They’re both HDR (High Dynamic Range) and were produced from three shots with varying exposures (short/medium/long). This allows the detail of bright spots to be amalgamated with the detail on dark areas obtained through the longer exposure, and it’s pretty suited to sunsets.

There are more shots - just click the images above to be taken to Flickr.

I also took my day 41 today, for today’s Flickr Group Roulette theme of ‘My Favourite Word’ (or a word you like etc.). I went for ‘Satisfied’ written on the envelope of a bill:

Day 36, for today’s FGR theme - ‘Fun with Paper’ is titled ‘New Hat’. Meh - I guess I’m not feeling inspired this week.

I was looking at the Canon EOS 50D earlier. I don’t want one and there’s nothing you can say that will change my mind. Argh!

And here’s pictures of one of the offending glasses:

Day 34 is not so interesting, but Day 33 shows my wine - now in it’s bag ready for consumption. I’ve tried some and it isn’t abysmal - but it’s tasting sweet and more like a white, so I may chill before drinking.

Nothing much exciting has happened lately - Friday I went out for drinks and curry - quite a lot of drinks in fact, so I’ve had a lazy weekend. Tonight I played footy with workmates and really enjoyed it - playing again on Thursday - so definitely getting a bit of exercise. Tomorrow is the pub quiz, but I may go swimming before hand. Maybe. Possibly. Probably not.

Oh, and in other news, I’ve just bought Filter’s last album ‘Anthems For The Damned’ which I’m really liking. My favourite is probably “What’s Next”. Click through for Anthems for the Damned on iTunes (mis-titled as Soldiers of Misfortune for some reason).

And then my last themed on before that, for day 24 - ‘Twirl’.

In other news, this evening I’ve had Salmon and new potatoes for tea.  Now, I found a bone in the salmon, which was advertised as ‘boneless’.  I wonder whether I’ve been mis-soled?  Either that or I picked up the wrong packet because it was in the wrong plaice…

As you may recall, I signed up for the Boxee Alpha a few weeks ago; well, this week I finally got my invite and proceeded to set up a USB patchstick to install the launcher for Boxee. What I didn’t know at the time of sign-up is that the patchstick also installed an XBMC option. Installation itself was pretty simple, using the software and guide provided at the following page: ATVUSB Creator

A bit of advice; once you’ve completed this process go to ‘Update’ and update the XBMC/Boxee launcher application first - as that will allow you to download the latest versions of both Boxee and XBMC.

To use Boxee you’ve got to have a login; which means being accepted on to the alpha. Go to the Boxee website to sign-up. The good news of course is that if you just want to use XBMC no sign-up is necessary, and while the AppleTV version is in Beta, it’s far more developed than Boxee. That said the Boxee concept is far more appealing.

First impressions of Boxee

Well, for starters I quite like the look of the interface, though I do find it’s a little slow to respond to inputs from the AppleTV remote, but that’s a minor niggle.

It looks like it’s got a lot of promise - it includes plugins that talk to Last.fm, so you can play music from that, or share details of what you’ve listened to from your own collections via Last.fm. It comes with access to a number of streaming services - though the only one I’ve seriously looked at is Comedy Central - where I’ve watched a bit of Drawn Together and Futurama.

Boxee is actually based on XBMC, so the plug-ins for that are supposed to work on Boxee. The one that really appeals to me, however, doesn’t work - the BBC iPlayer plugin.

Boxee is a lot nicer in terms of indexing content than XBMC - probably more along the lines of Plex (another fork off from XBMC, specific to Leopard; hence why there’s no AppleTV version - the version of OS X on the AppleTV is based on Tiger). I did have initial problems with it remembering what it had indexed - but today I updated again and it’s been happier since - though that update did disable the remote in XBMC, until I updated XBMC again.

I suppose really it’s not genuinely ‘first impressions’. I’ve known about XBMC for years (on it’s home, of course, the original X-Box) and used it as a few friends have it. I’m not a big fan of the interface - it does strike me as rather clunky and it’s not the friendliest thing to use in terms of finding content. Boxee definitely looks far more promising on that front.

That said, it is quicker responding to remote inputs and it’s clearly a lot more developed than the alpha Boxee. I’ve tested a few MKVs on both Boxee and XBMC - and juttered while they and the sound went horribly out-of-sync on Boxee, XBMC played them fine on the AppleTV.

I also had considerably more success with the iPlayer plug-in on XBMC; though it does only run in a window and I suspect it’s only accessing the lower (iPhone) quality version of content. If I could get it full screen that would be a major win. I’ve also downloaded and installed the ITV Catch-up plugin, but I’ve yet to play with that (is there actually anything worth watching on ITV? You’re not allowed to answer X-Factor; keep that hideous vice to yourselves! ). One point on the iPlayer plugin is that I found settings on Boxee to change to the Wii source - not sure where that would be located on XBMC, as perhaps that will be the higher quality streams the Beeb now makes available.

I hate Samba on OS X

A bit problem I encountered was Mac OS X’s implementation of Samba shares; for some reason beyond my comprehension it doesn’t allow the sharing of external drives. I have a 500GB external drive attached via Firewire 800 that contains all my media and unfortunately I can’t access it via SMB from XBMC or Boxee. On XBMC there is the option of FTP access, which may well solve this problem. Boxee however appears to be limited to SMB only. I’ve been in to terminal and attempted to trick OS X in to thinking the external drive is just a normal drive by playing with smb.conf - no joy. Perhaps more digging will come up with a more promising option - but I’m just not too keen on having to mess about.

Image via Wikipedia

A few days ago in work I was in the toilet when I considered that I wasn’t satisfied with Darth Vadar’s statement that “The ability to destroy a planet is insignificant when compared to the power of the Force.” My thinking was that the Death Star’s purpose was to blow up planets, and throughout the three Star Wars films we don’t see the Force contributing to anything that compares to the Death Star destroying Alderaan. Having raised the question, I was unhappy that I really didn’t have an answer to satisfy me… until, that was, one of my colleagues reminded me of Googlefight.com. Having plugged in ‘force’ and ‘death star’ I was delighted to discover that Vadar was actually correct; with the Force at 375,000,000 results versus the Death Star’s 16,900,000 results it is clear that the ability to destroy a planet is insignificant when compared to the Force. So, there you go.

On the subject of this post, I also plugged in ‘Terran’ and ‘Martian’. Martians won, naturally. However, replace ‘Terran’ with ‘Bacteria’ and you discover that the Martians don’t have what it takes to go up against our microscopic allies. And sticking with that theme, I’ve now booked tickets for myself and friends to go and see the 30th Anniversary production of Jeff Wayne’s War of the Worlds at the Manchester M.E.N. Arena in June next year.

And here’s one of just fireworks. Click it to go to Flickr and see the rest.

I had to improvise for oil and for straw. Thanks James for the loan of the machine gun.

I’ve joined the ‘Flickr Group Roulette’ which sets a theme for photo’s every day, which can help with ideas for self-portraits. Todays theme was ‘Story Telling Photo’s’.

I have posted day 13 - the cats in a stand-off over the USB cable for one of my PS3 remotes.

Day 14 could have been a bit more like what it sort of pays homage to if I had the patience - which I do lack when ill. Title ‘Argh’.

In other, more interesting, news; my bro’ and wife are celebrating the birth of their third child, and second boy, John; born at midnight on Sunday. He was a big lad too - 9lb and 4oz. Maff is going to have a fight on his hands for seconds on the left over pudding in a few years!

This is my day 12 picture for the 365 day project.

In other news, I’m currently at Kate and Dave’s, house/cat sitting while they’re off gallivanting in Paris for the weekend.