• Monty On The Run
• Crazy Comets
• Attack of the Mutant Camels (weird!)
• Hovver Bovver (brilliantly English)
• Outrun
• Pod — I’m sure that’s what it was called but can’t find any reference to it anywhere. Little man with big feet who had to jump across streams and walls and things.  If he fell in he would turn white, grow angel wings, and fly up to heaven while music played.  And I think maybe there a Welsh connection?
• Paperboy
• Nebulus
• International Karate+
• Little Computer People
• Winter Games
• Toy Bizarre
• Ghostbusters
• Falcon Patrol
• Blade Runner
• There was some kind of football game, don’t remember what it was called.  Actually I think the copy I had was translated into German… looking around it must have been a version of Emlyn Hughes International Soccer.
• Cauldron
• Booty was the first one I had, a pirate treasure platform game with colour-coded keys and doors.  At the time I had it plugged into a black and white TV set so that made it a bit more challenging!
• Haunted Mansion or something with a similar name.  Don’t remember a lot about it except that it was quite a simple game, but enjoyable.
• Orpheus and the Underworld (but don’t remember much about it)

It leads to a slowing down of the entire queue because what could easily be a simple “I’d like to post this please” into very lengthy discussion on the merits of various postage services, with double-checks of postcodes, prices, weights and so on.  I saw someone from the queue today phone up their friend to check the address was correct on their parcel while they were at the desk.

Is there a point at which things start moving more efficiently because people aren’t expecting a long wait in the queue next time?  Someone should find out.

This is a font called Spranq Eco Sans, based on Vera Sans.  The idea is that the little circular holes in the lines making up the letters can save up to 20% of the ink used for printing it out.

I think the idea is to get people to think about how much ink they use, rather than to get everyone to switch over to this font.

Found via EcoGeek.

1. Frame-by-frame conversion, where each frame is scanned separately and the frame rate adjusted by occasionally doubling frames.  This seems to be quite expensive!
2. Filming a projected image.  This sort of conversion is done at (for example) Aarchive.  This is much cheaper of course and there is a shop within walking distance that can convert it like this, so that’s most likely what we’ll do.

Anyone have positive/negative experiences about either method?

On the card are the following pieces of information:

• Some kind of parcel ID number
• The time
• The date
• My name
• The first line of my address
• The type of item (checked box)
• The number of items (there are several this time)
• A check in the box saying it’s too big for the letterbox
• The photo ID serial card number of the postman
• A check in the box telling me to pick them up from the delivery office
• The date I should pick them up

I coudn’t write it all in less than 27 seconds.  Surely it would have been quicker to just ring the bell?

This seems to be the wrong message.  There are plenty of things wrong with Chip and PIN, but mostly it isn’t an intentional lowering of security. (In fact it mostly seems to be about shifting liability onto the consumer).  But this logo doesn’t even seem to be trying to get it right.

Now, I’m no artist, so if you are disturbed by unnatural-looking hands, look away now.

Anyway, here’s the result:

I was asked whether this photo could be used for the top banner of a community web site, so I’ve adjusted the tone of the right-most section of the panoramic to make the seam a bit less visible, and the end result can be seen at the Bournemouth Matters web site.

This was one of my first attempts at using hugin.  Another attempt didn’t work so well at all.  I’d started out having already taken some photos and just hoping that they might overlap!

Having recently purchased a new camera, a Fuji Finepix S8000fd with 8Mpixels & a SuperMacro facility focusing down to 1cm (0.4″). I placed a slide on a small lightbox and held the camera approximately this distance in front of the lens and produced a fair digitized copy. Even the facial detection system works in this copy mode!
To eliminated camera shake and make the copying easier I then designed and manufactured a simple rig to attach the camera to and position the slide to be copied at the correct distance cover the entire film area, negating any need to crop the digitized image as the camera has a 3:2 quality setting. I have used this rig with both a lightbox and with a white diffuser positioned behind the slide using either the sun or a 60watt lamp as the light source.
The beauty of this rig is that it doesn’t require a steady hand (older people again) or the use of a tripod.

Clive has kindly given me permission to publish his design here, along with some pictures.  Thanks Clive!

On the left here you can see the rig with a camera attached and a slide in place.  Note that the design is specific to this model of camera and lens.  For other models, the length of the rig may need to be different to take into account the width of the camera and the minimum focusing distance of the lens.

On the right is the rig on its own, with the camera fixing mount (screw thread) visible.

Below is the design in PDF format.

I’m a little surprised, to say the least.  Anyone can make an ID card with their photo on it, and if all someone needs to do to gain trust is find out the name of a single employee of a very large company something’s not right!

So I was thinking, what secret do I and the utility company share already?  How about my account number with them?  I never throw bills away so that seems reasonably secure, although I don’t know how securely they treat it themselves.

If that was alright to use as a password, wouldn’t they have suggested asking callers for that when I was on the phone to them trying to set up a password?  What am I missing?

Has anyone else tried setting up a password like that?