IMG_7592, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

Picked up this rather strange plant yesterday - Syngonanthus chrysanthus ‘Mikado’.

Syngonanthus chrysanthus ‘Mikado’ comes from the family of the Eriocaulaceae and is native to Brasil.

Swiped the following from a site called Wildchicken so I’ve got it for future reference:

An elegant and unusual new tender plant, which forms a rosette of foliage from which long straight stems grow, each bearing one, creamy-gold, pin-head flower. Very much an indoor plant in the UK, it could be tried in a warm bright bathroom where it will have the humidity and warmth it needs to thrive.

Aspect
Bright but indirect light. Needs humid surroundings.

Soil
Acid compost (pH of 4-5). Well drained but kept moist at all times.

Hardiness
Tender - best grown between 19-22°C.

Maintenance
Because of its origin as a swamp plant, humidity should be kept high, at around 70% if possible. Keeping the plant in a tall, straight sided vase, or a deep shallow bowl, and spraying it regularly with filtered water will help to keep the humidity level up. Water regularly, from the bottom of the pot rather than from above, and don’t allow the compost to dry out. The best place for it would probably be a bright, warm bathroom, unless you can provide its exact requirements elsewhere.

I’ve got mine in the bathroom at the moment, but worried it gets too much sun in the morning…

More photos of Syngonanthus chrysanthus

Tags: house plant, Syngonanthus chrysanthus, mikado, photo

IMG_5392, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

I finally got around to replacing my old Sony Ericsson K750i. After two frustrating years with these Sony telephones (the joystick stopped working on both of them after just a few months), I’ve gone for something totally different: a Motorola MOTORAZR maxx V6. The MOTORAZR maxx V6 is a bit different to my old ‘phones, so here are my thoughts so far.

Read the rest of this entry »

IMG_5398, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

Picked up a Rollei Magic Twin Lens Reflex off ebay a few weeks ago. It’s in pretty good condition as you can see, but I don’t think the meter works.
There doesn’t seem to be a way to set the shutter speed manually either (nor can I find a battery), so it doesn’t look like it’s actually going to be much use now

Not sure if there’s a cable release socket for it, but if there is then I may be able to do some very slow exposures (slow film & small apperture) timed to about a second or so…

Still, it looks nice!

Tags: tlr, rollei, rolleiflex, photography

I’ve started to load my Croatia holiday photos into flickr. It will take a while as they’re all RAW so I’ve got to select the better ones then process them.

I’ve started to geotag the photos using the flickr organiser, which means you can see my photos on a map. I’m reading out the coordinates from my GPS tracklog at the moment and doing it by hand, but I hope to automate it shortly. The problem I’m faced with is my GPS tracklog is in local time to Croatia and my photos are an hour behind in GMT.

You can see the full Croatia photo set, or view the photos by day using the list below (which I’ll update as I load the photos).

	Day 1 Land at Rijeka, drive along coast road to Šibenik via Senj.
	Day 2 Šibenik to Skradin (National Park), look at waterfalls at Skradinski buk and monastry on Visovac island, then drive to Split.
	Day 3 Look around Split in the morning, then drive to Dubrovnik via Podgora.
	Day 4 Look around Dubrovnik, and walk around the city walls.

Tags: croatia, holiday, photos, flickr, geotagging

Well as I alluded to in my last post, I’m now back from my holiday to Croatia. Had a great time: weather was perfect (sunny and dry with no humidity — just how I like it), food was good, drink (notably the local wine) was very good, and we got to see quite a lot of the Crotian coast in our time there.

We flew in to Rijeka airport in the North of Croatia and spent a couple of days driving down to Dubrovnik (via Šibenik and Split). After spending three days in Dubrovnik we went up to the island of Hvar, spent a few days there (had a great day on a small hire-boat that cost just twenty five quid for the day), then drove back up north to the Island of Krk, ready for the flight back.

