stephen's blog » News

Helicopter

Stephen — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 13:59:55 +0000

Doing some tests with our new RED Scarlet-X camera rig, I shot this little clip of my remote-control helicopter. Turns out our white infinity isn’t as infinite as we thought!

Proto-AVR – it’s better than Arduino

Stephen — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 16:53:38 +0000

The Arduino development platform has been getting a massive amount of attention lately, being used in thousands of projects all over the internet. But the library used to program these devices is quite inefficient, so a friend of mine has started re-implementing it in a new project, Proto-AVR. At the moment, it implements most of the Arduino functions, but is three times more space efficient.

I think that source packages are coming soon. He’s eventually going to have custom hardware, which is pretty cool too.

Proto-AVR Development Framework »

No longer accepting comments

Stephen — Tue, 16 Nov 2010 06:32:12 +0000

I tend to get spam a lot more than actual comments, and even when you do get comments, it’s difficult to have a productive discussion on a blog… Therefore, no more comments, but if you want you can send me an email, or tweet a message @stephengentle if you want to respond.

New Site

Stephen — Fri, 24 Jul 2009 11:57:08 +0000

Over the last month or two I’ve been re-designing and recoding my website, and today I changed over to the new codebase and design. It’s a lot brighter than the old site, and has a far better photo gallery. There are still some parts missing from the site, like the production section and most of the development part, but I think that generally it’s far better than the old one.

You can read about the changes in the news section.

RED Scarlet and Epic: Everything Has Changed

Stephen — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 08:29:40 +0000

Well, Jim’s up to it again, saying once again that “Everything has changed“, and on their previous massive announcement: “The 13th was insignificant…“.

Well, it now it looks like December 3 will bring another big change to the DSMC system, but I doubt it could possibly be as huge as their last one!

New RED Scarlet Camera Pictures Released!

Stephen — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 05:15:29 +0000

Well, there’s still about eight hours to go until the big announcement, but RED’s Jim Jannard has posted some new pictures of both the RED Scarlet 3K camera, and the 5K RED Epic. Like all the images posted since the redesign, they are small, really close up, and probably just leading speculation away from the truth. Some of these look like parts of the new cameras, but the first one looks like it could be of a new lens – possibly indicating that Scarlet has interchangeable lenses?

Still, it remains to be seen what RED come up with, and I, like most people who have been constantly refreshing REDUser and ScarletUser for weeks, can’t wait!

More Images and Updates

This is interesting. Jim has let slip that “Scarlet® and RED EPIC® are part of the same DSMC system”. This new image seems to be of Epic, but given this new information, it could actually be a hybrid of components from both the cameras.

This one could also be a RED Scarlet camera configured as an SLR. This would probably mean that Scarlet will be able to have interchangeable lenses, and that it is probably full frame. If speculation is correct though, it could be, on the other hand, an Epic sensor module.

New Site for Symmetry

Stephen — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 11:46:11 +0000

I recently made a new website for my operating system project, Symmetry. The old site I was using for it was basically just the default WordPress theme with a slightly different header image. The new site is a completely custom theme that I made, and I think it is a lot simpler and cleaner.

I also did a bit of re-branding as well. Although the project has retained its logo, I made up a new name for it – Symmetry. I had been wanting to change the name for a while, but never got around to it until I decided to sign up for free Git hosting at Gitorious. It was a bit of a spur of the moment thing – I needed to put in a project name, so I thought for a few seconds and came up with Symmetry. It fits in with the old logo, and the old name can be used as an abbreviation – Symmetry Operating System (sos).

Updated Blog

Stephen — Sun, 06 Apr 2008 13:22:40 +0000

I have updated the blog to the newest version of WordPress recently. In fact, I am running the bleeding edge version from the Subversion repository. So now when I need to upgrade, all that should be required is SSHing into the server and doing an svn up in the directory.

You’ll also notive that I moved the blog out of its own subdomain, and into the main site. I think its better this way, and makes it easier to keep all the images and media together.

And finally, I hope you like the new design! I have been working on the new site for a while now, and I think that it is much improved from the old version.

Development System back up

Stephen — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 12:40:14 +0000

I actually fixed my computer a day or two after I broke it, but I haven’t got round to posting since then. Anyway, it’s a very good reminder of why having your home directory on a separate partition is so helpful – it saves having to reconfigure everything. You still have to install apps that aren’t installed by default, but it could be much worse.

Anyway, what happened was a dependency issue with glibc… Apparently it happened to other people as well, but was fixed fairly quickly – so I’m a lot more cautious now. If there’s an important part of the system in the update list, I don’t update for a day or two now – just in case.

New Monitor

Stephen — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 11:39:59 +0000

Tiring of my 15 inch CRT monitor, I recently went and picked up a new 22″ flat panel from Harvey Norman. It is very good, especially considering the price – just $357. The model is HG216D – I got the black model, which matches my computer case (which I painted black last year). The jump in resolution and screen real-estate is really great, and it makes development a lot easier. Now switching between my text editor, terminal and file manager and web browser is a lot easier – I can lay the terminal, editor and file manager on one desktop and the web browser on another (instead of either having to put them all on separate desktops, or have windows under other ones). Even switching from the browser is easier – I don’t have to have my browser maximized now, so I can switch desktops by rolling the mouse wheel on the desktop.

It’s got an HDMI input, which is really cool – but unfortunately we don’t have any HD sources to plug it in to… So for now, we just play HD video through the computer – which still looks great