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. It's relatively easy to dabble about in, rapidly getting much more difficult, but I think for people that know scripting it would be relatively easy. I've gone through the intro tutorial, which is more like a showcase really, making up a ready-designed game out of prepared components('here's one I made earlier'),which has a little animated alien character wandering around collecting things. It's very impressive, for the simplicity of the system.

June 2010
Clarissa Oakes
I've been having a run on Patrick O'Brian's naval novels, mainly because I got a whole bunch from the car boot sale:
The Letter of Marque
Treason's Harbour
The Ionian Mission
The Fortune of War
Desolation Island
HMS Surprise

14 March. Some sunshine at last. A few stalls venture outside. New stalls: nothing stood out. Gone: the second fruit and veg stall has given up. The laptops and the computer bits have gone, and there's virtually no computer stuff at all, just a few random bits. The cooker and fridge stall has disappeared again. Lots of: illuminated usb leads. Seemed to be on every other stall. Piles of jeans. I bought: jeans, wireless mouse, sweatshirt. People talking about going 'on the fields' now. I must find out where the nearest 'field' is.

Stalls are at about half strength still. The car boot hasn't really recovered from the work carried out on the warehouse last year, when insulation material filled half of it and some of the main sellers were dislodged, never to come back. Not sure what it all gained - it doesn't seem any warmer. There were some second-hand appliances - cookers and fridges, which is unusual. A lot of those kids educational games that include a magnifying glass or a circuit board. Also a lot of large soft toys in need of a wash - several Eeyores looking suitably morose.

Some snow on the ground, but not enough to stop trade. Pretty busy today, families seemed to be out shopping for toys (perhaps to replace the Christmas presents that have now broken/got lost/got boring). Most of the usuals present and correct, and a few people having clearouts. Registering on the car boot radar as they fade from cultural view: Crocs, stainless steel kettles, bags of golf clubs (probably some unpopular style). A lot of pewter style steel drinking mugs. Small copper vases of indeterminate use. Action Men: lots and lots of Action Men.

17 Jan 2010. Getting busier again now - the first couple of weeks after Christmas were very cold and stalls were few. This week a couple of tables even managed to set up outside the main hall (if you can call the bleak and unheated warehouse that). A lot of the usuals still aren't back yet, and the main offerings seemed to be clothes and toys. Not much in the way of technology, though a small mobile phone stall has crept in. One dirty cream ancient-looking pc. One regular stallholder even had a packing-up sale on. The veg stall is still there, giving it a bit of a market feel.

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.

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. An rejected 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, but I can't imagine anyone much is buying them now. In a box of vinyl, a huge Japan collection.

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.