Transformers tomorrow! (Actually, today in fact since it's past midnight... I *really* must go to bed now). Quite excited, my front room is full of cardboard boxes which I really hope will fit into my car. But I haven't packed up my computers yet - ran out of time.

Was out this evening for a friend's stag night. Went 10 pin bowling - was very pleased with my first game of 120 (including a stonking 8-split -> spare) but in the second game I bowled a rather more humdrum 78. Was all in all a very good evening.

Quartz Light User Instruction

Brief Introduction

Quartz light is one of most popular use lights in the studio. Based on 3200K color temperature, this quartz light can offer a suitable continuous lighting for your shooting. The light system is improved time after time. The design has over-heat protection of circuit and auto-cooling function. The light is not only infinitely variable adjusting in power but also the angle of irradiation is large. Under the light's good protection, it has long service life. It can connect all kinds of accessories, like soft boxes. This quartz light will provide high-quality continuous lighting for TV video shooting, advertising photography, traditional film photography, digital photography and so on.

Operation

1. Insert two pins of light bulb into the front base of your quartz light. Make sure two supporting clamps are firmly holding the bulb. Don't touch the quartz made envelope with bare hands.
2. Turn on on/off switch. The built-in fan cooler will automatically turn on and blow air inside out.
3. Place the light accessories (ie. reflectors, soft boxes, barn doors etc.) in front of your quartz light.

Note

1. When assembling and disassembling the quartz light, don't touch the light with your hand directly as the sweat will damage the bulb and affect service life of quartz light.
2. Don't tough light cover in use so as to avoid burning. Don't move the light in use for avoiding the damage by shaking the light.
3. When you use it, you should turn on the fan set, and then adjust the brightness of quartz light. When you want to shut down the light, pIs. adjust the brightness to the least. After five minutes, you close down the fan set. When the light is used 10 to 20 minutes, you'd better adjust the brightness of light to the least and make the light to have a rest.
4. Don't match flammable honeycomb to the best of your abilities. If necessary, you may consider taking off the middle cloth inside soft box in order to avoid the danger.

So, did anybody watch the Torchwood miniseries then?
( really minor spoilers )
Not for the first time, I'm left not entirely certain why I bothered to watch it.

Uh oh.

SPV are the parent company of record labels InsideOut and SuperBall, who between them publish about 80% of the music I'm buying these days...

Here's an interesting meme via hmmm_tea,

Pick a musical artist whose discography you know fairly well. Using only their song titles, try to answer these questions. Try not to repeat a song title.

Pick your artist: Marillion

( Read more... )

Oh dear. My pet vacuum cleaner managed to find a cotton reel:

rebifurcation
noun the act of bifurcating a second time, occurring some time after the bifurcated parts had been carefully joined together.

I used this in an email at work today, because I wanted to avoid the rebifurcation of some source code that had been branched off the trunk in our svn repository. I knew it wasn't a real word because of the squiggly red line, but everybody knew what I meant.

It wasn't until later, when someone pointed out that google returns only 22 unique pages for this search term (and 14 of those are in French), that I realized just how neologismy it was.

Oh hang on...

neologismy
adj. having the properties of a neologism.



[EDIT: typo]

Well -- it was no worse than anything in season seven...

Continued from http://shadowphiar.livejournal.com/61524.html...

It's working! It's working!
(well, mostly...)



Installing Leopard was surprisingly little trouble (once I had got the efi-x plugged in properly, which took a couple of attempts. Even with the little extension cable they give you, it's very fiddly to reach that corner of the motherboard, so at first it wasn't quite in far enough and didn't do anything).

The things I expected trouble with (e.g., system sleep, updating graphics drivers etc.) have been no problem at all. Instead, I get Time Machine falling over when selecting a local SATA hard disk as the backup volume, because "the built-in network interface could not be found". (Don't be silly, of course it can - it's working perfectly and I'm posting through it right now!). Allegedly this can be fixed buy buying a PCI network card... (or maybe a future efi-x firmware update) (or maybe it will only work on motherboards with two network connections -- it's a bit difficult to tell when your only official source of information is also filled with random people posting questions and unreliable opinions).

And then there's all the whole business with AHCI (new command protocol for SATA hard disks). One the efi-x forum there's very clear guidance that AHCI should be turned on in the BIOS after installation of the OS. What it doesn't say, is that doing so will prevent DVD burners from being seen! Aha - I think - there are two SATA controllers on this motherboard (southbridge has six channels, and a separate chip has other two) and they can have AHCI turned on and off separately. So I'll put one of them into legacy mode and run the DVD drive off that? No - because the separate SATA chip doesn't work with efi-x.

This must be some strange new usage of the words, "all features of these motherboards are supported", of which I was not previously aware.

It took a good deal of searching and browsing on their forum to discover that last bit of vital information! I've been unimpressed with efi-x's documentation and support in general. Anyway - in benchmarks I've been barely able to tell the difference between AHCI on or off, so I'm leaving it off in order to get the benefit of a functional DVD drive!

In short, it's been a bit of a faff (and that's not over yet). However, it was at least mostly quite interesting faff, and considering that to buy a machine from Apple with as high specifications as this would cost nearly a thousand pounds more than I paid - I consider it a few evenings well spent. While I like Apple hardware, the latest round of Apple desktop upgrades was insipid at best, and prices went up about 40% across the board. Perviously I've been willing to pay a premium for premium-quality kit. But not so much that it makes me feel like a chump for having done so.

I am posting this from a new computer what I have put together myself from components...

I'm quite relieved that it seems to be working, to be honest. As it's the first one I've done, I've paced it quite slowly and it's taken a few evenings to do - I would have finished yesterday, but I discovered one of the power leads from the PSU was about half an inch too short to reach the right place on the motherboard (unless I were to drill a hole through the middle of the graphics card) so that had to wait until after work today when a trip to Maplin supplied me with an extension cable.

Turning it on for the first time was very underwhelming... Nothing went bang, but it didn't exactly work either. It was randomly hanging in the middle of Kubuntu live-CD boot and sometimes even in the BIOS menus, which seemed extremely ominous. Fortunately Kubuntu provides a memcheck utility from the CD boot menu, so I ran that for a while and found a lot of memory errors.

After taking one module out, and testing one at a time in various slots (to rule out problems with the motherboard or cpu itself), I'm reasonably convinced that one of the DIMMs is bad... which is not unheard of, although it's the first time that I've had problems with anything from Crucial. The other one passes memcheck at 100% and seems to be behaving stably enough now. Fortunately I can keep using the computer with (a mere!) 2GB of RAM until a replacement arrives, which is an order of magnitude more convenient than sending back the cpu or the motherboard.

And so there you have it. Kubuntu is installed on one HD, with another ready and waiting for the inevitable fun and games which will ensue with efi-x and Leopard. But that is a job for tomorrow...

Incidentally, I'm a bit unimpressed that the case manufacture has described no less than three things which are to be done using "the special screws provided" - without ever making attempt to distinguish between the seven-or-so distinct types of screw which came in a little plastic bag in the case. Also, minus 5 points to Kubuntu, whose CD boot menu only talks to PS/2 keyboards, so I had to dig one out of the loft before I could drive it...