Archive for June, 2003

Useful Link for Nikon 4500 Manual Focussing…

Wednesday, June 25th, 2003

Nikon 4500 Manual Focus Calibration Chart & Depth of Field
is a link to a very nice chart to help with manual focussing on the Nikon 4500. It’s hard to do normally because there isn’t a numerical distance displayed on the screen while focussing. This should definitely help, as sometimes the auto focussing of the camera seems quite quirky.

Je suis en vacance!

Saturday, June 21st, 2003

Je suis en vacance au Paris, mais je vais aller chez moi souvent. A toute a l’heure!

P.S. You can get your slashdot fix for 1 euro an hour at the cyber cafe near
the Jardin du Luxembourg.

Experiments with Webware

Friday, June 13th, 2003

I’ve toyed with the idea of writing my own weblog, and toward that end have been playing a bit with Python and the Webware application framework. It has some nice ideas, and I’m slowly making some progress. Witness the following for an (often in flux) example.

When in Crete, do as the other Cretins do…

Tuesday, June 10th, 2003

It’s amazing how sometimes surfing leads you to interesting ideas that you’ve never had before. Like the mention of slashdot of pykrete, a combination of 14% wood pulp and water, which is frozen together to make blocks. During WWII, the British had a bold plan to build aircraft carriers several thousand feet long and capable of carrying 200 Spitfires and long range bombers.

Anyway, I found this to be interesting, but of no real practical use.

Surprisingly though, while perusing comp.graphics.rendering.raytracing, somebody mentioned that they were experimenting with padobe. What’s padobe? A form of
adobe that utilizes waste paper. It turns out that people are making various
slurries of water, paper, and cement and using them as inexpensive building
materials for home construction. I’ve been interested in alternative home building techniques for a while, but hadn’t heard of this construction technique.
I rather like the idea of do-it-yourself home construction using renewable and/or
waste materials, and some of the resulting homes are pretty amazing.
Nifty stuff. If you start at papercrete.com, you’ll get some ideas.