AllofMP3 is down at the moment. Their website says for maintenance. Slyck says it’s just while they recover from having servers siezed by the russian authorities. Even if it will be back, how long can AllofMp3 really survive with so much pressure on it? Putin’s recent assertion that Russia “must defend copyright inside the country. That is our obligation to our foreign partners” makes me think not long. Why is AllofMp3 so popular and what will happen if and when AllofMp3 disappears? (more…)
May 16, 2006
May 10, 2006
Last Exit: Gtk based Last.fm player
Last Exit is a Gtk based player for Last.fm. If, like me, you use GNOME Desktop then you might prefer the way this player looks compared to the Qt based official Last.fm player. It is harder to install than the official player and as it’s still quite new there are still a few bugs that need to be ironed out. I have written some basic instructions for installing Last Exit on Ubuntu Linux. (more…)
April 26, 2006
March 30, 2006
Photos from yesterday’s gig at the rugby club in Aberystwyth
I’m always happy to be able to combine two of my interests, photography and music. Last night I had that opportunity at the rugby club in Aberystwyth where there was a gig with 5 bands playing and I managed to get photos of the last four. Who were (in order of appearance)…
I don’t know the name of the first guy, but I believe he is from The Fenks. The was also a light show put on by Marco Matosic (I don’t know if he has a web address, leave a comment if you know) the lighting made for some interesting effects in some photographs and made some pretty bad as the light level changed rapidly and unexpectedly meaning that the auto focusing didn’t really work and the exposure was quite hit and miss, of the 168 photos I have put only 9 online. I’m hoping with a little work in The Gimp a few more will be ok.
March 29, 2006
We missed our emissions targets, over to you technology.
Tony Blair took some time off from yachting in New Zealand to say that what the world needs is a “technological revolution similar to the internet” in order to slow global warming.
What I suspect Mr. Blair doesn’t know is that the internet didn’t just pop up overnight. The first TCP/IP network (arguably the start of the internet as we know it) was born in 1983 but this was building on technology that had been developing since the 70s which in turn had been born out of the US DoD’s DARPA which was started in 1958. So if he means similar in timescale I don’t think it’ll help with hitting the emissions targets for 2010.
February 24, 2006
Python Webcam Time Lapse Script
I have written a Python script to download a webcam image at a configurable interval. I am currently testing it with the BBC’s three Aberystwyth webcams. Although it should work with almost any webcam. I will use these images to make time-lapse style video.
The script uses the If-Modified-Since and If-None-Match headers in the GET request to ensure the same image is not downloaded twice. The script is capable of regularly downloading images from several webcams. I will be using either ffmpeg or mencoder (from the mplayer project) to create the videos.
Thanks to Matthew Russell (aka horizon5) for help with threading. Thanks also to Gary Steele for his page on creating videos from a series of images.
For those who want to run it themselves, I’ll put it online in a few days to download once I know it works properly and the code is tidied up a little.
February 11, 2006
How to avoid buying a counterfeit camcorder in online auctions.
On eBay I was the high bidder for a camcorder that I did not want. The auction’s title was “CANON MINI DV CAMCORDER”. The description offered only sparse details about the camera. Lured by Canon’s brand name I emailed the seller asking what the model number was so that I could check the features elsewhere. The email back just said
mvx10i
mx30-7000
After finding the genuine Canon mvx10i has “DV in” by reading an online review I decided to enter a low bid and see how the auction went. Then I googled for “canon mx30-7000″ and found only one result, which was Polish, not being a Polish speaker I didn’t read the website, but wondered why there would be so few results for a camcorder, so I googled for for “mx30-7000″, the results quickly led me to a blog post with a picture of the same camera badged to look like a Sony camera. I then confronted the seller in an email asking which model number was the real one and why the megapixels quoted on the auction description didn’t match the details on the Canon website. His response was.
hi on the lens cap itsays mvx 10i on the screen you pull out it says canon mx30-7000 i realy dont know mutch more about this camcoder as i took it in payment of money owed to me it says 4.1 mega pixels on the front of it. it works and also you can connect to the pc by usb i was owed 120 pounds and it looked like it may be worth the amount thanks
How to spot a counterfeit camera
After looking through ebay some more I have found there are a few other auctions on their selling the same camera but badged slightly differently.
If you look carefully at these two pictures you can see they are the same camera, the only difference is the lens cap and the sticker with the fake brand name. If you’re going to buy a camcorder off ebay, make sure the picture looks nothing like this. In one auction I saw a series of pictures of this type of camera and then one picture of the camera it said it was when they clearly looked nothing alike. You should compare the picture on the auction page to a photograph from the manufacturer’s website.
It is probably also worth checking the feature list from the manufacturer’s website to the feature list, if any is provided, on the auction page. The description of the camera I bid on said it was 4.1 megapixels, whereas the mvx10i has only 2.2 megapixels.
If you find anything strange in an auction either don’t bid or email the seller. If you are convinced that an item on ebay is counterfeit you should report it, this should help protect other less astute buyers and hopefully make ebay a less risky place to buy from.
If you have already bid on an item you think is counterfeit, retract your bid and report the item to ebay. Read this to learn more about retracting bids on ebay.
With that all in mind you should be a little bit safer, don’t be put off by the unscrupulous sellers, there are some good deals on ebay, but, as with most things in life but especially on ebay, if it sounds too good to be true it probably is.