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iPod Shuffle - My Thoughts

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2009-03-13T15:30:11+00:00

This post is just to get my recent thoughts across about the new iPod shuffle which was released the other day by Apple.
In first impressions I was taken aback by it. I like the new design but I’m disappointed that they have taken away the choice of colors, which makes no sense after the 4th generation nano update, where they added more colors to the spectrum available. I think this might drive some customers away who would want an ipod that is color specific.
I’m all for convenience but I also think that the idea with moving the controls to the earphones could be impractical. Apple earphones are not the best for reliability. I have owned 2 previous ipods. Both of which the headphones have split and peeled. Apple’s headphones also have quite a price tag and they will come as a necessity when the ipod is controlled by them so apple headphones will have to be used. it also means the customer cannot use their own earphones which are probably more reliable and cheaper.
My last point about the new ipod shuffle is the voice-over function, some people may find it useful but I can imagine the voice in their ear pissing them off real bad, I know it would for me. These are the flaws I see in apples product and shows I’m not always for them as a company. Thanks..

Hello Again

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2009-02-11T18:01:02+00:00

Well, then… It has been a while since I’ve updated this, I’ve been much to busy with school and my other tomfoolery I get up to out of school. I’m just coming to a close with all of my mock exams for English, History, Philosophy and ethics, Psychology, Sociology and Life+Learning. the last of which is an utterly pointless subject which was undoubtably created to give somebody a job in some London office.
Anywho the 3 week pantomime show at the youth theater finished 2 weeks ago which free’d me up allot of time before my mocks.

I’m still doing my 365 photo project into February which I’m surprised of since I’ve had a few bad patches with it.. All the photos are on my photostream which the badge to the right of this shows.
I also turned 16 about a month ago and I went for an awesome game of bowling with some good friends.

We also had quite allot of snow recently. So I went out and did some snapping..

I’ve also been up to the usual assorted geekery and setup MySQL for a web project I currently have in development, I’ll talk about that later..

On the night before I was meant to have mu supposed psychology exam (which was cancelled thanks to snow!) Me and me dad went to pick up a kitten. Out of a litter of 5 we picked “Pepper” who was the one black coated kitten.
He is a cross breed between persian and tankoniese - which evidently is a cross between siamese and burmses. But enough with the quadratics..

Now back to my web project - Flasharkive, this is a website I’m making at the moment along with luke who is providing flash support as its idea is for people who animate to present their flash work on this site and such. If you would like to be a Beta tester, please email me or something as I’m going to lock it up to testers only soon enough so it is secure.

I also bought Call of duty: World at war the other day which isn’t as good as I thought it would be, but good fun none the less!

The holidays are coming to a close now. I’ll update further in late march. Before I head to Germany and Poland for a week with school. Thats it for this post, Bye!

So True..

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2009-01-15T22:58:15+00:00

This just seems so true and funny to me..

Originally tweeted by @speer360, retweeted by @jonothan_cox

Happy 2009 (ish)

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2009-01-01T23:12:30+00:00

I hope everyone had a very merry christmas and that you have a very prosperous 2009 (even though it won’t be). I haven’t actually “blogged” in ages. It’s been more about reviews and tutorials. I wasn’t as excited about christmas this year as I was more than happy with the new love of my life I got in september. I bought a special offer 19” sharp display HD ready!! to replace my old display which was crapping out on me alot, aswell as having a poor picture quality. Aint it beautiful!

I had to find a HDMI cable to go with it since one doesen’t come with the display and cheapskate curry’s had them at £50!! Found one off amazon for £5. This goes great with Call of Duty 4: Modern warfare which I also got for christmas. I’m a bit late on the gaming but I’m considering Call of Duty: World at War next month. Its an amazing game with killer graphics thanks to the HD lead.

With the last of my christmas money I bought a new book on PHP and MySQL. I want to learn some back end development in time for College or Uni. Since I’m satisfied that I’ve got standard front end development under my belt (HTML, CSS) thats one of my new year resolutions. James was kind enough to lend me some room and a sub-domain on his dreamhost server so I could test out my PHP scripts because my server sucks for php support

Aswell as to do a 365 project for flickr, taking a photo for every day of the year. That should put my D40 to good use aswell as my flickr account, and probably to help my photography come along.

As far as school goes. I return on the fifth and 3 days after than on the 8th its mah Birthday!!!11! about a week after that I get an english exam. (which I’ve yet to revise for) and then I get my math gcse results back. Pressure or what ?

