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Archive for June, 2008

Avoriaz 2008 Photographs Online

Wednesday, June 18th, 2008

Well I got the Lech photos online and now the Avoriaz 2008 holiday photographs are online.

The gallery is here.

There are lots of photographs but most of them are very good.

Myself, Mike, Steve P and Steve W all went, but Steve W broke his back at around 11am on the first day.  This means there isnt alot of Steve W.


This is one of Steve W before the accident.


Mike ready to go.


Steve waiting for Mike.


Where were we?

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Steve and Mike bombing down.


Steve W working hard.

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The view down into Avoriaz

Lech am Arlberg 2008 Photographs Online

Tuesday, June 17th, 2008

Well I finally got around to putting all the photographs from my snowboarding trip to Lech am Arlberg in January 2008.

I really did take a lot of photos this trip. I had to redesign the gallery pages to cope with the sheer number of the images. I now made the gallery page have multiple gallery pages. Each one showing 21 images (currently).

We had lots of powder the first few days then it went really sunny and nice. Here is a select few of the photos I took. The complete gallery is available here

A hut in the powder

The church in Lech am Arlberg

The Omeshorn overlooking Lech am Arlberg

Me and Steve on the chair lift in the sun.

Relaxing at lunch

The view down to Lech am Arlberg

New Car with 200bhp for around €25,000

Friday, June 13th, 2008

Well, my Audi A4 is very old now and we will probably need a new car in a year or so.

I’m really thinking of getting another Audi, but I thought I would check around and see what else I could get.

I was looking at Opel, mainly to see how much the Opel GT (Speedster/Spider) was, but I found a 200 bhp Astra for ~ €25k

The Opel GT is only ~€22k and does have 250 bhp, but its a little small for every day use.

You can get a VW Golf GTI for around €26k too.
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You can get an Audi A3 with 200 bhp for around €27k

Its about €27k for the 200bhp Honda Civic Type R

It would be good to have a 200bhp car but I really dont know if I can justify it. You can get large, more efficient cars. My A4 is only around 125 bhp. Well it was when new, its 11 years old now so its probably even less.

Oh and I nearly forgot the Ford Focus ST. Its 225bhp and around €27k

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Mazda also do a 191 kW (259 bhp) Mazda 3for ~€26k

All prices are current from German websites.

Firefox tab at the bottom

Thursday, June 12th, 2008

I’ve always liked how Opera used to put the tab bar at the bottom.  I’ve always configured firefox to be the same too.

I recently updated to Firefox 3 rc3 and I lost this setting.  After a little searching I found that you simply need to add

/* Puts the tabbar at the bottom of firefox */
#content > tabbox { -moz-box-direction: reverse; }

to the following file.

C:\Documents and Settings\<username>\Application Data\Mozilla\
Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxx.default\chrome\userChrome.css

You may need to create the file as it doesn’t exist by default.

Once you restart firefox, the tabs are at the bottom again.

AVI to FLV with ffmpeg

Monday, June 9th, 2008

I used to have all my videos on my website as divx or xvid encoded AVI. This is a pain as you have to download the files to play them.

I found FlowPlayer and it works really well. I used to use flvtool to encode videos as flv files but it is not part of gentoo and I had to keep manually downloading and building it all the time to get the updates.

I recently found this article which shows how to use ffmpeg to encode videos as flv files.

ffmpeg -i video.avi -ar 22050 -ab 32 -f flv -s 320x256 video.flv

I then use the flv with FlowPlayer like this

<object type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
    data="/include/FlowPlayer.swf"
    width="320"
    height="284"
    id="FlowPlayer1">
  <param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
  <param name="movie" value="/include/FlowPlayer.swf" />
  <param name="quality" value="high" />
  <param name="scale" value="noScale" />
  <param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
  <param name="allowNetworking" value="all" />

  <param name="flashvars" value="config={
		autoPlay: false,
		loop: false,
		initialScale: 'scale',
		showLoopButton: false,
		showPlayListButtons: false,
		playList: [
			{ url: '/media/tux_07.flv' }
		]
		}" />
</object>

See Hintertux 2007 for an example.