Harmonica

I was thinking of a way to make music while on holiday as there was no space in the car for the guitar 🙂

Looking around at home unearthed an old harmonica which fitted the bill perfectly. It can be slipped into a pocket and played anywhere. My harp chops were a little rusty but it is coming back.

I have read that after 10 hours of harp playing you will have learned all of the required techniques and all that is required after that is learning songs. I think that this is true as I find I can still do the note bending etc. but need to remember, look up or work out some songs to play.

Squeak 4.1

Squeak 4.1 was released this week. After all of the problems with the community splitting after the Pharo fork, Squeak appears to be back on track. Squeak 4.0 was a licence clean release without any new functionality but 4.1 includes all of the updates that were made during the re-licencing process.

Hightlights include a new look and feel based on the Newspeak UI, new anti-aliased fonts, the closure enabled compiler from Cog, core library improvements and modularity advances. More details can be found on www.squeak.org.

I hope that I can find the time to check it out more fully soon.

It Might Get Loud

I have finally got around to buying the “It Might Get Loud” DVD. This features The Edge, Jimmy Page and Jack White telling the story of the electric guitar from their own unique points of view. There is some interesting stuff on the DVD including some fantastic guitar playing both with the guys together and via archive footage.

The main part of the DVD is set in a warehouse type building with some armchairs in the centre. The amount of guitars, amps and effects that these three guys can bring togeather is amazing!

One of the things that caught my interest was the fact that some of the guitars played by White were of very low quality. His main stage instrument with the White Stripes is a plastic bodied mail order catalogue “own brand” very cheap guitar! If he can make a career with that then there is hope yet for me and my Chinese made Squire Strat!

Practical Photography DSLR Skills 2010

Its the time of year again for the the Practical Photography DSLR Skills course. This year there are six modules

  • Module 1  – Urban landscape / movement
  • Module 2 – Still Life
  • Module 3 – Wildlife & Animals
  • Module 4 – Nature
  • Module 5 – Portraiture
  • Module 6 – Rural landscape

Following the course will give me some incentive to get off my backside and get out there taking photographs. I will try and do all of the modules this year, I didn’t manage it last year!

Truss Rod Adjustment

I played my acoustic guitar for the first time in a while this weekend and noticed that it was suffering from fret buzz all the way up the neck. I am sure that it was not like that the last time I played it!

A little investigation, with a capo at the first fret and fretting a string at the 14th fret showed no clearance at all at the 6th and 7th frets. Looks like the truss rod needed adjusting to give a little neck relief. I have never attempted to adjust the truss rod on any of my guitars before but there has to be a first time for everything!

I took the adjustment one step at a time; slacking the strings, loosening the truss rod by 1/8 turn, re-tuning and checking. I went through this cycle three times before I was happy. There is still a little buzz on the D string around the 10th fret when playing hard but I am going to let things settle down for a few weeks before I make any more adjustments.

The guitar now plays great again. All in all, a good couple of hours work.

Another model helicopter

I went ahead and brought another model helicopter. It is a similar size to the Chinook but his one has a single co-axial rotor and an horizontal tail rotor to tilt the whole thing for forwards and backwards flight.

IMG_1174 small

It is much more laterally stable than the Chinook but needs constant adjustment to keep it at a steady height. Different but equally fun!

Model Helicopter

I have recently acquired a micro model helicopter (see below with my mobile for size comparison)

IMG_1167_small

I have always wanted to fly model helicopters but was put off by the cost and the amount of space that was needed. This little thing was cheap, can be flown in the house and is great fun.

I am still learning the basics of flying but am already thinking of buying another model, a single coaxial rotor configuration this time. After that, who knows. Maybe I will get to the stage of flying a conventional single main rotor with tail rotor job and doing some 3D aerobatics! Will have to wait and see!

Open University

I will have less time for my own programming projects for the next few months because I have started a new Open University course. I felt that I had done enough maths after two courses and so now I am doing a software one, M255 – Object-oriented programming with Java.

This will be the first time that I have been formally taught object-oriented programming or Java. Should be interesting!

Best laid plans…

After stating that I would use Ruby for all of my personal programming I did something that changed all of that. I downloaded VisualWorks 7.7 NC and started to play with it. Smalltalk has always held a dangerous attraction for me since the fist time I saw Squeak many years ago.

The latest version of VisualWorks looks good and there is so much material around the Internet to support it both from Cincom and third parties. I am now going to port some of my personal applications to VW to see how I getting on using it as a development platform.

Ruby is my language of choice (for now!)

As could be guessed from my last post, I have chosen the language that I will concentrate on for a while. And it is Ruby!

However I have had limited time to get any coding done in the last couple of weeks. There is DIY work around the house that has to be done and now we have the #uksnow to contend with as well 🙂

I hope to get on with some serious Ruby coding soon.