Snap365
by Jon on Jan.16, 2010, under General, Photography
On January 1st 2010 I started a new project, Snap365.
The idea of Snap365 is simple. Take a photograph every day for a year. The only rule I’ve given myself is that the photo for each day must be taken on that day. No taking 7 pictures on a Sunday and chilling out for a week.
I will try to upload the pictures the same day I take them, but this may not always be possible.
The inspiration for Snap365 came from my desire to buy a new lens. For a long time I’d wanted to buy Nikon’s 18-200mm lens with built-in vibration reduction. The lens costs approx. £580 so it’s not a purchase to be taken without consideration. I had put off buying it for about a year or more due to the cost, but by the end of 2009 I finally had the money available. Once again I considered buying it, but then realised that for over 6 months I hadn’t taken a single photo with my SLR. The last photos I’d taken were in May when I bought my Exige.
I decided that there was no way I could justify spending £580 on a lens for a camera that I didn’t use. Infact there was no justification for me having the camera at all if I didn’t use it. So, in a “use it or lose it” moment, I came up with the idea for Snap365. Since starting the project and telling people about it a lot have replied with “Ooh, my friend XXX did that last year”, or “My friend XXX is doing that too”, or even “Did you see/read XXX? They recommended doing that this year”.
No, I didn’t read/see/hear about this from anybody else, and I don’t really care about anybody elses projects. This is something I’m doing for myself more than anything else, as an effort to get back into photography.
The website is more of a motivational “you better take your picture, people might be watching” rather than a “look at my photos” thing. A year is a long time, and I’m a lazy person. I need to feel that people are watching to motivate me to do this on a daily basis.
So here we are on day 16. So far so good. It’s a Saturday, and I have a day of work ahead of me including a wonderful tax return. To top things off, the weather outside is miserable. Once again, I have absolutely no idea what to take a photo of today!
Wish me luck!
MacBook Pro Upgrade: 500GB Hard Drive
by Jon on Nov.01, 2009, under Apple/OS X, Computers
Thanks to this brilliant guide, I have just upgraded my 15″ MacBook Pro (2nd Gen Core Duo) hard drive from 100GB to 500GB.
The major benefit from this is that my 50GB iTunes library, and my 65GB iPhoto library can now reside on my local disk, rather than an external firewire drive.
If you’re doing any maintenance on your mac, i’d definitely recommend the ifixit guides!
Silverstone
by Jon on Aug.26, 2009, under General
Yesterday I had the pleasure of a track day at Silverstone with Lotus-on-Track. We did the International circuit as the GP circuit was closed after the fatal plane crash on it last weekend, but in the end this turned out to be a more enjoyable track as it is more suited to the Exige.
Some pictures from the day:
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My new baby - a Starlight Black Lotus Exige
by Jon on May.25, 2009, under General
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Recovering lost MDADM Raid partitions and LVM volume groups and logical volumes in Linux
by Jon on Apr.15, 2009, under Computers, Linux
For some reason, I was once silly enough to create an mdadm RAID array using physical disks rather than creating a primary partition on each disk and creating the array from those. Because of this, when one of my servers boots, LVM cannot find it’s partitions since the array hasn’t been assembled at that point in the boot process. Or something. I’m not entirely sure, since it was never important enough to spend too much time worrying about.
Anyway, when the machine eventually boots (I’ve removed the mounts from /etc/fstab for the logical volumes on this misbehaving array) I’m left with the issue of finding the missing logical volumes and mounting them.
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