It seems I was half-way through renovating this site last year, so everything is half-working again, but I guess that’s enough of an incentive to completely change it once I’m all caught up with everything else.

Thanks to capital G I managed to scrape back all of my blog posts that weren’t in my backup^I and repost them, albeit without any formatting, links, and worst of all devoid of all the comments left in 2009.

Needless to say I’m rolling my own backups now.

1. Other private blogs I host for friends and family weren’t as lucky [↩]

The company that hosts all of my sites, WebHostingPad, had some server issues yesterday morning and every site went down, though I was told they’d be back up in a few hours. A day passed and nothing had happened so I contacted them again, to which they said that the problem was fixed and that there’d be a gradual rollout account restoration. I asked if there’d be data loss and was assured that there would be none at all.

I must have taken a trip back in time while asleep, because this morning according to my sites it’s now mid December 2008, with every single thing afterwards gone.

Luckily I back up more often than WebHostingPad’s pathetic annual backup, but the awful timing means I really won’t get a chance to get everything right again for at least a week.

Email still works thankfully and I’ve ranted on Twitter about how awful and crappy WebHostingPad have been in regards to data security, uptime and general nonchalance, so if you want to contact me and don’t have my details best to tweet me until it’s all back to normal.

I apologise to everybody I’ve recommended to the substandard hosting company that is WebHostingPad, I hope none of you have been unlucky enough to be on the same shared hosting box that I was.

See you all in 2010!

It feels good to have one final release this year to cap off 2009, and for two good reasons – there’s some major new releases this time around, Thunderbird has hit 2.0, RSSOwl which broke into the 2’s after an enormous beta phase, and the SeaMonkey suite which also turned two since the last version. The other reason is the oft-promised substantial boost to the lineup, which was held back with the pedestrian-slow Kiwix migration.

After not adding much in the way of new programs in a while, adding seventeen completely new programs^I was at least ambitious, if not foolhardy. Fortunately volunteers pulled together nearly all of the data required, including the ever-troubling screenshots^II which only left forming the text up to fit the format and to hunt down a few logos. A big thanks to all the regulars and everybody else who suggested, tested and contributed to the wiki and made it possible to get such a huge increase of new software onto 09.12.

Thanks to Forrest Walter for the shiny new Audacity logo. I spotted his work after thinking there was no way the old logo was still in use, and googling for the new logo led me to the new one, or so I thought. Turns out he had the same impression of their logo and took it upon himself to redesign it, but sadly the developers declined and stuck with the original for their own reasons.^III Forrest was kind enough to let us use his version to make Audacity more presentable for users, so his work wasn’t for naught.

Two new FLOSSManuals also grace 09.12 (newcomers Avidemux and Miro) as well as an expanded and updated manual for Firefox. Here’s hoping more people contribute to make manuals, as the existing selection (although limited) is well written and a huge boost for useability of the programs covered.

Now, there aren’t many rules for programs to make the cut and appear on OpenDisc, but I’ve made the choice to break one for Infrarecorder. It’s now the only program featured that isn’t cross-platform. There’s a couple reasons, the main being we recommend using it to burn copies of OpenDisc on the site so it’s hypocritical to recommend it for use without including it on the disc itself. Secondly, there just isn’t a cross-platform open source solution out there, not even on the horizon^IV with the same capabilities.

Two other releases were slated for 09.12 but were yanked at the 11th hour, simply because there aren’t any official installers. One is the FPS Nexiuz^V and the other is KompoZer, the replacement for the long-abandoned Nvu. If people look hard enough chances are they’ll find community-made installers, but for security reasons we only take it straight from the horses mouth. As program selection widens, we’ll have to look at managing our own installers for these programs, which sadly adds to the workload.

There’s a laundry list of things I’d like to have ready for this release ((New screenshots and disc/cover art top that list) but the slew of new programs put those back into the 2010 pile. At least the new site design slid in nicely between releases without a hiccup.

We’ve got two big things planned for 2010 so far, so be sure to keep an eye out early in the new year. OpenDisc 09.12 comes in at around 1.2GB and as always is available from www.theopendisc.com.

