Mister Ian's Weblog

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  • Bobby McFerrin hacks your brain with the pentatonic scale

    World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

    He’s musically amazing.

    From boingboing

    And for a bit of fun

    Again from here on boingboing

    And another link from boingboing if you haven’t seen it already as it has over 14 million views. Here is a great wedding entrance dance.

  • Bombed out building

    [Group 1]-20090802_020820091682_20090802_020820091685-4 images-2

    I think it must have been bombed out in the Gulf War. It is in North Kuwait next to an Oula Gas Station.


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  • How to wash SCUBA diving gear

    Do’s and don’ts.

    • Do use lots of fresh water and a big bucket.
    • Do rinse the inside of everything with fresh water.
    • Do take your knives and scissors out and rinse and dry them so they don’t turn into rusty lumps.
    • Don’t forget to put the dust cover on tight on the regulator first stage before soaking.
    • Don’t purge the second stages.
    • Don’t press the power inflator button on your BCD. But do press the exhaust button to fill with fresh water and rinse inside the bladder.
    • Do also open the bottom dump valve on the BCD and  let fresh water go out through it. Similarly you can rinse the inside of SMBs.

    Legal disclaimer is here. Well actually that is for bigwall climbing but I take no responsibility for your gear or safety. That is entirely your responsibility as it was before you read this and it will always be. Dive safely!

  • Food Allergies

    1169378_49769565

    The latest on Food Allergies at the NewScientist. What you are allergic to depends on where you live.

    Via kottke.org

  • Cloudy and dusty but good lighting

    Al Kout Docks

    Click on the image above to see it large at Flickr. I’m trying to figure out a quick and easy way to embed draggable panoramas.

    Then after reading the newspaper and having a coffee at the Hilton you could see the moon through the clouds – or is that through the dust.

    Hilton Parking Lot with Moon in the Dusty Sky

    These also prove the point that the best camera is the one that you have with you. Though the images usually need a bit of tweaking to look OK. In this case the Nokia N82 phone camera took the photos. Then the photos were brought into Adobe Photoshop Lightroom 2, merged in Auto Pano 2 and then put in Adobe Photoshop, cropped and the edges fixed and also run through the Noise Ninja plugin to remove the horrible noise that the phone camera puts in them then back to Lightroom and using geocoding support the GPS location data was embedded in the images from the original ones that were geotagged in the phone with the phone’s built in GPS. Then finally they were uploaded to Flickr with Jeffrey Friedel’s Flickr plugin and his Geoencoding support to embed the location data. Are we having fun yet?

  • Dust Storm Today

    Dusty Today

    The photo was taken here.

    I was out and about and even ended up trying to take a shortcut back to the office to avoid a traffic jam and ending up going in a big circle! It is hard to keep the bearings when you can’t even tell where the sun is coming from to help your sense of direction.