Underwater Base Jumping

published on June 28, 2010 » filed under Tech, Web

Guillaume Nery base jumping at Dean’s Blue Hole (Trentemøller Edit) from Kevin Bock on Vimeo.

Election 2010

published on May 2, 2010 » filed under Politic

bigot-gate-uk-election-2010

some of my favourite stories from the past few weeks of UK electioneering:

Nick Clegg facing demand over fraudster’s £2.4m donation

End of the End of Boom & Bust?

Ken Clarke flip-flops Tory standing over nationalised Northern Rock
also Lib Dem’s John Thurso slipping deeper into inconsequential waffle

The Prescott Express

Cameron Egged

Does the Business Vote Matter?
from Robert Peston’s Blog – the BBC’s business editor

Vacuous Tory Wife in the Kitchen
that sends the right signals, eh? this clip is a real smarmfest

Tory Candidate ran prayer sessions to cure homosexuality

Will Self: This Week, Radio 4’s Today: #1, #2,

Labour Car Crash

I got Retweeted by Armando Iannucci

JANUARY

published on January 6, 2010 » filed under Photos, Travel

(c) Callum Alden 2010

December

published on December 20, 2009 » filed under WordPress

ach, can’t get motivated for even the simplest of endeavours this month, getting out of the flat was a mission in itself today, in this permafrostian chill. okay, so it snowed, maybe once… but y’know.

for the lack of blogging, my apologies- i’m working on a project or three that, happily, don’t involve going outside so that’s keeping me busy. here’s one: Catgut Music (Owen’s website / blog) is rocking out. we’re about to add a whole new video section, so that’ll be fun. For now I want you to check out Owen’s Blog. It is a treasure.

i’ve recently setup a Wordpress Multi-User blog (on leithermagazine.com). always amazed how well the Wordpress stuff works out-of-the-box. WPMU relies on the same structure – many of the same rules / hacks and plugins – which i’ve learned through running this mess of a site over the years… so all this is nonsense is coming in handy.

also- my photography portfolio gets a good updating every now and then: check it out. what are you crazy kids up to? anyone still out there?

Restoring The Star Wars Negatives

published on November 17, 2009 » filed under Film, Tech

via secrethistoryofstarwars.com

Cool it! The man said ‘restoring’ not ‘improving’ or ‘amending’ or any other form of buggering about which Lucas has previously used as an excuse to further indebt himself to the Star Wars fanbase. Look, you owe us one Georgie-boy.

In one helluva fascinating article over at secrethistoryofstarwars.com a fella by the name of Michael Kaminski has written a very comprehensive piece about the restoration of the original Star Wars film negative. There are some tedious facts, lots of fun for colourists and video techies but also some interesting details, or to put it kindly ‘oversights’, on the part of George Lucas are revealed. Shockingly the prequels to Star Wars were all shot natively on 1080p HD ‘film’. This is disturbing because, well, I can shoot that on my camera as a fun extra feature these days… despite not having that all-important Panavision lens-set to play with. 1080p was a brand new technology, it wasn’t the future resolution– no where near it. Dagobah to Lucas! Hello!?

… another undoable element of the prequels — filmed on 1080p HD, they have, at the most, less than half the resolution of the 35mm original trilogy… they have just under 1/5 the resolution…

Anyway, enjoy: Saving Star Wars: The Special Edition Restoration Process and its Changing Physicality.

via BinaryBonsai

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