Micks Distractions

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I’ve been get­ting into Facebook’s Mob Wars of late. Trou­ble is… it’s so damn addic­tive. Here’s a cou­ple of point­ers for new­bies that I’ve dis­cov­ered.
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I’ve been suf­fer­ing dizzy attacks for the last ten years. I decided to do some­thing about it when I suf­fered some pretty bad ones just recently. I was ordered to have a full head CT scan by my Doc. Of course I had to ask for the images on CD.
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I have a lot of hard­ware run­ning 24x7 — PCs, routers, switches, fire­walls, SAN, and it’s all con­tained within a cup­board where I stick it all. It’s pretty cool, in that it’s a dust free envi­ron­ment, and keeps the noise at bay, which is my intent. It’s basi­cally a small con­tained com­puter room. What’s not cool about it, is that it isn’t.
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Laser pro­jec­tors have been around for a while. You would see them at dis­cos, (show­ing my age there), along with fog machines, cre­at­ing ambi­ence. More recently com­pa­nies have been try­ing to make into some­thing more use­ful than mere ambi­ence, but is there any real prac­ti­cal use for them?

What would you say to a device that can project a 2048x1280 screen on
any sur­face, infi­nite focus, no mov­ing parts, that con­sumes only 1.5W
of power, and is the size of a matchbox?

This device seems to be such a device. If it was a typ­i­cal 1st April day post, then I would have casu­ally laughed and moved on. But if this device does what it promises, then laser pro­jec­tors will be the demise of these bulky LCD screens, (LOL).

If only it wasn’t announced a year ago.…. Where is it now?

Read on for more.….

Another 360 pano of the old house at the pool area. Pretty bor­ing, but this was taken with the DSC-F828. No pano head was used, so par­al­lax error is par­tic­u­larly notice­able. Look straight down and you’ll really see the errors.

Need to build a pano head now.
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One of the things I enjoy see­ing is big engi­neer­ing. That is: Engi­neer­ing on a big scale. I had the good for­tune to be offered a guided tour of a cable lay­ing ship. Which is a ship that lays cables, (fun­nily enough).

Read on.
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A more recent pano of our house taken with a rented Sony DSC-F828. I also pro­duced a full 360 pano with it. See below.
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A cou­ple of old misc panos. of fam­ily houses.
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I’ve gone and stitched together a whole bunch of pho­tos that I took when in NZ a year ago. They were taken with an El’ Cheapo 3MP cam­era, so they’re pretty fuzzy. Also, it was set to auto every­thing so the bal­ance is way out. One of these days I’ll get a proper cam­era and redo these panos prop­erly.
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