I spent several evenings last week trying to make an interval timer for shooting time lapse movies out of a Lego Mindstorms robotics kit. This involved several trips to Maplin and some soldering as well as learning to program in the weird drag and drop enviroment. I’d nearly finished when I came across a cheap interval timer on ebay. Didn’t cost much more than the parts I had bought at Maplin and is loads better. Ho hum… I had fun tinkering.

This is my first attempt with the ebay time. There is a great deal wrong with it but I think I know what to do next.

I have just been introduced to blipfoto.com. A photo journal where you upload an image a day. It has re-kindled my desire to take photos. It will be interesting to see how long it keeps my interest. There appear to be quite a few people who are addicted! I have added a plug-in to the sidebar of this blog. As you can only add an image a day to blipfoto.com there are likely to be some near-misses. Here is one for 27th November.

A friend just introduced me to BuddhistGeek which looks like a wonderful source. I enjoyed listening to this podcast on The Practice of Contemplative Photography – which I would highly recommend. It certainly chimes with how I have felt about my own photography.

Mixed feelings at the ending of the last weekend of the Bangor Mindfulness course. It doesn’t look like I will continue next year for a whole host of reasons that’ll I will no doubt blog about once I have the assignments out of the way.

After the snow was gone. These are some woods in Chilterns in South Buckinghamshire at the closing of the year.

I have been messing around trying to make my blog more photo-friendly – but without much joy. I use Apple Aperture which is integrated with MobileMe and Flickr. I have a MobileMe gallery so I could include images from there but Apple don’t provide an API just a rather inadequate RSS feed. I could use Flickr as they have a nifty “blog this” feature that would enable me to pick photos from my stream and add them to the blog. Unfortunately this would mean the images stay in Flickr and I only link to them so I would be bound to maintaining a Flickr account and eventually paying for it which would be yet another account to look after.

I could use PixelPost but that would be yet more software to keep up to date and backup.

My conclusion at the moment is simply to export photos from Aperture and upload them one at a time and one per blog post to my regular blog. At least they then stay with the blog and its data.