About This Site:

You've found my little bit of the internet... Click here to read more about the author of this nonsense...

This site exists to document some of my projects with a view to helping and inspiring like-minded people - it also allows me to show off! I enjoy taking pride in my work, and it's sometimes frustrating to think that I was the only person to know how nice a project looked under the covers.

Please note that I don't aim to provide complete projects for people to print out and build. None of the projects are offered with any sort of guarantee that they'll work for you - expect to do some engineering of your own if you're trying to copy something. If you're after ready-made projects there are lots of sites out there that will sell you complete kits, PCBs, plans, etc. This site is about ideas and inspiration for people that want to learn - it's not a "cookbook".

Generally speaking, I'm not aiming to cater for complete beginners, but most projects have a reasonable amount of explanation and background that should help you learn about the subject. Having said that, I do intend to add a number of tutorial-style articles in the future, covering basic electronics and PIC programming.

Additionally, you can read about selected items of hi-fi, complete with pictures and technical deconstructions. You should find items here that are hardly mentioned elswhere on the internet.

Site Design:

In August 2004 a long-overdue re-launch occurred. Inspired by a number of sites, such as my employers, I finally found the "courage" to use a white background! Coupled with the pastel shades of blue, plus charcoal text, I really like the new look - I hope you agree.

After much reflection, I decided to drop frames. Despite feeling that my site used them in a reasonably intelligent and restrained fashion, I really felt that it was the right thing to do. Unfortunately, this means more work for me, as the navigation section of nearly every page needs much more work whenever new pages are added. But navigation should be improved for the majority of visitors who arrive at this site from a search engine.

I've tested the site with Internet Explorer 5/6/7, Netscape 7.1, Firefox 1.5 and Opera 9, running on Windows 98 and XP machines - hopefully the site looks ok on your system. If you're using a less mainstream system, I'd love to know how it looks.

Printing:

The basic page layout appears to be the basic header plus two-column table format, but I spent a lot of time perfecting the layout for one fundamental purpose - printing.

I hate webpages that don't print properly without losing characters on the right hand side, and resent having to change to "landscape" to avoid this. Sadly, the overwhelming majority of sites suffer from this problem.

With layouts of this style, the problem is normally caused by the header being wider than standard paper, and this is the case with my site - the two images are indeed too wide. Using the usual single table to encapsulate the header and content area, this forces the overall width to be wider than the page which in turn causes the right hand side of the content to be lost. So my header is in a seperate table to the content, which means that the content table will shrink to the width of the page. The right-hand edge of the title graphics will be lost, but this isn't really noticable. All of this works as long as I restrict the width of any images in the content area.

A nice side-effect is that on a slow link, the title table is able to load quickly, so when loading a page, this title bar appears almost instantly, thus reassuring the patient reader that the page is actually loading. The content table doesn't get rendered until all of the text has been downloaded.

Images:

Most of the images on this site were taken with a Fujifilm 4800Zoom digital camera, which is nice camera, despite it's quirky "upright" design. Its major problem is barrel distortion on the wide angle settings, which is a shame because that's the kind of photo I normally need to take! But, the image quality was an impressive step up from the older Fujifilm 1500MX, which I borrowed to take the older images. The oldest images were scanned from photographs...

I use Paint Shop Pro 6 to manipulate the raw images. Having tried later versions of PSP and also things like Photoshop, I've found that PSP6 has the right balance of facilities and ease of use. Version 7 has more features, but is correspondingly more difficult to drive. I did install a trial version of PSP8 and this seemed radically different, but had some nice features, including a barrel distortion corrector. Perhaps I'll buy myself a copy one day...

People often compliment me on the images, and ask me how I manage to get the high image quality. I'm no expert, but these are the things I've learnt:

Acquisition:

• Lighting is everything. Use daylight if possible.
• Learn when to use the flash (if in doubt, try it with and without - digital film is free).
• Learn how to use the macro mode.
• Experiment with manual focus and focus lock
• Use some form of support or tripod to avoid camera-shake.
• Set the JPEG compression to minimum or "best".

Graphics Software:

• Learn to use your graphics software. It's possible to make something from the worst source material.
• Experiment with Brightness, Contrast, Gamma and RGB settings.
• Crop your images. Bandwidth is precious, remove any background that isn't required.
• Resizing the cropped image to fit the webpage is normally the next step. Make the image as small as you can without losing detail.
• For especially detailed images, consider offering a thumbnail and enlarged version. But only do this if the enlarged version actually offers something over and above a "normal" size image.
• After resizing, apply a sharpen filter. Don't overdo it, because it will look "edgy".
• When saving as a JPEG, experiment with the compression settings. Too much compression will make the picture seem "blocky", whereas insufficient compression will result in large file sizes. For PSP 6, I tend to use a setting of around 15
• You should never cascade lossy compression systems, and this applies to JPEGs. When editing pictures, don't save a JPEG, and then re-open it for more editing later. When you re-save it, the JPEG compression will make different "decisions", and the result will be much worse than you might expect. I keep the origional images, and if I need to re-size or retouch an image, I go back to the origional. Unfortunately this is a JPEG because my camera doesn't produce TIFFs. But, this means that the images are only JPEG'd twice.
• Finally, try to check the image on an array of different displays. LCD displays can look quite different to CRTs, particularly in the "whites".