I’m almost done now and I mean that. The last thing I want to talk about it a tumblr theme I’ve been working on for a while. Found here I’m trying to add in all the things possible to make it a good theme for public use. Rather than it being a basic theme with a small style sheet that only works in one browser. I’m still working on it and tweaking it but I’m sure it’ll be done soon (ish).

Thats it and I hope everyone has a happy new year :D

Timelapse - How I did it

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-12-31T17:10:11+00:00

I thought I’d write a blog post on how I created the timelapse in the previous post. It can be done with a variety of software (for mac) I prefer Gawker since its free and easy to use (well for me). The error below always appears for me and did so on my previous mac.

Download Link

This does effect the file but we’ll look at that later. Go ahead and select your video device and click record.

For results like the one below I would recommend setting 2-3 seconds. Bare in mind increasing this number makes it faster and bringing it down make it slower. I always leave the frame rate as it is but feel free to adjust it for different results. Go ahead and record. it. When your done click stop and the movie will export to the selected destination.

Now I guess your ready to do some editing and adding finishing touches. This is where our error comes into play from before. If you import into iMovie 08 it won’t show anything and if you import into iMovie HD you will get this error:

We need to fix the file and I do so using a trial app called EasyWMV which will change it to a .mp4 which is then usable for import.
I usually like to put my videos on the web exported from imovie 08 so I use the following settings to make them suitable for the net:

You can now upload to the web and it will work without a stumble. Understandably it won’t work as fast when people have slower internet speeds. I hope this was helpful and credit / inspiration goes to Bayliss

Timelapse

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-12-30T20:16:33+00:00

Timelapse from Karl Roberts on Vimeo.

I made this since I was bored. All I actually doing was english lit work and call of duty.
The song is Book’s from Boxes - Maximo park

Nikkor 55-200 mm

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-12-14T16:05:38+00:00

Today I picked up a nikkor 55-200 mm lens for my D40. This is a zoom lens or “telephoto” which both basically mean the same thing.
D-SLR’s use measure zoom differently to regular point and shoot and is called “focal length” which is measured in mm as you would measure zoom on a point and shoot (3x zoom, 10x zoom, etc.).
This lens starts at 55 mm which is the maximum focal length of my original 18-55mm kit lens which came with the camera body and goes up to 200 mm which I think is alright since I can’t see myself shooting anything beyond that, if not a crop tool always comes in handy. Its given me some experience in purchasing lens’s as you have to think practically of what your going to shoot. I’ll most commonly use this lens for the moon or nature in the garden so that I can step back while I shoot.
There are downsides to this as you may find you need to swap lens’s quite regular which can be quite a tedious thing trying not to expose your sensor to much. An alternative to it would to purchase something like a 18-200 which was £500 in store, I don’t think so...
I was saving for one though my parents were confused with the lens name and length so we went out today and purchased it. I hope they don’t ask me to wrap it up..

All in all I think this is a good budget telephoto lens for someone who is beginning photography like me.
If your after this lens. The exact model is:

AF-S Zoom-Nikkor 55-200mm f/4~5.6G ED

Thanks for reading. Merry Christmas!

Christmas Dashboard Widget

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-12-11T22:28:21+00:00

I took of the previous blog post and decided to reblog about the dashboard widget I made last week. I used Dashcode which is packaged in with the xcode developer kit available when you sign up to the ADC (apple developer connection) over the internet. I found that it was alot easier to create a widget than I first thought. The graphical user interface makes it quite simple and quick to produce what you want, rather than learning how to program cocoa. Though you can view the source code if you want to know what makes it tick, a bit like peeking at the html of a website.
The point of the widget is to basically count down to christmas day at 0:00:00 and took me 5 minutes to make and then add my own styling and cheesy clip art snowmen (thanks microsoft!).
All I had to was take the .wdgt file and zip it up and place it on here.

Download here

Please get back to me with feedback about it.
Thanks.

Xyle Scope (app)

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-12-09T16:35:35+00:00

Xyle Scope is a really neat app from Cultured Code.
If you like CSS and to know how people like to wire up there code this is a really useful application. It is basically an internet browser interface where you can navigate to the site you want by URL as you would. Then in the section of the interface to the right you can see the layout and the cascade of the stylesheet. When you select a snippet of code. For example a div tag in which site content is contained. It would show you the CSS rules which have been given to that snippet of code, such as a width, height, padding margin and so on.
Here is a look at the interface displaying my friend Sam’s website.
I seriously recommend this, though I am only using a trial at the moment.

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-12-08T16:29:46+00:00

More Photoshop fun.
I used the Paint splat brush for this.

