March 19, 2006 on 11:29 pm | In Madness | 2 Comments

I’ve had a busy weekend, but a good one! I’ve made Bobble a Light Box out of PVC tubing which should help in doing photography in our light-starved flat.

Best buy was some dead cheap lights from homebase – only £4 each, when combined with some 60W Daylight bulbs at £1.80 each we now have a couple of very cheap, very handy “studio lights”.

A final cheap and fun construction was a pinhole ‘lens’ for Bobble’s digital camera. Made out of a £3 body cap, some tin foil an a ‘spare’ – well mostly – 1A filter, it’ll be great fun! Hopefully that will get tried out properly next weekend, so far I have a very blurry picture of a teapot that shows up dust on the image sensor – oops – but it’s incredible that a simple tiny hole works so well!

Updated: Here are some pictures taken by Bobble with the light tent yesterday.

March 7, 2006 on 1:49 pm | In Madness | 7 Comments

Ever get the feeling?

So, at the weekend the ‘funny noise’ that kept coming from Bobble’s Powerbook was revealed as being not the fan, but in fact the hard drive tearing itself to shreds (erk). However, help is at hand as we did have a recent back-up and a new HD has now arrived. Tonight I have the fun job of following the somewhat complicated instructions to replace it.

Helpful diagram:

plus

= Happy Bobble!

Also, the internet broke this morning – well, really our ISP broke the internet, which was rather annoying. Bobble reports that it has come back now and they’ve admitted it was all their fault was well (this is plus.net by the way).

So, fingers crossed everything will be back to normal tonight. Phew!