A weekend of snow. Thursday night / Friday morning saw heavy snowfall over the South East so roads were closed and travel chaos ensued. Although the snow (and ice) prevented me cycling this weekend, it did result in me having a day off on Friday! 
Took a long walk on Saturday afternoon in some local woodland and took the camera along with me. More photos over on Flickr.
Last.fm scrobbled my 30,000th track this week! i.e. Last.fm has logged me listening to over 30,000 tracks since I started it counting on 25th April 2007 – an average of 31 tracks per day.
The specific track? Here it is:
30000: (2009-12-15 09:48:50):
Johann Sebastian Bach – Brandenburg Concerto No. 5 in D major, BWV 1050: Andante
The bikes have got me back into photography. When I go out on long rides I take my Canon Ixus 40 with me to capture the ride, the sights and the memories. Then I bought my Canon G11 as I wanted more control – the same level of control I had when I used my Minolta SLRs in the past.
Now I’ve bought a Gigapan Epic – a robotic camera mount for taking huge, high resolution images.
What?!
Okay, here’s something cool:
“The GigaPan Imager uses the same panoramic photo technology as the Mars Exploration Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, used to collect amazing panoramic images of Mars.“
“GigaPan Systems was established in 2008 as a commercial spin-off of a successful collaboration between researchers at NASA and Carnegie Mellon University that developed the breakthrough GigaPan System for creating high-resolution panoramic images. GigaPan Systems was founded to bring this powerful, high-resolution imaging capability to a broad audience.“
The Gigapan system consists of the robotic mount, stitching software and the Gigapan.org website which hosts the resulting massive images.
The mount itself ($300) fixes to the top of your tripod and then holds your digit
al camera nice and tightly in its special fixture. There’s a small amount of setup to perform, so that it knows the field of view of your specific camera, and that’s it. You then put your camera on maximum zoom, lock the focus, lock the exposure, then tell the Gigapan what to do. It’s simple: you point the system at the top-left corner of your scene, then the bottom-right corner, and the Gigapan will then work out how many shots it needs to cover the entire scene. Everything set, you start it off and it pans and tilts until its taken loads of individual photographs of the scene: x-number of rows and x-number of columns.
You then go home and download the images from your camera and into Gigapan’s stitching software. This software really ‘uses’ your computer and all its processing and memory capacity to blend the photos into one huge image. This can take a long time to compute, my initial (relatively small) capture took around 30 minutes – it’s complex and demanding for the software/computer to merge and blend these images automatically but it does it fantastically well.
Once it’s done its thing you upload to the Gigapan.org website, into your account, and then it’s available for the world to see.
Initially it looks like a normal photograph, but then you move your mouse over it and you realise that you can zoom into the image, pan around and explore it – in a similar way to the way you navigate in Google Maps. Find something of interest in the middle of the image? Just zoom in and take a look. As you do, the Gigapan viewing software adds the more detailed images as you get in closer until you reach the full resolution, then just keep panning.
The Gigapan hardware was shipped to to me from the USA. I ordered it late on a Sunday night (UK time), the Gigapan team shipped it on Monday afternoon and it arrived at 1045 on the Wednesday morning! Really quick shipping and a high quality product.
It’s a great bit of kit and I’ve only just started playing with it. The weather yesterday curtailed my trials but I managed to get a couple of giga-images captured: the Castle and the Cathedral. I’ve just exported the castle image to a TIFF file and that image is 450MB in size! It is a 261 mega pixel image! Oh, and it took my computer 1hr 55mins to stitch it together – that’s 56 images in a grid of 7 x 8.
The images below are small copies of the exported TIFF files, if you want to see the Gigapan images then click the links below each photo and you’ll be taken to the images over on Gigapan.org.
I’ll post updates of my Gigapan experiences as and when they happen.
Click here to view the Gigapan image of the Castle
Click here to view the Gigapan image of the Cathedral
My Gigapan Epic set to take the images of the Cathedral
Two factors, this weekend, prevented the bikes getting an airing:
I did venture out today though, Sunday, to see what was going on in town; to sample the ‘Dickensian’ atmosphere.
It was packed!
High Street was shoulder to shoulder with locals and tourists all trying to see the procession and to sample the foods for sale. The Castle Gardens had been invaded by a fair and people roamed the town dressed in antique clothing and as Dickens characters.
More photos over on Flickr.
Wow, today the weather has been crazy. I didn’t venture out on the Dahon and I’m glad that I chose to walk. Some cyclists were out, but they soon dismounted and began to push…
Parts of the UK have been hit by winds up to 100mph and here in Kent the weather has been, and still is, pretty rough.
I walked into town today for a coffee and to drop off a suit for dry cleaning. I could barely keep to my feet as the wind buffeted me as I walked. On the walk home the heavens opened and unleashed a huge amount of rain. I was soaked but it was nice to be out in the elements. I like this time of year and the British weather was at its best (or worst) today.
I had another (nice) day off work yesterday and headed into London. It wasn’t a warm day but it was nice for November and at least it wasn’t raining.
Decided to visit the London Eye for the first time and the weather was good enough to give us a nice view of the city. We were lucky as later in the afternoon the rain started and reminded us it was Autumn and England.
One biking-related thing to note, I saw a tour group from Fat Tyre Bike Tours – a nice idea and a great way to see the city.
Some more photos over on Flickr.
No cycling again this weekend as I headed back to Pembrokeshire to see my family. A great weekend away and very relaxing – it’s far nicer there than here in the South East of England!
Didn’t take either of the bikes so I hope to get out on them during the nights this week.
Some pics of Pembrokeshire over on my Flickr account.
Alton Towers
Only just getting around to sitting down and posting this, after almost a week!
Went away last Saturday to Alton Towers, a theme park near Nottingham. Went with eight friends from my old place of work and we had a great time. I’m not a theme park fan but I have to admit that I really enjoyed the rides and the day out with my friends.
The rides were fantastic and by far the ’scariest’ was Oblivion – a ride which hangs you in mid air before letting your drop vertically into a darkened hole in the ground. I left my stomach somewhere behind me on that ride!
We spent the day there before heading over to Nottingham for a night out on the town. We were out pubbing and clubbing until 4am! Fortunately I had Monday off work to recover…
So, no bikes last weekend, only thrills, excitement, beer and dancing! And a hangover.
I have been using Last.fm to track my music habits since April 2007. It, through iTunes, logs all the tracks that I listen to when out with my iPod or in the house.
Since April 2007, I’ve listened to 26,701 tracks (as of this point in time!). That’s an average of 30 tracks per day.
Just found a cool application which checks your Last.fm data and extracts your milestones. Here are my milestone tracks at 5,000 track intervals.
Get your own listening details: Anniversary tracks grabber
No bikes today but a day off work let me get out in the car and explore the South Coast of England.
I headed to Rye and then along to Hastings and back up the small country roads to Rochester. A long day but well worth it.
Some of my photos from the day are over on Flickr.
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Just listened to: Dave’s Weather