The (fairly) Big Debate

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-12-05T15:36:45+00:00

This is a blog post mostly written out of annoyance to some people I go to school with.
As we all know out of the top competing consoles these days there is certain rivalry between them, in this particular case I mean the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3.
Rather like many useless arguments such as the PC and the Mac and whatever else.
I own a Playstation 3 and I purchased this console because it was an offer at a reduced price with a game I really wanted to play, the reason I took the Playstation 3 over saving for an Xbox 360 was because A. This console has free online capabilities for multiplayer with other users and so forth. Alot of people with argue to me that “the xbox live is better”, but really how?
They both do the same thing. Both have video and audio chat, buddy lists in and out of game. Both allow you to team up with other players in and out of game to do things. But you have to pay for this on xbox live. People will then argue “but it isn’t that much”, so.. if there’s another console out there for around the same price tag which has online capabilities for free. I would not see the point in buying the one which you have to pay for. B. The Playstation 3 is more reliable, this may not be the same in certain cases though I have seen more red rings of death on a friends Xbox 360 than my Playstation 3, why I believe this is? the shape of the Playstation console is bigger than that of the Xbox, this is just seen as “bulky” or a “george foreman” but logical. If you want a processor or hard drive to work efficiently at its best capacity, It needs to be cooler, not cramped within the case which from my point of view looks like someone sat in the middle of it. Microsoft, rather like they do with there operating systems such as vista. Have gone rather for the style element of the console more than performance.
Though the biggest argument on the xbox’s side of the fence is games. There are generally more popular games for the Xbox than the Playstation 3. In which Microsoft, being the greedy cunts they are, sign contracts with companies such as bungie so they can only play there games on the xbox. “Software without walls”, No.
So its really catch 22. You can buy an xbox for all the great new games which are being released or buy a Playstation 3 for the performance and free online.
Yes I could go out and pay more money on an xbox 360 elite which has a bigger hard drive and has been painted black. But don’t you think thats enough money spent on a console which at the moment I wont have much time to play as a year 11 student.

I’m sorry if I may have offended Xbox 360 users in this blog post. But I honestly felt that I needed to get my opinion out to people about this. I have a friend who I regularly play on his Xbox with and I would class it as a good console.
This is mainly a go at some of the people who I go to school with who steriotype the Playstation 3 before they go to sleep holding there Xbox.
Thanks

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-12-01T16:34:17+00:00

I just cooked this up in photoshop. For no reason at all.
Enjoy :)

Spotify (my thoughts)

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-11-29T15:16:42+00:00

Yesterday I was sent an invitation to Spotify by Sam. Which is a service where you can find, listen to and share music in one place, rather like last.fm.
You just go ahead and download the OSX desktop streamer which has a really nice interface and listen to music from there.

With a free account an advertisement will commence every few songs you play and can be removed by purchasing a premium account but isn’t that bad anyway.
Just likes in iTunes you add and organise playlists.
The interface will also keep search strings open for you unless you close them and the entire application has functionality with the play/pause etc keyboard shortcuts.
So thats my review and thoughts on this service and I’m still impressed with the fact that its so integrated and free.

Busy

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-11-17T17:22:29+00:00

Sorry for a lack of update to my website. Or my flickr which will usually get updated the most.
I’ve been rather you see. My maths exams are now done, I won’t have my results until January so I’ll cross that bridge when I come to it.
I’ve also developed a theme for Sean’s Tumblr which he is pleased with, therefore I am pleased with. It was my first time working on a theme for tumblr. It seemed quite complex at first until it works in the same principle to the rapid weaver syntax tags which it detects in the index.html file and displays the content edited in the application window like so.
All I had to do was place div tags around the parts of the content I wanted to manipulate and style then create the style sheet and images to create the theme and leave the tumblr code which was placed in side {these brackets}.
I’ll soon be creating a theme for my own tumblr to match this website so I can post the small things I want which aren’t tutorials and mainstream post’s.
Here is the link to his tumblr so you can see the theme in action and the modifications sean has made, If you’d like me to have a crack at designing you a theme for free I’d be more than willing to, just Contact me and I’ll take a look :D

PHP Includes

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-11-06T21:56:28+00:00

At the moment in my spare time during my GCSE’s. Only a true geek would take time to learn a server-side scripting language. In this case PHP (PHP, Hypertext, Processor). The term “server-side” means that, quite ironically that its a programming language or script that remains on the server and therefore not accessible on client side computers except for javascript which is something usually enabled in the browser and can be seen if you view the page source.
There are a number of uses of PHP which are valuable to web designers and so on. Which include “includes” which I’ll use as an example for how it can be used. (Oh and if you want to learn PHP you need it to install it first, which can be really complex. So I would suggest you download XAMPP which is a package put together which will install Apache, Perl, MySQL and PHP on your computer safely and comes with a neat control panel where you can turn on and off any part of XAMPP.

