Photographs from Austria

We recently visited the Wildschonau valley in Austria, staying in the small village of Niederau.

I've uploaded some photographs to the main site: Austria photos so why not take a look!

New phone...

SO, the Sony Ericsson P1 has gone - to be replaced by my first foray into the world of Windows Mobile.

Check out the new blog here!

Keep Alive service version available...

You’ll be pleased to know a major new version of Keep Alive is now available.

The main difference is that the application now runs as a background service. The console can control the service from another PC if required.
Some reporting options have also been added, along with some enhancements to some of the monitors.

This version is completely new – so you can install it alongside the current version you have to test it out. There is an import option to save you entering your monitor definitions all over again.

Keep Alive website

Vista installation stops at "Completing..."

I recently decided to re-install my laptop for a variety of dull reasons. Unfortunately, the Vista install kept stopping on the "Completing Installation" part. Rebooting in to safe mode led to it halting at "crcdisk.sys".

Anyway, after much head-scratching I found a couple of potential problems that can cause this. Firstly, if you have over 2Gb of RAM in the machine, try removing some so it's under the 2Gb mark (you can replace it post-install) - Vista, particularly 64 bit versions, seem to have trouble with this.

My problem was slightly different. It appears that AHCI mode for SATA can cause problems during the setup. I'm not sure why, but in any case, after disabling AHCI mode in the BIOS, the install ran through first time. BEWARE - if you simply enable AHCI afterwards, the chances are it won't boot. You need to enable the AHCI driver in the registry before rebooting with AHCI switched on, by following the steps in this MS Article: http://support.microsoft.com/kb/922976/en-us

Hope that helps!

Timelapse photography

I've been playing around a little with timelapse photography. This is basically where you take a series of photographs and then combine them in to a movie. The effect is that of a 'sped up' film and works very well with scenes of constant movement over time (think traffic at night in a city).

My first attempt was simply of some clouds passing over the house, and you can see the end result on the weather pictures page of the website. I set up my Sony DSLR camera on a tripod, and used a programmable shutter timer (from ebay) to take a picture every minute. I then resized the resulting .jpg images to a smaller size, and finally combined them into a movie using the simple img2avi utility. It came out pretty well, so I'm going to try this technique a little more!

Rent a villa, chalet or apartment at a great price!

We've teamed up with Villarenters to offer you some great deals for your next holiday. If you've visited the puffle site, you will have perhaps seen some of the photo pages from places we've visited. If you like the look of these, then we can now offer you some excellent deals on Villas and Chalets to rent for your next holiday!

Villarenters are one of the largest companies in the UK, and are backed by the Teletext holidays arm of the Daily Mail, so you can have the confidence to use their fantastic booking system to pick and choose your next villa! But the great thing is Villarenters aren't a travel agent - they merely put you in touch with the owner of the villa or chalet in a hassle free way. You book online and that's it! No phone calls to foreigners in the middle of the night trying to arrange things!

To help you out, we've put up some pages for places we've been with some example properties, but you can of course visit the Villarenters site using the banner above and search for somewhere anywhere in the world! If you do want some recommendations however, then check out:

Villas in the Italian Lakes, around Lake Garda
Villas in the Greek Islands of Corfu and Kefalonia
Chalets to rent in the Beautiful Saas Valley, Switzerland

new 3ds max images

I've popped a couple of new 3DS Max pictures on the website:

Audi race car


Courtyard


Rowing Boat


Visit the 3D Images gallery at puffle to check them out!