The 23x blog

I’m an avid photographer. I take a lot of pictures, especially when I’m learning new techniques or have some new equipment to master. This means I take a large number of photos in public places and when on holiday I always seem to have a camera around my neck.

A few years ago, this would have been seen as perfectly acceptable behaviour and I would have been treated as a welcome visitor, bringing in tourist cashy-money. The iconic image of the American Tourist is one of a behawaiianshirted loud man in shorts with an SLR fitted with a 200mm lens round his neck. The iconic image of a Japanese Tourist is that of a polite suited man looking at the world through the lens of a compact camera. Cameras are tourism. Even us Brits when taking our local money to a different town will usually be armed with some sort of digital camera, and let’s not forget we all have camera phones now.

A week after the 2005 London Bombings, I was in London on a holiday we’d booked weeks before. We didn’t consider it a risk or any of that stuff, but we didn’t realise that, as our hotel was at Euston Station, we would be in and around the area it all happened. Walking round Kings Cross and Euston with a camera and I was stopped several times by the police, asking me if I was there the previous week and if I’d taken any pictures. They were all handing out leaflets like this:

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Much has been written about Scotland’s mythical Deep-Fried Pizza, yet very little of it seems to be consistent. Is the pizza battered or just dropped in the fryer next to the battered fish and the flaccid chips?

The answer is seemingly arcane and mysterious …

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Firstly, rather than make this a review of the ssh clients available out there, I’ve decided to stick with the client I bought: iSSH. Reasons for buying this one over the others? It does well in comparisons/reviews and it’s available in the UK. Go read the reviews linked as they do what I’d have done better than I would have done it.

Note: If you don’t want to read a boring article full of opinions and screenshots, The following string is what you came for, whether or not you know it. "screen -DRRS iphone"

Look! Restarting MySQL from a fricking phone!

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I just picked up the domain immobile.me for fun. The problem is, I don’t know what to do with it. Do you have any good ideas? If so, please plop a comment below. Oh, and if you can think of anything to do with plook.net while you’re at it, I’d appreciate it.

Well, you’ve done cheap Macro photos in the last post, so it’s time to try this madfangled HDR thingy you’ve seen everyone doing.

HDR (High Dynamic Range photography) is taking a photo at low, medium and high exposure and blending them together to get the best results. You know how when you get a decent holiday sunset photo and the beach is just a black smear under the gorgeous sky, or you see all the details of the sands with a white sky? That’s what HDR kicks to the kerb. Check out this slightly exaggerated example to see what I mean.

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Here’s a tutorial I wrote for the wristwatch forums I visit from time to time. Hopefully, you’ll be able to apply this technique to your photography. As you can see, I’m using a Canon EOS 400D but any DSLR should be able to do this.

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In the west of Scotland, in the towns and villages surrounding Glasgow, there is a delicacy available in some of the more discerning fast-food outlets. It’s called the Munchy Box (sometimes just Munch Box) and it’s a sight to behold. The one I bought for this article is a regular-sized one, in a 10″ pizza box for about a fiver, but they can come in 12″ or beyond for eight quid and up.

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Well, it looks like we’re a go. The main page has been running as a Blog for almost 9 years without a way of adding comments. This is us finally succumbing to the future.

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