So anyway, Back to PHP. We’ll now make an example of how includes can be used to your advantage when creating a website. Lets create a simple HTML document.

Save this as “index.php” then create another file. lets say a footer for a site. So go and create a file called “footer.php” and make a small footer.

Then lets add in the PHP to integrate the footer into the index file.

And as we can see from the preview in my code editor, we have sucsessfully included the footer content into the index page using the include function in PHP.

Why is this useful? It wouldn’t appear useful in this example as it actually complicated things more than they should be. But on a larger website with multiple pages. Includes will be more efficient that typing out the same code for a footer or a navigation bar time and time again.

I hope this tutorial was useful and if you have any questions feel free to contact me at the bottom of the page.

Obama FTW!

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-11-06T19:17:30+00:00

Congratulations to Barack Obama and the majority of the U.S. for electing him. If I were an american citizen I would have voted for him though I did put my part in the voting system that was going round twitter a few days before election when I voted for Obama. I honestly think that he can bring change to the world and the world’s view of America politically and it couldn’t have come at a better time when we need “change” during the crisis’s currently happening around the world. This was just a small blog post say what I thought about it, Thanks.

Using Curves

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-10-24T20:16:29+01:00

Something that I learnt a couple of weeks ago in digital photo magazine was how to use “curves” to adjust photos rather than using the histogram and adjustment sliders.
So for an example, go and open your image in photoshop or elements and go to:
image> adjustments> curves.

Then you can adjust the line with your cursor to experiment with tones. The good thing about curves is that you can adjust many aspects of the image such as contrast, exposure and brightness together. You can always use on off the presets available if you want to.

So thats pretty much it on curves. Most photographers and photo editors will know about and probably use curves regularly but I thought I’d put it out there for people who might enjoy experimenting with them.
Thanks.

Apple Event 14th October

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-10-14T22:40:29+01:00

So here are my long overdue thoughts on the october 14th apple event and the new macbooks.
The reason why this blog post is overdue is because I needed some time to align my thoughts and opinions appropriately before I published them on the internet. At first with all honesty I didn’t like the new macbook’s at all, I think this was because It was “new” and it needed some adjusting too as most people will with most occurrences. This might seem as a bit excessive to be so in depth about the style of a laptop, but the truth is that apple is ahead of the technology market in terms of style and perfection (not to say apple are perfect, no one is) but an image change could influence how people view apple as a company. I think I wasn’t an immediate die-hard fan of it because I’m used to apple being having quite a basic dress code, for a while most their products have had a glossy “plexiglass” look and thats how I find them appealing (apart from my macbook pro which is all silver aluminum) but apple have started to incorporate black into their products more; such as the 07 imac with the black bezel, all black iphones (which a majority of people thought would be white/silver), the mba with black keypads and now the entire macintohs range has formed to this new style with the new cinema displays.
I understand now I’m probably not making much sense but these are my overall thoughts on the event. Just to make it clear though I do actually like the new apple designs though it must have taken more time for steve jobs’ reality distortion field to make its way over the atlantic.

Just a quicky

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-10-11T23:12:18+01:00

Just a little update for now about the site at the moment. I “finally” finished the new theme for the site as you can probably see I also added a Twitter badge and customised my own Flickr photo stream badge using CSS. There is also a comments system now that I added with Rapidweaver if you have any questions or such, I’m now aware thanks to Sean that the PHP contact form that I built in using rapidweaver doesn’t work, I’m not sure if this is a fault on Rapidweaver’s part; or wether its because I haven’t installed PHP on my macbook yet.
So hopefully you enjoy the new site theme and all the nice javascript badges that go with it.
Karl

Update 101

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-10-07T21:28:14+01:00

Apologies for the lack of updates, I’ve had a lot of school work on my plate recently and I’ve managed to grab a quite evening to write a lengthy blog post.
Firstly before you burst with anticipation Moriarty did arrive in one peice after much jerking around and apple thinking the shipping destination was a port in holland and declared it had arrived.
It has to be the fastest computer mac and pc aside that I have ever used.. EVER! it delivers both portability and desktop performance in one which does it for me.

