Author Archives: alistair

Amazingly high resolution photos

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Check out this link to a 720 megapixel photo of Sydney. Your normal camera probably takes pics at about 5 megapixels, so this is some serious resolution. His blog says that he creates these things by stitching together hundreds of individual photos. He must have a mean zoom, a good tripod and some real patience to get it right.

This is a screenshot of part of the zoomed out image.

And this is a zoom in on the bottom left of that screenshot.

He also has links to other photo’s, one at 1500 megapixels which is well worth a look.

Lightning in Cape Town

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Lighting over Devils Peak

There was an awesome storm last night with plenty of thunder and lightning joining in. We don’t often see lightning in Cape Town (although I feel like it is much more common these days) and it was really beautiful. I have seen a few pics floating around – this is one of them.

Moving into our new place

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Jules and I ‘moved’ into our new apartment yesterday. We were staying in a furnished place so we shouldn’t have had too much to move… No way, we worked hard all afternoon and we don’t even have our furniture yet.

Update: Here are some more pics of us enjoying the balcony.

Insane airport queue

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Air travel is something that people love to hate. So extremely useful that we all use it, but it often seems very disorganized. On top of that terrorists love to make their point on airliners so airports must scramble to handle security. It can be chaos.

Check out this truly enormous queue in Heathrow. It’s all to get through a security checkpoints and took around 3.5 hours to get through. I found myself wondering is someone was keeping a place for the guy taking the video.

Cecil has posted more of his cycling diary

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Reading this guy’s stories still kills me. He is having some incredible experiences and I was glad to see another update on his site.

He is out of the desert now and is continuing to experience the real Africa. On a rest day they rented a little scooter to do some sight seeing:

“Two guys on a tiny scooter; here it is the norm, but it was a bit uncomfortable. We drove 90km to Banfour. On our way there the police stopped us. This big guy said we had to pay for two infringements. We didn’t have our passports and we didn’t have papers for the bike. We asked him to take us to the place we have to pay, because we don’t want to pay him. He said he is not going to, but we are not allowed to continue like this, so we have to pay him. We told him that we didn’t mind not continuing and we sat with him. After a few minutes he got fed up and told us that if we could get his photo on the background of his phone he would let us go. We took his phone, captured a picture of the proud man in uniform and set it as his background. We were set free!”

At another point they cycled into an unfenced game reserve and encountered some not so gentle giants:

“After our rest we cycled out on the same road we came in on. We were joking about how funny it would be to see the elephants in the road. I told Philip I could smell them… I really could. Sure enough, around the next corner they were standing in the middle of the road. If we were not aware of them, we might have cycled straight into them. We slammed on brakes and stood dead still. They just looked at us for a while, the bull then decided that we were too close for comfort and he came for us. Lance Armstrong would have had a hard time keeping up. We cleared some distance, stopped and checked out the situation. There was no other road. At that time guy on a scooter came in the same direction that we wanted to go. He first laughed at our situation and then he took us through the bush to another road that would lead us back to the main road. It was an amazing experience, but it could have been dangerous.”

There are only two kinds of work

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I recently read a 1932 essay by the philosopher Bertrand Russell called “In Praise of Idleness”. Basically he is arguing that as we become more efficient and productive workers we should be working less and less.

His argument (although he doesn’t make it this clear) is that when we become more efficient workers we have two choices:

  1. Work the same hours and produce more;
  2. Work fewer hours and produce the same amount.

Russell argues that we shouldn’t be obsessed with growth, and should rather take more time for leisure. Not really a sustainable idea because there would always be incentives more people to produce more while others settle for the same. And as Jack Sparrow told us – when there are incentives people will take them.

My favorite part of the essay however is pretty cool. Mr Russell says that there are only two types of work:

  1. Altering the position of matter at or near the earth’s surface;
  2. Telling other people to do so.

He goes on to say that the second group can be indefinitely expanded – “there are not only those who give orders, but those who give advice as to what orders should be given.” Very cool way of looking at things – and largely true.

Remember to check out my shared articles

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I read a lot of news and articles using the brilliant product Google Reader. Reader collects and allows you to view RSS feeds from millions of sites. So each morning I log onto Google Reader and scan through all of the new articles for the day.

One of the cool features of Google Reader is that you can choose to “share” articles that you find interesting. So whenever I see an interesting article that I’m not gonna explicitly blog about -I just click share.

There is a link to my shared articles page on the right (under the heading Blogroll). Check it out from time to time.

Cool cooperative game played in cinemas

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Using a camera and some cool software these guys have set up a multi player game in a cinema. The whole audience plays by swaying to the left or right. It’s meant to keep the audience going while waiting for the movie to start, and I’m sure they will build in advertising.

It’s a really cool idea and it looks like a lot of fun too.

Artist puts his whole life online for all to see

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Wired has an article on this guy who was put onto the FBI’s terrorist watchlist. As a response to the invasion of his privacy he decided to take things to extremes by giving the FBI complete rundown on his daily life.

Every day he posts about 100 photos of everything he does. The toilettes he uses, the food he eats, the rooms he sits in, everything. He also puts his credit card records onto the site so you can see everything he buys. He wears a little GPS tracker so you can see where in the world he is in real-time (currently in New Jersey).  It’s like the ultimate alibi.

It seems bizarre but it is also a commentary (he’s an artist) on the way that modern people have such serious online presences. Between my blog, my Picassa album, and my Facebook account quite a lot of my life is available for examination online. Kinda freaky but I don’t have anything to hide.