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DSLR Off Camera Flash Study

The object of this little exercise is to assess the various different lighting techniques and setups that I could use when taking portrait photos. I tried a few different combinations of the 3 light sources (2 flashes and a reflector). The Equipment Camera is a Canon 550d Key (main) light is a Speedlite 580exII (Canon [...]

Extract metadata from Apple IPA files

The resources and code for Apple iDevice Apps are all contained in a single .ipa file. I needed to find out who was the Apple account that purchased a particular Apple store app. This information is stored inside the ipa file in a plist file. [However this code could be the basis for extracting any [...]

Britannia 1682 – What fool would build a ship that’s sure to sink

The first time people see a dockyard model, they almost invariably comment, that it’s going to sink, and it surely would as the planking towards the bottom half of the ship are entirely missing, but these models ships where never intended to go on water, they were designed so the King of England could visualise [...]

Spider Attack – Mad Squid iPhone Game

I recently got a pre-release version of the new Mad Squid iPhone game called Spider Attack, and so thought I write a quick review. It’s 1953, the US Army have been conducting secret experiments with mutating radiation. Experiments that have gone badly wrong.  The Army baracks are destroyed.  The only thing between these Giant Mutant [...]

Quick dirty fix to speed up qmail for bulk mailings

We were getting around 2 mails per second with qmail for a bulk emailing, which was not fast enough and rather than try and patch qmail to fix a bunch of problems,  we chose to put the qmail queue on a temporary file system. It appears that one of qmails bottlenecks is disk access (so [...]