30 minutes of sunset in 30 seconds (video)

Download the Quicktime version here (or click through to the blog page for the Flash version).

I’m up at the house near the England/Scotland border. The back overlooks fields, hills and crags and has always been a prime location for some spectacular sunsets. I recorded 30 minutes of one tonight and then reduced this footage down to the 30-second-long time-lapse movie that you see here.

If you want the technical how-to-do-it…

Great RSS feed reader

For quite a while I’ve been looking around for a good feed reader. I was using the one that is built into Opera, but the slow-down while it updated the feeds every so often bugged me when I was busy looking at web pages at the same time. Sadly this is just one of the Great RSS feed reader

Correct audio recording level is a basic…

Dear Rocketboom… Horribly distorted sound (again). Note the flattened-out peaks where the level has exceeded 0dB. Correct sound recording level… Why bother producing a ‘high-definition’ version of the show when the audio is painful to listen to?

A great spotted woodpecker outside my window (video)

Download the MP4 version here (or click through to the blog page for the Flash version).

Currently I’m in a little village near the England/Scotland border.

At 6am on Friday morning there seemed to be a lot of bird noise outside the window. I looked out and saw a crowd of sparrows and a male great spotted woodpecker (I know that because I looked it up on the RSPB website)

The first woodpecker I’ve seen in real-life. I was rather excited.

The window has that old-fashioned glass, which is why the video is a bit blurred.

Should soya carry a health warning?

From The Guardian.

I’m finding it hard to keep up-to-date with what’s good and what’s bad. An article I read recently suggested it may be more healthy to eat butter rather than margarine…