incase anyone did not know where it originated from).

Personally, I am looking forward to Portal 2, as I enjoyed the short, but fun original. I’m also looking forward to having the content in Garrys Mod, a popular Source mod that I have been addicted to of late. Soon I shall hopefully have a website up for my Garrys Mod community, and I shall be making a post about that in the forseeable future.

To briefly conclude, Portal 2 is due for release some time later this year (most likely via Steam), and even although we do not have much information as yet, basing on my oppinion of the original game, I look forward to its apperance for both Garrys Mod content and for the sheer fun of the game itsself.

Ross Imlach

Getting Into Macro Photography

Calum — Sun, 24 Jan 2010 19:32:27 +0000

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

Calum — Sun, 10 Jan 2010 02:26:30 +0000

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 Symphony of Science Site

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

…And I says to Maybel I says…

Ross — Sun, 20 Dec 2009 14:45:58 +0000

I hope everyone has purchased their copy of Killing In The Name – Rage Against The Machine in attempt to beat the X Factor to number 1!

Now that homelinen has moved home (if you pardon the little joke), hopefully it’ll be faster to load and so on. As you probably know, I’m now hosting the site for Calum, and some of his other domains. If you would like me to host you a site or something, then please email me on ross@imlach.info or ross@homelinen.org and I’ll get back to you as soon as I can. Since I’m hosting it now, I think I have the right to do this:

HOSTED BY ROSS IMLACH

I’ll speak to Calum about putting a banner somewhere on the page.. I’d like some credit you know!

Anyways, thats my little post for the time being.

Ross

Happy Pac-Mas

Calum — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 23:51:28 +0000

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.

I have yet to taste the cake, and I’ll feel bad destroying my creation, but I do hope that it tastes good.

Another photo:

Writing was completely ruined by the bag it was in.

FalkirkLUG

Ross — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 21:16:56 +0000

Well, tonight was my (and Calum’s) second FalkirkLUG meeting. We did flash talks this evening, which are basically small 5 minute(ish) talks about a chosen subject. I’m going to assume Calum will do a post about his talk, however.

I did my talk on bash (Bourne Again Shell), which is the default linux/unix shell. If you are a Linux user, then you are probably familiar with bash, or the terminal as a whole as it is very useful (it is also a lot more powerful than the windows command prompt). If you would like more info on this, just check out the Wikipedia page or something, because quite frankly, its too much effort to type it all out!

Well, if you are a Linux user in the Falkirk area, I strongly suggest you join FalkirkLUG. All the necessary info is on the page that the image on the right links to.

All in all, I think I have advertised enough.. So yeah.. Linux + FalkirkLUG are awesome.

Ross

AMP Uploadr

Calum — Sat, 07 Nov 2009 11:06:51 +0000

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.

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

Calum — Sun, 25 Oct 2009 13:13:48 +0000

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

Calum — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 12:34:35 +0000

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

Scientology

Omega — Wed, 30 Sep 2009 19:00:22 +0000

PC MOD: New Fan

Calum — Fri, 18 Sep 2009 16:15:18 +0000

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

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

Current Goings On

Calum — Sat, 12 Sep 2009 13:22:01 +0000

Well, I just wanted to say that I’ve started working on the new Homelinen.org and you can find it here. I’ve got a lot of thoughts on how homelinen should be presented in the future but I’m not sure what to do with the design. Any input and comments would be most appreciated.

I just want to give a big thanks to Grangemouth Rugby Club for linking to my Flickr and giving me the opportunity to do photography for them.

I’ll try and keep this blog going as I’m not going to blog on homelinen until someone else posts or I put the new design up. We’ll see which one happens first. I would really like to get back into blogging for homelinen but no one else posts very frequently and I feel that myself and Steven are trying to keep the thing afloat ourselves. I don’t think I’ll change the format of homelinen, in fact I think I’d be more open to personal blogs and links to interesting things the writers find on the Internet, whether it be a YouTube video or even a tutorial.

I will be changing web host at some point so this site might be down for a few days at some point and I’ll be sure to keep you up to date with the progress of that and if it helps in anyway. I’m considering Fat Cow as my web host, but I’m not sure if I’m ready to make the transition just yet. I do hope that they are faster than my current host as that’s the main reason that I’m considering the move.

Just bought a new fan and some thermal compound, hopefully they’ll arrive by Monday of next week as I’ve finally grown tired of the noise and heat that my computer makes. It really shouldn’t be this loud or hot. This is yet another thing that I’ll keep you posted on, either here or on homelinen.org.

Just thought I’d give a shout out to my friends over at: Asbo, which is a social networking project by Ross Imlach and Eden Graham. It’s coming along quite quickly and Ross has made a lot of progress over the past few weeks of development, hopefully it will continue to develop at this rate.

Well that should just about do it for now,
Calum Gilchrist