I’ve been trying to get some closeups of Edwards hands and feet while he is still small. The problem is, he waves them around so much that getting the shot framed and in focus before the limb is flung around into a another position is non trivial!

We managed to find time this past weekend to visit the Farnborough Airshow, I dont think I’ve been since I was a kid. It was certainly as big as I remember it! I rented a Nikon 300mm f/2.8 VR lens and a TC-14 E Teleconvertor from Calumet for the weekend. Oh my, I love that lens! It took a while to get used to not having zoom, but after a while almost every shot was a keeper. I think I’ll be renting it again soon. Below is a slideshow of some of the pictures I took during the afternoon of flying.

I got one of these for my birthday.

It outputs NMEA format files, which I  normally convert into the more widely used GPX files, using GPSBabel. Once I have my GPX file I use the excellent GPSPhotoLinker to embed the GPS coordinate information into the EXIF of my photos.

I’m sure there used to be a thing called raidhotadd, anyway these days it seems to be mdadm. We have a few machines with software raid, and very occasionally a md device flags a disk as dead but adding it back into the array fixes the problem.

Anyway, I never remember this, so to remove and then re-add a disk from a md device do the following:

[root@host ~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
104320 blocks [2/2] [UU]`

`md0 : active raid1 sdc1[0] sdd1[2](F)
143371968 blocks [2/1] [U_]
md2 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
71577536 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices:
[root@host ~]# fdisk -l /dev/sdd
Disk /dev/sdd: 146.8 GB, 146815737856 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 17849 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes
Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sdd1   *           1       17849   143372061   fd  Linux raid autodetect
[root@host ~]# mdadm /dev/md0 --remove /dev/sdd1
mdadm: hot removed /dev/sdd1
[root@host ~]# mdadm /dev/md0 --add /dev/sdd1
mdadm: re-added /dev/sdd1
[root@host ~]# cat /proc/mdstat
Personalities : [raid1]
md1 : active raid1 sdb1[1] sda1[0]
104320 blocks [2/2] [UU]
md0 : active raid1 sdd1[2] sdc1[0]
143371968 blocks [2/1] [U_]
[>....................]  recovery =  0.2% (297280/143371968) finish=32.0min speed=74320K/sec
md2 : active raid1 sdb2[1] sda2[0]
71577536 blocks [2/2] [UU]
unused devices:
[root@host ~]#

And there we can see from /proc/mdstat that the md device will be synchronised and happy again soon.

I setup  a blog just before Edward was born so we could upload some pics as he grows up, I managed a few updates in the first couple of weeks and then became ill so I forgot about it. It turns out my lovely wife has indeed been taking many pictures of him and updating the blog. You can find it here.

So this evening Harrys’ inquisitiveness got the better of him when he leant a little _too_ far over the edge of a full bath. Dozy thing! He managed to scrabble out with only his lower half soaking though 🙂

When we moved into this house, three of the rooms had original Edwardian cast iron fireplaces. They were all covered in many layers of thick black gloss paint; in some cases it was so thick it obscured some of the details.

After much googling I found a company which sell a special paint stripper called Kling Strip that soon got rid of all the paint but left the fireplace covered in a layer of rust.

I recently got a set of wire brushes which fit in my drill, a couple of hours working away at the rust and we have a nice, shiny, bare cast iron fireplace. A polish with WD40 every so often should keep it looking that way. 🙂

I thought I’d put a side by side, before and after comparison of the garden when we moved in (early 2007) and how it look during the Summer of 2009.

The left was taken with a Nikon D70 and the right with a Bronica ERTSi on (I think)Fuji Velvia film.

Looking back over some old photos, I kind of miss my fisheye lens (sold last year) . I wish I used it more. According to Lightroom I only took 119 shots with it, most of which were throw away tests. When I’ve decided wether to move to full frame or not I might invest in another one.

In September last year my Father and I went up to Duxford to the late summer airshow, I’ve only just got round to processing the pictures. Looking through them it seems like more of my ground shots are nicer than the inflight ones, something I’ll have to address in future airshows!