poppy alexander change and decay in all around I see

I've recently come across Unity3D - a 3d games development kit that outputs to browser and is free if you're not a big company. I think for people that know scripting it would be relatively easy. The intro tutorial has a little animated alien character wandering around collecting things. It's very impressive. Easy to embed as well. You do need the plugin to see it, but it's not massive. I look forward to playing more with this. Sadly no Linux port yet for the plugin. http://unity3d.com/

August 2010

The City and the City - China Mieville

8/08/2010 Carpenters LPs

2 kneelie chairs in the outside bit. More child car seats. Seemed to be a lot of tables with jumble style heaped clothes, suddenly. A few bicycles. Massive collection of Carpenters LPs. I resisted the kneelie chairs (I already have one) and got: 4 small wine glasses and some exercise trousers.

1/08/2010 Mouth Organs

The site and gallery are no longer online via home server, they've been moved to a host - Vidahost. It seemed a bit ungreen to keep the home pc on all the time, and it passes over the headache of making sure it keeps working. So far everything seems reasonably straightforward, took a while to migrate the Drupal sites and the embedded Galleries over. Basically, used Cpanel/fantastico to install new versions, ftp'd over the files, used PhpMyAdmin to export and import the databases, then tweaked config files, settings.

We visited Calke on the way back up North a few weeks ago, stopping off the A50. Lingering taste of weirdness. You go in through a fairly normal country house hall, maybe a few more stuffed trophy heads on the walls than usual. Mild eccentricity in the the 'cartoon room' where someone in the C18th pasted humorous prints all over the walls and on to a fairly conventional dining room, though apparently this was hardly used and has been spruced up by the Trust, and through to a massive room, formerly the main hall, completely stuffed with furniture and collected things.

I've been trying for a while to get a cheap system set up to transfer some old college videos from svhs to dvd. I've gradually accumulated bits and pieces including a VideOh! PCI card, which I put in my Windows pc. The card worked, but the software it would work with was very limited. I read it would work with Linux, so I've bought a better motherboard (ASUS P4B533-VM) for the Linux pc (still only 1.8 MHz, but I'm hoping to get a cheap chip to get it up to 2.4 or 2.8, the Asus sute has a list of compatibles) and I've updated my Ubuntu to version 10.

The 1981 John Carpenter film with Kurt Russell. Class on a no-effects-to-speak-of budget. The rather stupid premise (Manhattan Island has become a giant prison which the President accidentally crash-lands in) gains such a lot of atmosphere from its minimal treatment that it becomes something really strange. It's all filmed at night, in urban dereliction just dressed with a bit of burning rubbish and the odd police helicopter, Carpenter's own music sounds as if its been played on an old-style synthesiser with one finger .. and it is creepy, as well as funny.

Louis de Bernieres' 'Red Dog'. The dog, in 50s Australia, becomes a local character, hitches rides, lives its own life, becomes a metaphor for rugged independance among small outback communities, gets poisoned when newcomers start changing things. Reminds me of another metaphorical tale, 'The Tree' by Grey Owl, relating the passing of the American Indian way of life as seen by a tree over a couple of hundred years.

2009-11-15 Furby

A bit quieter this week, or maybe the rush is just getting earlier in the morning and I missed it. Item of the week: a set of child's upper body armour for wearing on one of those mini motorbikes, all overlapping plates like a samurai or Mad Max biker. Seemed to be quite a few crash helmets and inline skates about. A Furby, once the must-have Christmas toy. Lots of knitted South American style earflap hats with wool plaits. Still a lot of actual videos for sale. In a box of vinyl, a huge Japan collection.

2009-11-11 Christmas Shopping

2009-11-07 Winding down for winter

Not much going on now. Picked a couple of smallish cabbage and some spinach, couple of leeks. Sprouts on the way. garlic and most of the autumn sown onions are now in. Got some compost to start off the broad beans, sweet peas.

Some of the onion sets coming up are getting nibbled by rabbits: put one bed of onions under a plastic cover to see if it helps. The downside is that it protects the slugs from the birds.

About two thirds of the pruning done on the raspberries, but the gooseberries still to do.