Macbooks aside I’ve also been able to take 2 higher I.T. courses which will gain be another GCSE alongside my core I.T. GCSE I’m currently working towards, the 2 units will be webdesign and flash animation both of which I should be able to okay. The one problem with the web design course is that I have to use tables for the layout of the page as part of the criteria in order to complete the course this is not a problem of skill since I understand how to implement tables into HTML and use them to create a website layout though I learnt to design layous using div tags whereas tables are an archaic method of creating a layout, while James found more “appropriate” words to describe this. Non the less its another GCSE and I’m not planning on dictating to my teacher about web standards and practices.

Thats probably a wrap for the mean time, I have an early entry maths GCSE exam next month so I’m having to revise after school and do maths papers on a weekly basis. All I can say is I’m hoping to switch my hosting for a service that has My SQL database support for Wordpress
As for the site currently I added a contact form and updating the sidebar.
Karl

Moriarty The Macbook Pro

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-09-14T12:09:17+01:00

Woah! Within the next week or two Moriarty my new Macbook Pro 15” who was appropriately named by Chris will arrive.

He will prove extremely useful to me over the next year or so and then even more if I take off to university, My current system is a Mac mini dual core with 1GB of ram which means there will be a significant difference in processing power, At the moment within my workflow I usually run Rapidweaver to edit my blog, CSSEdit and Textmate to work on my site code And photoshop for graphics and such, Not forgetting If I have my Mail open and looking up something on the web, The Macbook Pro has 2GB of ram standard, Which is being upgraded to 4GB (explaining why it’s taking so long to arrive) Will be more than enough to deal with my workflow, I’m planning to sell my Mac mini on ebay for a price which I haven’t yet decided since it is the higher spec model with a 2.0 GHz processor and a bigger hard drive, Thats it for the moment and I will update when he arrives and add some unboxing photo’s to the website
Thanks..

The end of the world (Again)

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-09-08T17:03:50+01:00

So, For a while now I’ve been looking up about the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) Which is a machine designed to simulate the big bang, Which will apparently reveal to us some of most of the mysteries in the universe such as: “what is dark matter” and change our perception of the world around us, But as with any project like this the doomsday threats come with it, Some say that it will cause a black hole that will cause the earth to collapse in on itself, And others say that it will turn the earth to molten goo, I’m not denying that this isn’t true as I’m not a particle physicist, But I’m sure the few hundred scientists and physicists that have been working on this project for a good year may have noticed a flaw that would caused such damage, Even if there were a risk this dangerous and potential I’t would have been immediately pointed out and stopped in its tracks by the CERN and courts, Which some of the doomsday predictors have been trying to do, Even if it did cause a massive black hole which would suck in the earth, Yes this would put a bit of a shitter on your day but thats the way It goes, So there you have it, I just thought I’d put my view on this out here and to show what the real facts are. Thanks

Bring on the trumpets

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-09-05T22:56:42+01:00

Well I dont think this needs a blog post as it speaks for itself, I thought I’d share this with anyone who hasn’t seen it

Summers End

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-09-02T22:47:38+01:00

Back to school, Finally the summer holidays have come to and end, And Ill start my final year of compulsory education in year 11 but I think I’ve achieved what I planned to during the holiday, Including the setup of this website and beginning to learn CSS for web design and learning some nifty things in photoshop which I plan to apply to my i.t. coursework this year, I also went to Russia within the first week of breaking up and got some good material for my photography which can be found Here and I captured some good video footage for the movie of it which I’m currently still working on and I will post when Its finished, I think i’ve covered the main things that I’ve done over my holiday and I’m looking forward to the next term and to getting my early entry maths exam done instead of that stress being amounted at the end of the year with the rest of my exams, Thats it for now and follow my Twitter Account for updates, Cya !!

Another Droplet!!!

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-09-02T12:49:38+01:00

Soon enough Chucks adopted brother will be arriving to us from within the glossy walls of the jamfactory where all the magic happens!
Not knowing which color he is, He could well be chucks evil twin but we doubt this and hope for them both to be individually happy with personality, I’m ordering another one because since Chuck arrived from wookieweb.com Mom has been going hysterical over the cuteness of them and soon enough I’ve ordered another one and he’s on his way thanks to the marvelous, magical Gavin Strange, So thats it for now and browse the new site as you will :D

Site Redesign

karlmroberts@gmail.com — 2008-08-31T21:02:37+01:00

So, The new website redesign that I’ve been working on over the past few weeks is finally done, The one that I originally made was just to hold it for the mean time so I could have more time to work on this new theme, I’ve attempted to incorporate aspects of graphic design which I have taught myself and design it to be minimalistic and light on the human eye, At the moment I understand that it may look quite dry but Im planning to add more pages in the near future, Such as a page to display some of my favorite pictures from my photography, I also may embed a stream window because I do have a Ustream account and I’m planning to use it more