Personal

I haven’t posted at all this month, I have been busy though so to make it before December here is a little model I made at the end of last month: I don’t think next month will be any better, we will see…

I have been remiss in posting for a while and in April I posted nothing. The reason for this is the move I mentioned in the previous post. Well that and nothing really much of interest to say, apart from how much I hate cardboard now. May has had a slow start, still figuring out where to put stuff in the new place and how many curtains I need to hang, it is very bright here and I have four large windows, three full length with a door to open and a balcony, I know terrible. The problem is blocking the light from my screen in the daytime as it is very bright from behind. I have a solution for three of the windows and another pair of “blackouts” coming on the weekend, then I should be secure in my little dark man cave. ...

After nearly three years living here on the Elbe, we have finally found a new place back in town. Living out here has been a mixed bag of country calm, noisy garden machinery, and day tripper motorcycle madness. Post COVID has seen the later go from manageable to really annoying at times. The Elbe is not far from us, about 150m behind our house with the main shipping lane to Hamburg about 1.5km across the water, this means we often hear the deep drone of container ships coming and going, this is more noticeable in winter when the trees along the shore are bare. Worse than the sound though is the pollution from the ships. We never considered this, as we moved in here during the COVID lock down and so it was much less pronounced then. ...

A lot of stuff going on this month and almost none of it productive. February has been a month of waiting and hoping, details still under wraps as I don’t wish to jinx anything. The first half of the month was reasonably productive I managed to add a more features to the addon I am working on. It is almost complete and I will post when it is finished. I am still not sure if I will release it or just keep it for personal use. ...

It has been an interesting year, I have rekindled my interest in photography, which I had let slide for a long time. I even bought back into the Adobe software by renewing my Photography plan. I have been using Affinity apps for a few years now and thought they were all I needed, and for my renders etc. the tools were more than enough. However for RAW images and photo organising Lightroom and Adobe Camera Raw are far superior. Despite the subscription nature of the tools I am more that happy with my decision. Lightroom has come a long way since I last used it and I am finding the results to be very pleasing. ...

In a previous post, one full of hopeless optimism and naive enthusiasm, I talked about re-launching my BlenderBits domain, see the About link above it you are interested in seeing the domain, for as long as it exists. Unfortunately reality has kicked in and I find, that in all honesty, I have neither the time, nor the interest in maintaining two discrete blogs, especially as they intersect on topics, Blender, so as this is the more generalised one, I have decided to use this one only. ...

The month is nearly at an end and I am not feeling like this month has been very productive. The reason is probably the weather and the amount of people visiting this area in August. The weather has also been pretty horrid. Extreme humidity has left everything feeling muggy and damp. We have had so much rain in the last couple of months, I am expecting next years crop to be rice not wheat. ...

We are now well into June, half way in fact, and I realised I haven’t posted on the blog in a while. The reasons are the usual ones, a lack of interest and anything interesting to say. To that end this post is somewhat of an oxymoron, it is all of the above and thus posted purely for the sake of maintaining the blogs output. If I leave it too long, I will fall into a state of low inertia, and so will my posting. ...

I recently decided to try and recycle some old bees wax candles as they had burnt down pretty much to the bottom but still had a good deal of wax left on them. I like bees wax and it seemed a shame to waste it, so I bought some wick and took some little jam jars and made my first candle. I melted the wax in a pot of hot water, but later found it is easier and quicker to melt the wax in a microwave. The secret is to do it in short bursts and not over heat the wax, 30 second bursts at full power worked well for me, and took about 4 minutes. In the pan with water it took a lot longer. ...

Cloud storage, for me at least, is becoming too vulnerable and time consuming to manage. It is also a huge pit for data hording, take Photos for example, so many old and irrelevant images going back years just sitting there on the cloud gathering pixel dust. With that in mind I have decided, that this year I am moving back to local storage and away from the likes of Google and One Drive. I have repurposed my old Mac Mini as a local storage server. The 2012 machine has a very low power foot print using around 10W in idle, better than many dedicated NAS devices I have used. ...