Posh Lard game roster sent out, as well as directions to avoid the cycle race someone decided to run across half of Cambridgeshire on Sunday.
Otherwise, I've been being house sysadmin and archivist, helping James build a new PC and scanning loads of precious paperwork from my long-lost D&D campaign (see a couple of days ago re B A C K U P S!!) with occasional pauses for nostalgia trips and evil cackling (hey, I was the DM, what can I say?)
Tomorrow I might actually get some peace and quiet (since everyone else is off to the Olympic Stadium to see Muse) to finish the Omaha Beach boards and pack for Sunday.
Well, there's usually one day a week when my hobby activity consists of admin, bookkeeping, emails and the like for one or both of the club and the show. Today's that day, and you don't want to know :D
Reminder for folks attending Posh Lard - if I haven't had your game preferences, please get them to me!
Another evening with the static grass applicator, this time on the three trench boards, which required a little work with masking tape so as not to get the grass in the trenches.
Also did a quick drybrush on the test piece. I'm waiting on WWS shipping me the non-aerosol (pump action) version of the spray before I can shoot video: while the store room I'm handling scenery boards in is big enough for an aerosol not to be a hazard, my workbench is in my office, which is distinctly cosier, and I'd rather not asphyxiate
Salutary lesson of the week: I am currently scanning and OCRing about 100 pages of printout that I did at one point about 25 years ago have on disk on my last Apple Mac but... um... about six or seven. Somewhere along the way they failed to get transferred across machines (I'm pretty sure they survived to around 2000 in a set of Claris Emailer folders, and possibly on my last mail server but three, but those HDs are long gone :(). Lessons learned, especially nowadays:
if you're attached to it, back it the heck up. Most stuff I care about is backed up both on Dropbox and on a Synology NAS at home, as well as local disk on my Macs. Stuff I'm really passionate about also has a copy on Google Drive.
There is EVEN LESS excuse for it than there was 25 years ago, with the advent of the cloud: one of my friends had a copy of most if not all the stuff I'm scanning, and like an idiot when she found it for me in 2007 I managed to accidentally delete it with no copy. And hers was on floppies...
On a happier note, LeadTools OCR is a very nice free app (for Mac among others) for converting scanned documents to Text. Surprisingly error free and comes with a nice set of cleanup tools: I'm averaging about 3 errors a page on about 8 point laser printed text, which plenty few enough I'm happy to correct them by hand afterwards.
Today's a bank holiday. I had, given the chaos of the last couple of weeks, completely forgotten this until last Friday, when the Ukrainian QA lead at work wished us a good long weekend... At least she's on the ball!
I spent a fair amount of it sorting through paperwork for my old D&D campaign (man, THAT was a nostalgia trip!) but also got the cream dry/overbrush done on the remaining beach boards, so they're ready for a mammoth bout of re-grassing (yes, again) along with the rest of the Omaha boards this week, in time for Posh Lard. Fortunately the War Worlds Scenics layering spray makes this very easy. I hope to do a test board later in the week and video the process, now I can.
It's a week today - Sunday 2nd June 2019 in Peterborough. Details are here! (And I've been doing the pre-event housekeeping today :D)
Current game options are a couple of Big Chain of Command and the infamous Bloody Omaha - as yet we're ok for numbers for just those three, but if anyone else wants to come along, feel free to sign up and pay your £5!
Rich has it in his diary, so should be paying us a visit.
Well, that was a learning experience. I finally got the camera batteries charged (and a new charger ordered that doesn't require a US to UK adaptor :D) after Wednesday's setup stuff and Thursday and Friday's general gefuffle in getting James out of hospital (our NHS are wonderful, trust me, but woefully understaffed and underfunded - don't get me started).
Nice setup - basically I have a pair of lapel mikes that go to wireless belt packs (they also do a single one for not much more than half the price), and the receiver unit will mount on the camera accessory shoe out of the way and plug into the microphone input on the camera. As I have a newer Canon (700D) DSLR it'll shoot full HD video and the view screen will flip and twist so I can see it while I'm filming.
Things to work on:
the view screen is sufficiently small I can't see it very well without my glasses, which means I can't tell if I'm correctly focused when sat down. The autofocus can 'hunt' a bit, which currently is solved by a process that involves a bunch of faffing with manual with something placed in the chair at 'me' height to focus on. More experimentation required - I think I can force it to use a limited set of autofocus points so it will reliably pick up me rather than the bookcase behind me.
I could plug a small monitor into the camera's mini HDMI output so I can see what it's showing better, however...
this would make my tendency not to look into the camera even worse (which is not helped by having a lazy left eye that tends to drift inward :D)
That said, I don't look as bad in front of a camera as a talking head as I thought I might...
Still. Can't show you the resulting video as it's for someone else, but here's a screen grab of iMovie, just to prove I'm not making it up.
Next step is to sort out all of the above, and also figure out which multi-camera software I can use for gameplay videos.
Yes, I'm not done tidying yet :D
I do also now have a small camera clamp, which was bought for James while he was in hospital but wasn't terribly useful, which now allows me to do over-the-shoulder workbench shots without camera shake and my head getting in the way.
I do also have a shelf clamp for the DSLR, but it's quite hard to get it to stay in position and not sag, annoyingly.
The below (very short!) test video was done using the iPhone audio, rather than the lapel mic - as it's pretty much just above my head, this isn't that bad (yes, the dialogue is banal, but it's just proof of concept). It does demonstrate that my cutting mat has seen better days, however...
