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Saturday, July 07, 2007

Blogger isn't letting me put a proper title on this post...

Today I mowed out the front of the house again. First off, I found a hedgehog. It made something crossed between a grunt, a sniffle, a snore and a snort. I sprinted back to the house (it was a good 100 - 150m away) and returned with a Camera and Cycling Gloves (you'd be surprised how thick they are). Suffice to say he was a prickly customer and even through the gloves it was quite possible to feel the spines! I got some nice pictures of him.

All the pictures are larger than my screen so there's a chance they're larger than yours. The best way to get them is to right click on them and select "save image as" or "download image as" depending on what browser you use.

Normally I'd put up thumbnails but there's a lot of pictures and the thumbnails tend to take up a lot of space on the blog. As such I've got a list.
- When I found it
- Close up, just before it curls into a ball
- Distance shot of it sitting in grass
- In a ball after being rolled onto it's back
- Sniffing gingerly at the plate on which we put some cat-food
- Closer up version of the previous
- It's thinking about making a break for it after deciding cat-food wasn't good enough

A bit later I found a frog. It took be about two minutes to actually catch the thing and then it leapt out my hands again, I managed to get it slightly faster the 2nd time and then got my Dad to take some pictures. Warning, they're pretty big pictures. Also, someone that studied physics fancies themselves as a wildlife expert and reckons it's a toad. On general principles I will both disagree and compromise with them.
- Me holding the Tog
- Close up of the Froad

My Sister managed to find a Newt so we got some pictures of that.
- Good overall picture of it in my sister's hands
- It makes a break for freedom
- What you'd think is a shot taken just before the last
- Newt on the palm of my sister's hand
- Close up of the Newt's head
- Close up of the whole newt
- Newt crawling over my finger
- Closeup Newt in the palm of my hand
- Newt in a (muddy) white bucket thing with water, again, it's first response was to try to escape

We released all the animals into their preferred environment after taking the pictures.

Thursday, July 05, 2007

FlyGesture


FlyGesture by Flying Meat Software

I watch a page called "I Use this". It's a site that lists new Mac software, lots of said software is freeware. Most of the stuff that appears there isn't of interest to me, however, once in a while something really cool appears there. That was the case with Fly Gesture.

I saw that it was a mouse gesture program and thought to myself "this could be cool, odds are it's horribly hard to control and results in your quitting all applications by mistake". From my experience, mouse gesture things are not the best way to control your computer, mostly because they're not very easy. However, FlyGesture seems to work nicely. It takes a bit of getting used to, I suggest setting no modifier keys and starting it from a mouse button. There are a load of actions already there that you can edit or remove or add to as you wish.


FlyGesture by Flying Meat Software

With Fly Gesture, you push a key or mouse button (you set which one it is) and the window shown to the left pops up. You connect the dots and it tells you underneath what you will be doing if you click. The window is actually a little larger than that on the left, I shrunk it to look nice on the blog. The disadvantage of a fast computer is that I cannot tell you how good it is on lower end computers. However, as luck would have it, I garnered access to a slower computer (768mhz with 600Mb of Ram, should be slower than most Macs) and it ran fine.

I did have one incident where I was playing warcraft 3 and pushed the middle mouse button by mistake, when Warcraft 3 crashed about 20 minutes later I found that there were yellow lines all over the screen and Fly Gesture sucking up 99% of the CPU power trying to catch up with the mouse (you don't have to push and hold the button, just push it once). I needed to go into Activity Monitor to quit it as it doesn't show up if you Command + Tab your way through the apps (though by default it does show up, I just prefer it not to).

Monday, July 02, 2007

What it's like in my house

Well, with one thing or another I've forgotten to blog. Firstly, my house is inhabited by Coel, Gethin, Brecon, Cerys, Mum, Dad and Taz (Cat).

Coel is home all the time as he's finished his first year of Uni, Gethin is also home having done all his A Level exams. Brecon and Cerys attend school so are missing for the middle of each day. My Mum is also home all day while my Dad has recently started his new job.

I sit in a room on my own using my computer most of the day. Apparently thats a bit "sad" or "boring". Well, I worked on my CV today so hopefully that doesn't count as either of the above two (I found it a little boring).

Additionally, no matter how old we are, we still manage to act like infants. Take Coel for example, today he had scrambled egg on toast and brought in some brown sause from the kitchen to put on it. We found brown sauce on the floor, walls, door, Coel's elbow and sleeve. We're not sure if he got any on the plate but we all laughed at him a lot.

My music tastes are a little "odd", I like a wide range of music yet I also only like a few bands from each part of it. People will say "hey, you like so and so, odds are you'd like this group" and despite them sounding fairly similar, I don't. It's really odd. Recently I've been listening to Dance music. Is it sad and boring that I don't dance to it?