Stuff and Nonsense: Tuppence a Blog: LOST Comic – Ben Tells It Like It Is.

Explains why Ben Linus had to be introduced to the story gradually.

As I am hopelessly addicted to tv shows that give your brain the sort of ride it could expect in a magimix, it was only a matter of time before I hopped on the Lost bandwagon. Got caught up to season six over a few weeks and I’m still gloriously clueless about what’s going on.

While meandering around the webs absolutely not searching for pictures of Sayid looking windswept and interesting, I happened across a fine set of cartoons depicting some of the show’s finest moments so far”

Foggy Memories of Lost on Flickr and more foggy memories of lost here too

See you in another post, brotha.

The question… will I blog on my own site more often if the admin page is on my bookmarks bar? Will I give it more attention than Tumblr, Facebook or Twitter?

There’s only one way to find out…

…

FIGHT!

I used to use Aperture 2 for all my photos. Recently, though, I’ve taken to only using it for pics from my DSLR (Nikon D90 [: UK, US]), and using iPhoto for shots from my compact (Panasonic Lumix FX-550 [: UK, US]). I’ve found myself taking many more shots with the compact, and don’t normally carry the Nikon any more.

That means that for the last few months, I’ve almost exclusively used iPhoto.

When Aperture 3 appeared, it seemed to mix the benefits of Aperture with those of iPhoto, so I grabbed the trial version to have a go.

First impressions were quite good. I imported my iPhoto library, and it seemed to work quite nicely. Then I imported my Aperture library.

Except I didn’t.

I’ve been trying to now for two weeks. Each attempt means leaving it to work all day, or overnight. Every time I return, Aperture has crashed part way through. There doesn’t seem to be any way to get it to continue from where it left off.

There’s been an update from Apple, which addresses just the sort of problems I’ve been having, but it hasn’t helped matters for me.

I even decided to give up on that, and just import the original images again from scratch, losing all the metadata and edits. That crashed somewhere in the middle, too.

This morning, I wanted to post a picture of my breakfast. I opened Aperture 3. It decided it had to process some images and face data in the background, and wasn’t usable while it was doing that. I opened iPhoto and imported the images. Aperture finished it’s background jobs, so I told it to close. I was most of the way through editing and posting the images in iPhoto before Aperture actually got around to closing.

I gather there are some really nice improvements in Aperture 3, but so far, I can’t get to the point where I might care.

The chunk of cold weather we’re having here in the UK at the moment is a bit of a problem for the birds. They’re having difficulty finding enough food. We wanted to help, but we have a bit of a problem – we live in the top flat in an old four-storey school building. We get to our door by climbing a set of metal steps on the outside of the building. Our outside space consists of a few square metres of metal panelling, with metal railings around it, and a long drop.

Feeders are available that attach with suction cups to the outside of a window, which seem like a good idea, but I’m not sure I trust them. For a normal house, if it falls off, you just have to go outside, pick it up, and stick it back in place. If one fell off our living room windows, it would fall four floors down, and land in a cut-out section below ground level, outside the basement flat’s front windows. Or, if it bounced a bit further forward by hitting the window sill, it could fall far enough forward to land on someone’s car.

Anyway, I hit on a solution last weekend – part of the packaging from our new microwave, some holes punched through with my Swiss Army Knife, and a couple of shoelaces:

It sat there firmly, and the food (a slice of bread and some seeds) didn’t blow away. Win. The birds, however, didn’t know it was there. Fail.

My boss had a good suggestion, though – add a couple of hanging bird feeders, and not only do we add more options for food, but we put something there the birds might actually recognise as a source of food. A white polystyrene tray probably isn’t going to say ‘food’ to a chaffinch, but a swinging tube of peanuts might. So, this weekend, we visited Pets at Home, and stocked up. Here’s the result:

Some food on the tray, and three hanging feeders, containing:

• Peanuts, with a spare bag ready for refills.
• Mixed seeds, with sunflower hearts to replace them when they’re gone.
• Fat balls, with a large tub full of replacements ready.

There’s only one problem with this now. You may notice the lack of snow – it’s pretty much all thawed here, and there doesn’t appear to be too much risk of more to come. We may be a bit late, but hopefully they’ll still enjoy a few treats.