Dusting off the Guitars

Many years ago I heard an excellent guitar solo by ZZ Top. It was in their song Rough Boy. At the time I was listening to their Greatest Hits album in the car and I was suddenly off in hyperspace. I decided at the time that I would really love to be able to play that. Shortly afterwards, I bought a used Yamaha Pacifica electric guitar. I then set about finding a guitar teacher.

I had 6 lessons and then my work took me to another city nearly 600 miles away. Finding a new teacher there was impossible. They all had long waiting lists, so the guitar playing was put on hold. After a year, I moved back to my old town but time constraints meant that I just didn’t have the time to sit and practice – let alone have lessons.

Now, many years later, I have a son who wants to play guitar, and he has just started having lessons. So I have decided to dust off my old guitars and learn along with him. He now attends the Academy of Contemporary Music Regional school in Bournemouth.

One thing that I found when having the few lessons that I had, was that it was quite boring. Of course, you expect to learn simple tunes, but do all the books and tutors really have to churn out “On the Banks of the Ohio”, “Yankee Doodle”, “Ode to Joy” and “Greensleeves” ?

While my son was at his lesson, we heard people playing songs by the Beatles, Oasis and Jessie J. That’s more like it! Teach the sort of music that people want to play, instead of the boring tunes that seem to be trotted out in all the books. I know my son is more likely to keep his interest if he learns to play modern pop songs, and so shall I.

I don’t know if I’ll ever learn to play ZZ Top’s “Rough Boy”, or various other favourite guitar tracks by Pink Floyd, but I’m going to do my best with the little time I have available to practice. Maybe I should keep a guitar in the back of the car and practice during my lunch breaks – it’s probably the only real spare time that I have.

May 14, 2012 · Phil Rogers · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: playing guitar

Don’t Subscribe to Time Lowe’s Programs…

There are thousands of marketers on the Internet, each trying to push various money-making schemes on us. Some of them are good guys, some play by the rules but tend to swamp you with emails, and others are just plain nasty.

I occasionally subscribe to the lists of these people as the result of the offer of a free gift – maybe some software, a script or a report. Then follows the inevitable flood of emails pushing stuff that I’m not really interested in.

More often than not, the emails mount up in my inbox and never get read – especially those from people who are not really promoting anything new.

From time-to-time, I have a purge of my inbox and Unsubscribe from most of the lists, and being a rainy day today, I decided to do just that.

One of the lists I’m on belongs to Tim Lowe. Looking at the bottom of his emails there are links to confirm membership, update your email address and unsubscribe.

Except that there isn’t! The unsubscribe line is formatted to look like a lilnk, but it’s just plain text. There is no way to unsubscribe from his list.
Not only is this ILLEGAL, it’ annoying and shows signs of desperation on his part. If he was confident in what he was promoting, he wouldn’t have to resort to underhand tactics to keep you on his list.

So he’s now in my most severe spam filter (the email doesn’t end up in Junk – it gets deleted right away). I also clicked the link to change my email address and put HIS email address in its place.

April 28, 2012 · Phil Rogers · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Internet

More Blender Display Problems Fixed

Having more than one PC can be quite a luxury, but it’s quite common for a professional software developer such as myself. However, it can also have its down-side, especially if the computers are different models from different manufacturers.

The reason I say this is that having solved the problems I had with Blender on one PC, I found that on the second, I experienced the same problems. The cure that I used for the first PC completely failed to fix it on the second. Furthermore, the fix that I did wasn’t really satisfactory because it is now downgrading the performance of my PC’s graphics card for the sake of one application.

So I needed to find an alternative fix and that turned out to be new video drivers. Both PCs have ATI graphics cards, so I suspect that updating the drivers on both machines might cure the problem.

Both PCs are a few years old now, so I was pleasantly surprised that a newer driver was available for my second PC’s graphics card. Having installed the new driver, Blender behaves itself perfectly, so I’ll be applying the same change to my first PC and I’ll be able to restore the hardware acceleration to its highest setting again.

April 14, 2012 · Phil Rogers · No Comments
Tags: , ,  Â· Posted in: Computing, Troubleshooting

Blender Display Problems

For years, I have been interested in 3D graphics. In fact, I used to render 3D graphics on my old BBC Micro, which was long before any of the big movies like Toy Story were ever created.

It’s only been a hobby though – I never got into it in a serious way.

My sons have got to that age where they are interested in computer games and as I am a professional programmer, are quite keen for us to put together a game of our own. Of course, we don’t have the time and budgets of the big software companies, so we’re not expecting miracles, but it is possible to put together simple games reasonably quickly.

One tool that I have used in the past is Blender. It’s a free 3D modelling tool that incorporates Python scripting and a game engine which lets you interact with the models that you create.

So, I downloaded the latest Blender and set it running. Disaster! As I move my mouse around the screen, various menus and display panes go completely black and then come back again randomly. It makes the software totally unusable.

A search for the solution to the problem wasn’t very fruitful, which suggests that not many other people have suffered the same problem. This points the finger at my PC, and probably at my video drivers and/or settings.

The PC I am using is running Windows XP with SP3 and has an ATI Radeon video card.

I tried the settings first and the solution was not actually hard to find. Basically I opened up the Display Properties (right click the desktop and select properties) and went to the Settings tab. On there, I clicked Advanced to open another settings dialog. On the Troubleshoot tab, there is a slider control that determines how much Hardware acceleration is used for the display. Mine was set to Full. I had to reduce it by 3 steps to the setting that says “Disable all DirectDraw and Direct3D accelerators, as well as all cursor and advanced drawing accelerations. Use this setting to correct severe problems with DirectX accelerated applications.”

It’s a pity that these settings cannot be made application-specific as I don’t see why I have to switch off all that hardware acceleration for all applications when there is only one which fails.

April 13, 2012 · Phil Rogers · No Comments
Tags: ,  Â· Posted in: Computing, Troubleshooting

Home Grown Fruit and Vegetables

You really can’t beat the taste of home-grown fruit and vegetables, and as on previous years I’m growing some of my own again this year. Where I live on the south coast of England, it’s unlikely that we’ll get any more frosts this year, and if we do, they won’t be very severe. So I have taken advantage of the good weather this weekend to get some gardening done.

A couple of weeks ago, the kids and I planted some tomato and cucumber seeds. This week, the plants were big enough (about 4″ or 10cm) to transfer to their own pots, so we did that today. We’ll be putting the plants outside during the day and bringing them in at night until they have hardened up a bit.

We also planted some runner beans and some dwarf pea plants. The peas are a variety that grows only to about 24″ (60cm) so they are ideal for growing in containers. Useful when you have a postage stamp garden.

Finally, as in previous years, I am growing potatoes in potato bags. The idea is that you plant the seed potatoes in a small amount of compost and once the plants are about 4″ tall, you earth them up. This process is repeated until the potato bag is full. This makes the plant produce a lot of roots throughout the entire depth of the bag, so the potato yield per plant is very high.

I usually plant one set of earlies and one set of main crop, but this year I’m doing two sets of the main crop. We’re huge fans of the King Edward potato in our family, so that’s what we’re growing.

Our apple trees and blueberry bush are just starting to produce buds and the plum tree will soon be in flower. The gooseberry bush is an early riser – it’s completely covered in leaves already.
Finally, the rhubarb and the raspberry canes are already starting to grow new leaves.

Last spring and summer was a little strange as far as the weather is concerned, so we didn’t do very well from most plants. We’re hoping for something better this year.

March 26, 2012 · Phil Rogers · No Comments
Tags:  Â· Posted in: Food