Due to popular demand... I have had a haircut. And just so you all know the way it works. My haircut has been booked for months, in fact I book a new appointment every time I go there!
It's the Easter Holidays and I'm happy. I think, so far, I've spent a lot of it doing productive things.
I just don't have the time to update it.
I tend to have a select number of sites that I visit a few times a day that tend to give me all the information that I feel I need (most of them based around technology). Some are very similar and offer some very interesting points of views, some I just enjoy reading.
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So Here are my top five Blogs that I read (in no particular order):
Engadget is great as it culminates the most important tech news stories all in to one place. Even those from their sister sites such as TUAW (See Below). They have a crack team of bloggers who have a genuine interest in what they are writing about. I often find there posts to be very in depth and there live coverage of events great (such as Apple Events). I highly recommend the blog, but I highly doubt that you have not at least heard of it.
Extra Life is the best blog/web comic I
have ever seen. I have mentioned them before, but I thought that I'd go
in to more depth. The comics take on issues from gaming, to the search
for Dean Cain (Go read the last few comics if you don't get what I'm
going on about 
)
The blog is also fantastic because of a lot of the content and links
are user submitted and very funny. Scott Johnson the mastermind behind
Extra Life is one of the most talented web comic artists I have come
across (and there have been many) SO I highly recommend it and hope
that it continues for a very long time. Scott also does some very cool
free avatars which I have used on many occasions.
I first found out about Major Nelson's (MN) blog when I was looking at buying an Xbox 360. Since then then I check out MN for the latest market place news and arcade games and also his fantastic podcast/blogcast there we get to here some great interviews. MN works at Microsoft games devision ad is the community manager (?) which helps as we get to here from the people working within the Games Devision and see some very cool stuff. And if you very wondering Major Nelson is Larry's gamertag.
Doug who runs Webmacster is great. He manages to write some very opinionated stuff (thats by no means a bad thing) and seems to have the ability to do what no other man can do and shake off Steve Jobs' Reality Distortion field and look at the facts of most Apple products. He is currently doing a mass of reviews of various apps for the mac that are very detailed and I suggest you check them out.
I linked the other day to Glenn when I
did my first weekly wallpaper, and he is a prime example of a blog
creating their own content (which I find d a great challenge) I liked
his series on starting a blog and mac setups and the interviews with
their owners. Glenn also does a very good video show on YouTube called
(very appropriately) The Glenn Wolsey Show. He also has a mac pro (also
called by some - The Four Core Whore
) which allows him to do some great work with photos in Aperture and he
runs a Desktop Friday feature, and one of his desktops I'm using right
now 
So check out Glenn's blog.
More importantly, what blogs do you read?
I just went around our graden and took a few random pictures (mainly of flowers). No special filters or IO levels (what are they anyway).
The first picture is from when my dad got back with a friend from Sandhurst at about 2AM/
Audio: Share the song that will get you dancing...every time!
Submitted by foxsydee.
YMCA!
Here a few video slide shows that Mr Leigh made using the photos from the trip, we also took plenty of video but I expect that it will take a long time to be edited.
The HV20 arrived at lunch - I'll probaly write a review ina week or so once we have had a bit of time toplay around with it.
]]>At school we are currently getting into video and audio production. Currently we produce about 3 shows fairly regularly for example our current project that we are really into is The Aaron Show. We have produced about four episodes but only released one on the website, however we are currently looking at increasing our production value with some new equipment.
First of all, the camera:
We are currently using a JVC HDD camcorder which is really nice but it does not have a mic input which is a big disadvantage and as it is a hard drive based camera it compresses the video to mpeg 2 so we do not get the highest quality video that you might get with DV tapes - is this correct?
Another problem that we are having is interlacing. When we record the video and edit it there is no sign of any really bad interlacing. We have tried dozens of codec’s in different qualities such as quicktime, mpeg and wmv all of these produce really bad interlacing. So we have more or less narrowed it down to the software that we are currently using Adobe Premiere Elements. As when we watch the footage it is fine before putting it into premiere.
However we think that it might be viable to get a new camera with a mic input and higher quality video and we have narrowed it down to about 3 cameras -
What do you think? - any other suggestions for cameras?
Next is hardware which will affect the software.
Mac or PC? We recently took a trip to a place in Cheltenham about how they produce video they use Final Cut Pro and a host of Macs. But do we really need one and is the Apple software superior over say Adobe’s video suite – but I’ll cover the rest in the software bit.
So lets cover the actual machine itself:
We have a fair budget of about £2300 for the Computer itself.
A big decision is whether we should get a Mac Pro or an iMac. This is hard because we want the computer to be able to everything seamlessly and be able to last a long time (say at least 4 years) This makes us lean towards the Mac Pro as it is very expandable unlike the iMac. There is much more space for hard drives which we would naturally need for video. Plus we could also upgrade the ram easily. But one big downside to the Mac Pro is naturally is the price and would it be overkill to get one especially as we would also have to get a monitor or two. But this is the price that we have come up with:
2.66 GHz
2GB ram (1GB from Crucial)
1x 250 GB HDD
1x 500GB HDD (not from Apple)
ATI Radeon X1900 XT (big question on this in a bit)
Dell 22” monitor
Logitech VX Revolution
This adds up to about £2292
Now here are a couple of questions about the Mac Pro:
So next in the iMac. It is far cheaper and seems reasonably powerful but our major problem with it is the expandability. I am aware that they might be updating it on Monday so I shall not go into specs but would a reasonably tricked out one last us a while?
Next is software. We are looking at Final Cut Express which is £200 and comes with some really cool features. Does anyone have any experience with it and are there any issues with it.
Thanks for reading this, there are a lot of questions but it really comes down to whether we should pay extra for a better machine and camera which will last us longer and be more expandable (in the case of the Mac Pro) or is it over kill.
Thanks in advance – remember to check out THE AARON SHOW – episode 2 up next week
]]>we have booked and finalizing our summer holiday to the US today and I'm really excited.
First we'll be flying up to San Francisco for four days in which we'll be staying at the Fairmont Hotel. And we'll be going to Alcatraz, Golden Gate Bridge and of course.... The Apple Store.
Then we'll be flying up to Denver to go to Latigo Ranch for a week.
Then we're going to go to go back to Denver for a few days where we'll go watch a baseball match and see the cirque de soleil (how do you spell that?) We'll be there when the 7th Harry Potter book is released so I guess that I'll pick up the US edition from there.