1. And games, which welcomely fills that section out nicely. [↩]
2. More on that later though! [↩]
3. Something about merchandise IIRC, which is fair enough as his design was unsolicited. [↩]
4. Happy to be proven wrong. [↩]
5. The developer explained that it’s easier for them just to provide one zip for all three platforms, something I can’t argue with. [↩]

I’m downsizing from my old camera^I to an E-P1, so I’ve had to hunt down a new CPL. Problem is the kit lens is 40.5mm, which must be unusual as everywhere I asked had no filters to speak of in that size.^II Looking on eBay, I noticed absolutely no brand names that I recognised, so I took the punt on a dirt cheap CPL, and what arrived was instead a brand new type of lens, the SGCD, for my hard earned $10. Here’s the before and after:

When you see advertising for CPL filters there’s the stereotypical before+after of sky or Koi in a pond; I was all outta’ Koi. The before photo is on the left, and the second photo has the CPL filter attached. No, I didn’t get these around the wrong way, the CPL filter I bought is actually just smoked glass. The end result drains the natural colour from the photo and darkens shadows into obscurity, resulting in some awfully muted skies.

The guilty party; a Made In USA^III quality Fotodiox, that famous optical company everybody has been telling you about. Nothing is outwardly wrong with the case or the filter, the screw thread is perfect and the case looks more modern than most other brnads, but as the photos show it’s a worthless piece of glass. There’s nobody I hate enough to give this to, so I guess I’ll hold onto it in the case that it finds a use. Needless to say, a $40 Hoya CPL is on it’s way, my lesson fully learned.

For the m4/3 readers: you can actually use a regular linear PL as there’s no phase detection AF to cause trouble, but for the cost of finding a multi-coated PL, it’s cheaper and easier to source a good quality circular.

1. a 400D, which I’ve only had since October 2007 [↩]
2. UV filters do not count. [↩]
3. Lens/case/cardboard made in China, Sticker made in China but applied by an illegal immigrant in USA. [↩]

Hugh McGuire contacted me on PGDP back in March to test run his new startup, BookOven, before it went live. I wrote about on StumbleUpon^I a while back

Much along the lines of PGDP and Recaptcha, The Book Oven is aiming to make social-collaboration proofreading available for all publishers (public domain or otherwise), in a simple way by chopping text into sentence blocks, much in the way Recaptcha grabs single words. People discouraged by proofing whole pages on PGDP should find this more palatable, while proofing will be more accurate than the Recaptcha model as you aren’t just fixing a lone word.

It’s great to see that although it’s still calling itself an alpha, it’s now open to the public. More info is available on their blog. Nice work guys!

1. Which doesn’t have much relevance now Twitter is around, no doubt unfortunate for the original owners who bought it from eBay recently. [↩]

Like most people I couldn’t go past this cheap prime lens for my first non-zoom glass, and I took it into the garden to try out just how narrow 1.8 actually gets. I was really surprised by how sharp primes are compared to zoom lenses, although after looking at pricing for other sizes I might not be venturing much further for a while!

I don’t get to talk much about music these days, so it was interesting when Brooklyn musician Dan Costello contacted me a few weeks ago to ask if was okay to use my origami cd sleeve^I for the cover of his next album, Recession Songs.

It’s suitably a free download (along with the printable cover) and is an interesting solo/indie LP, so if you like it be sure to leave something in his tip-jar and check out his other albums, and if you’re lucky enough to live in his neck of the populated woods, catch a live show. Tell him I said gday.

1. See An aesthetic Origami disc card sleeve. [↩]

I musn’t be feeling well, as I’ve signed up for both Twitter and Google Latitude in the last fortnight; surely down to a weakened sense of privacy lately.

Google Latitude on the surface sounds like a good idea, although at the moment it’s telling everybody I’m currently enjoying a town called Saint-Ghislain, in Belgium. It’d be nice^I but it’s a little far from Ballina.

1. I’m sure the weather’s better! [↩]

We were working in the (insanely expensive) Brisbane suburb of Ascot all  week, and our regular Kangaroo Point house was occupied so we decided to grab one in Redcliffe, an old double storey holiday unit block called Lutanna Sands.

Since it’s right on Moreton Bay^I I got up every morning to catch the sunrise, but was thwarted by clouds every single morning. These are from the one morning where the sun wasn’t completely hidden.

1. Which is so wide that it looks like the ocean, without the waves and swell. [↩]