The X Factor Effect

"Quelle horreur!", as they apparently say in France, but yes I do watch the X Factor. In fairness, to say 'watch' is doing myself a disservice; let's just say it's on the TV and, in our house, dinner at weekends is timed to coincide with it being on TV. Perhaps watching cheesey television increases our appetite.

Each week while I eat my dinner, the would-be cash cow(ell)s prepare for their inevitable Xmas number 1 (you can imagine the scene in households up and down the UK: "<insert husband/boyfriend name here> I've had to pay 35p [plus standard network charge] every week to vote for Danollystacedward. If I've had to pay for the hype, I'm damn well going to buy the single!") by singing a song based loosely on that week's theme. Said theme of course dependant on whichever special guest act has a new album/single/book coming out and needs their own share of the hype. Funnily enough Cheryl Cole accused Simon Cowell of arranging a Rock Week for the first time because he is mentoring a rock singer this year. Er, no Cheryl, that'll be because Bon Jovi have a new album out and, strangely enough, were the special guests that week.

At least whoever wins can relax, knowing that the final will probably be the last time they ever need to sing live. From that point they can follow 'mentor' Cheryl Cole's lead and rely on Auto-Tune in the studio and lip-synching while performing 'live'. Allegedly, of course. Lip-synching, by the way, is just PC-speak for miming, the same way that cheating in sport is now referred to as 'simulation'. Not that it's done "nation's sweetheart" Cheryl Cole any harm, her single and album going to No. 1 after her lip-synching appearance on the same bill as the plainly off with the fairies Whitney Houston.

This brings me to the X Factor effect I mentioned in the title. Having to sit through the cabaret style performances of the contestants and middle-of-the-road guest acts (Whitney Houston, Michael Buble, Bon Jovi... it's like the scene from American Psycho where Christian Bale's title character decides to kill someone based on their MOR taste in music), makes me want to dig out some albums of real artists simply enjoying making music together either live on stage or in the studio.

So I've rediscovered some classic albums old and newish (and yes, I have got the Blues this week):

John Mayall with Eric Clapton - Blues Breakers
Fleetwood Mac - Blues Jam in Chicago
Gov't Mule - The Deep End
Jimmy Thackery - Guitar

Lifeboat - Topaz Adjusted

I'm currently playing with the Topaz Adjust plugin for Photoshop. The picture below is the first I've blogged after adjusting in Topaz (click for a larger version). It's easy to go way over the top with settings and create something weird and wacky but, as with most plugins, using it to create something more subtle takes a bit longer.

For this one I duplicated the background layer and edited the duplicate in Topaz Adjust. After playing with the sliders to get an effect I liked, I changed the blend mode of the duplicate layer to Soft Light and reduced the opacity of that layer slightly. The final touch was a mild Curves adjustment layer to boost the contrast.

Under Clacton Pier at Dawn

 

A shot from underneath Clacton pier at dawn (click on it for a larger version). It's actually 5 shots merged into one using a process known as tonemapping, which takes a series of pictures at varying exposures and averages them out. It's the photographic technique equivalent of Marmite, largely due to the number of badly processed images that are out there. It's easy to turn everything up to the max and end up with something that looks completely false and unrealistic.

I'm not suggesting that this one of mine is particularly great but it does represent what I actually saw at the time, i.e. the bright rays of the sun making shade patterns between the columns and also the detail below the boards. A camera can't capture the range of contrast that our eyes/brain interpret so a single photo is either too bright or too dark. There are some good HDR tutorials on the web, with the two best that I've found being:

• Trey Ratcliffe's Stuck In Customs, which is free, or
• David Nightingale's Chromasia site, which requires a subscription but has a wider range of training

Both have also recently released books on HDR technique (links are to Amazon UK): A World in HDR by Trey and Practical HDR by David. I've not read either of them yet but since both are excellent exponents of the art, they should be worth a look.

W7 Now Fully Installed

If you read the previous post you'll know I've been having some fun and games installing W7 64-bit on a clean machine. Last you heard, I was able to start from the beginning (again)...

Well, the short version of the story is that it's now fully installed and operational. After the previous issues seemed to be related to the quality of the drivers for  the Gigabyte motherboard's (the GA-EP35-DS3) SATA ports, I decided to replace the Hitachi 500GB SATAII hard drive with a spare Samsung 160GB PATA drive, hoping that using IDE would be more successful. Sure enough it was, though the build wasn't exactly plain sailing as a couple of blue screens did appear when Windows Update was run for the first time. Compared to the previous attempts however, it was almost a breeze.

So, to get it to work this was what I had to do:

• Use a PATA/IDE drive for the installation.
• Connect the BD-ROM drive to the Gigabyte SATA ports (as I knew I could download the driver from the Gigabyte website).
• Once built and able to log on, I downloaded the Gigabyte drivers for the SATA ports, LAN card and Audio.
• Before installing any other software I ran Windows update to get some application compatibility fixes installed.
• The first time I ran Windows Update, it blue screened while downloading the 8 Important updates. I rebooted and installed them one by one until the compatibility updates were installed and then the final 3 in a single batch.
• Then I downloaded and ran the Intel INF Update Utility to update the Intel chipset (USB and SATA).
• Finally I ran Windows Update again to get the optional updates (graphics card and LAN chip drivers). The graphics card driver installed first time, which was strange as it refused to do so on a previous attempt.

To sum up, it wasn't a pleasant installation experience. As a techie, I refused to let it beat me but 'normal' users may well have given up and installed something else instead. I could have understood it if I was using leading edge hardware but all of the components have been on the market for a year or so.

Windows 7 - A Premium Experience?

The following describes my experiences in installing Windows 7 Home Premium as a clean install on a new machine. I've never had such a bad experience in trying to install a version of Windows (desktop or server) in my 20+ years of working in IT. 24 hours after starting, I finally thought I'd cracked it but I'm now writing this before starting again for the umpteenth time. And I - supposedly - know what I'm doing.

Mrs Vinman's PC has been playing up for a while and it's fairly old now, so I decided to build her a replacement for her birthday. There seemed little point in buying Vista so I pre-ordered a copy of Windows 7 Home Premium. I sat down yesterday afternoon with a nice cup of tea and decided to spend an hour or so installing it. That was at 2pm. Shortly after 2am this morning I went to bed, thinking that I'd finally cracked it and could start transferring her data. Hah! After it trashed itself this morning I'm just about to start again.

Click the Read More link below to see the full details of the issues I experienced. I'll post separately if and when it installs reliably. For now, I'd say wait before you try as not all manufacturers seem to have made drivers available. I think several of the problems I'm having relate to chipset and SATA drivers for my Gigabyte motherboard. The Gigabyte website has W7 64-bit drivers for the sound chip, SATA RAID (their own controller, not the Intel) and the LAN chip but not the chipset. A DriverAgent scan advised that the USB and SATA drivers were out of date but the links to download updated ones were incorrect.