As you can probably imagine, I took rather a lot of photos and I’ve started to filter them down. They’ll all appear on flickr in due course, but this time I’m trying something a little different: I’ll be geotagging my photos. I picked up a very small Garmin Geko 301 GPS receiver which I left in my camera bag, so I should be able to work out where I was everytime I took a photograph. (It was giving me accuracy of 12 feet and less with WAAS turned off, which I think is pretty amazing). Just in case there are issues with that, I also recorded the location from which I took lots of photos from as waypoints.

It will be interesting to see if this works, and I’m looking forward to seeing other people photos taken from the same places!

I saved my daily tracklogs (logs of where I had been) on the GPS, and it looks like you can publish them to your website and replay them on Google Earth. I’ve not worked out how to do this, but I’m guessing it’s quite straight forward. So watch this space - you’ll be able to re-live every detail of my holiday :-p

The worst thing about holidays is coming back to email. I’ve already deleted over 3000 spam mails that were missed by my spam filter, so if I’ve missed anything from anyone, then sorry! I’ve got quite a lot to follow up on too, which is a bit of a pain.

Anyway, must press on with work (or rather lunch now).

Tags: holiday, croatia, gps, geotagging

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Over the weekend I picked up a little GPS device (a Garmin Geko 301). There has been a lot of talk about geo-tagging your photographs so that you can overlay them on maps (e.g. Google Earth) and so that you can find other photos taken at the same location as your (e.g. flickr). This GPS can be accurate down to 10 feet or so (it is WAAS enabled), and it’s very small and waterproof so seems like the perfect companion for this sort of thing.

Anyway, geotagging my photos is something I want to have a play with, and while I was thinking about this the idea of GeoBlogging popped into my head. It’s often said that you’ll never hav an original idea, and this is one of those occasions. Still, I thought it would be a great idea to geo-tag your blog posts so that people can find posts from people near them, or blogs from events or holiday destinations etc.

This is something we’ve been trying to do with BritBlog, and are in the process of dropping postcodes in favour of GeoURL-style metadata in a blog template:

< meta name=“ICBM” content=“51.2327,-0.3309″ />
< meta name=“DC.title” content=“Mark Sweeting’s Blog” />
< meta name=“geo.position” content=”51.2327;-0.3309″ />

If you could do this on a per-blog-post basis rather than just on a blog basis then you’re half way there. I was thinking microformats would be the correct approach for this, but you’d need better blogging software support for wide adoption. You’d also need to think about how you mark up RSS feeds.

As I mentioned above, it turns out this isn’t a new idea. If you’re interested in this sort of stuff then you probably want to do a google on the topic, and take a look at GeoRSS. I’m in a bit of a rush at the moment, but if anyone has any useful tips/links or thoughts on this, I’d be interested to hear them.

Tags: geoblogging, georss, geotagging, gps, blogging, microformats

Photokina 2006 is nearly upon us, and I find myself wondering what new cameras will be released.

I’m still on the lookout for a good compact camera, and I have a feeling this quest won’t be complete any time soon. I’ve been amazed at the price of the Digital SLRs (DSLRs) that have been hitting the market lately, and am looking forward to seeing if Canon come out with anything. There have long been rumors about a Canon EOS 3D coming out, but I don’t think we’ll see one any time soon.

I’d like to see improvements made to the EOS 5D - perhaps giving us an EOS 5D Mk II! These improvements will include a price drop of course, and then I may be able to get back to full-frame photography.

Nikon have already released lots of new DSLRs lately, so I don’t think we’ll see anything new from them. We’ve also had the first Sony DSLR (the Sony Alpha DSLR-A100), so we probably won’t see anything from them now. Anyway, I really should be working (just stopped for a cup of tea). No doubt I’ll mention any exciting new cameras here when I hear about them

Tags: photokina, cameras, eos 3d

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Sony GPS tracker for photography, uploaded by Mark Sweeting.

How cool is this?? This is a GPS tracker to attach to your belt whilst taking photos. The supplied software can then later be used to geotag your photos (EXIF) based on your location at the time a photography was taken. Cunning eh? You can then plot yor photos ona map etc.

This looks like a fantastic device, and should cost about $150 (so knowing our luck ~ £800!!)

Photo from dpreview.com

Tags: sony, gps, photography