Painting in Montefalco

Having not done any watercolour painting for 14 months, it was time to go and give it another crack. So myself and another 11 like minded souls met up for the first time at Perugia airport. We met the tour organiser and our painting tutor for the week and were soon travelling to our hotel in the hilltop town of Montefalco.
Here are some of my photos from that week, together with my efforts of producing watercolour paintings from the inspirational scenes that abound in Umbria.

 Early morning at Stansted

 

In transit

 

On finals with Assisi in the distance

 

Montefalco houses

 

A classic Fiat 500

 

Every Italian door is different (no uPVC in sight)

 

Our tutor helps a budding artist capture the view

 

Perugia is full of character

 

Pink Vespa

 

Sagrantino grapes

 

The local vineyard in Montefalco

 

A typical hilltop scene

 

I must try painting this

 

Buttresses

 

Approaching sunset in Assisi

 

The Basilica di San Fransesco

 

Montefalco olive groves

 

Local transport

 

Glad I was sending postcards from Montefalco and not the B.... place

 

The hotel pool

 

Time to return home

 

Montefalco street

 

 Piazza Dante door

 

Fiat 500

 

On the hotel terrace

 

My first ever sketch

 

Montefalco landscape

 

I enjoyed my week in Italy and the weather, food, wine, views, and company were all good.

In other news, I see that Lewis Hamilton is leaving the McLaren F1 team at the end of the year, and will be joining the Mercedes team for 2013. So my suspicions mentioned in my post on the 8th of this month were correct.

The World T20 (WT20) cricket match tournament is underway in Sri Lanka. The England women won their first match yesterday when playing Pakistan. They are due to play India tomorrow and Australia on Monday.
I'll be keeping an eye on how it goes.

All the best

Peewit

England women win T20 series

On Monday I watched on tv, part of the second T20 game between England Women and West Indies women from Old Trafford. The rain stayed away and England won the match having lost the toss again. This time the West Indies team were better opponents but still lost by 28 runs.

Today the teams were playing again at the Northampton ground. There was no tv coverage but I did manage to find some audio ball by ball coverage on the Internet. It was rather odd as the commentators had never seen the England women play before. In the commentary there were lots of long pauses before players names were given. Even then they were often wrong. It was good to hear that Charlotte Church is now playing cricket even though her score was lower than expected from the England captain. The match was much closer but England did still pull off a win by 10 runs after some excellent work by the bowlers and in the field. So England have now won the series 3-0 with the two remaining matches coming from Hove, and then Arundel over the coming weekend.

I was hoping to go and watch the Arundel match but instead I am travelling to Montefalco in Italy for a week of watercolour painting. I am sure there will also been some good food and wine and a fair amount of site seeing.
Anyway well done to the England team.

Peewit

Lewis Hamilton wins at Monza

I did not watch today's Formula 1 race live. As it was on Sky, I watched the Tour of Britain cycling on ITV4. I should have been outside as it was a sunny and warm day.
Later on I did watch the BBC programme that provided the highlights of the race from Monza. It was certainly not what I expected with Button's car retiring due to a fuel problem and neither Red Bull car getting into the points. Lewis Hamilton won the race and Alonso having finished third, retains the overall lead in the driver's championship. See that latest charts here.

Tomorrow afternoon I will be watching the tv again. This time it is the England Women's cricket team taking on the West Indies at a T20 match from Manchester. England had a convincing win in the first match of the series from Durham. It might be a bit harder for this match and of course being in Manchester it could rain.

Peewit

Pork pie weekend

It is another Grand Prix weekend.

On each weekend where there is a Formula One Grand Prix I buy myself a pack of these as it is a special occasion.

 

These treats seem to be coming thick and fast at the moment. I suppose that is one of the benefits of having 20 F1 races this year. With the messing around with the tv coverage this year, I watched the BBC coverage of the qualifying session a bit ealier. This was not live but about fours hours behind the actual event. The BBC engineers seemed to cobble up the sound balance so although I could see the video, the commentary was almost completely drowned out by the wail of F1 engines. Lewis Hamilton is on pole for tomorrow's Italian Grand Prix from Monza. If you want see the trends taking place in F1 this year you could always take a look at my website www.f1charts.com
I will post the up to date charts soon after the end of the race tomorrow. The chart of Team car reliability for this year clearly shows that Mercedes have consistently led the field in terms of broken cars that fail to finish. I hope that they can improve on this if Lewis is going to join them.

Meanwhile my attempt at creating panoramic photos as easily as possible continues. You can see my latest attempt here. It is the newly revamped Woking Town Square.

Peewit

More panoramic stuff

As mentioned previously I have been looking at the way in which to produce a panoramic image. I recently visited Guildford and took along my entry level DSLR (a Canon 1000D that I bought in Sydney a couple of years ago) and my new Samyang 8mm lens. I took five photos from the same spot in the High Street and produced this panorama with the aid of some pc software.

I also used the same five photos to make this youtube video.

So just taking five photos in under 60 seconds is all you need. However my plan is to also make some gigapixel panoramas when I am back in Sydney. The idea of these is that you can zoom in and get a lot of detail. I will use a standard lens but you do need to take about 54 photos. So to achieve this I have made up a special bracket to hold the camera while I rotate it between shots. The bracket is mounted on a tripod with "click stop" panoramic head on it. You can buy a fully robotic head to do all this automatically but I want to save the money and do the job the harder but more rewarding way. Only time will tell if I get decent results.

Peewit

Panoramic image quest

I have been trying out the ways and means to take photos and then convert these into full 360 degree spherical panoramas.
Why bother ?
Well when I was in NSW, I kept visiting many beautiful locations and feeling frustrated that I could not adequately capture the scene in a photo. A panoramic photo does a reasonable job although it does take a bit of effort and some expense to get started.
Anyway, I decided to have a go as I am heading back to Sydney in a couple of months. This time I will be able to visit or re-visit places and get a proper panoramic image.

Here is my first attempt. It is a local bridge that crosses the Basingstoke canal near Woking.

Peewit

Cricket at Normandy CC

Yes, I know that this photo is not cricket, but last Saturday I watched the whole of the Olympic mens cycle road race on tv.
I took this photo of the race as it appeared on my tv.

 

Team GB were running plan A that was intended to deliver Mark Cavendish to the front of the race with 1 Km to go. However when it became clear that plan A was not working there did not seem to be a plan B. That was such a shame as the team had made a massive effort to get the wanted result. In the end they were out of the medals.


On Sunday I watched the women's cycle road race. The weather was awful and it contributed to a number of crashes. However the girls of the team did a good job especially Emma Pooley who was often at the front at crucial points on the Box Hill circuit. After a long run into London with heavy rain all the way, Lizzie Armitstead fought out the final sprint for gold with Marianne Vos of Holland. Vos got the gold and Armitstead got the silver and the first medal of the games for team GB.

On Monday I went to the Normandy Cricket Club to watch the first day of a womens T20 county tournament. The counties taking part were Kent, Surrey (where I am residing at the moment), Middlesex and Sussex.

Normandy is only a few miles from where I live and I love to watch cricket where a large number of the top English International players are taking part.

Here are Surrey batting and Sussex fielding at the second oval at Normandy.

Oh dear, Surrey do not seem to be doing too well here. 37 for 7 and only a few overs left.

 

It was time to go and look at the match between Kent and Middx. Kent were batting and a certain C Edwards was out first ball of the match. I was going to ask her for her autograph but decided against it.

 

In the end, Kent managed to win the match fairly easily as Middx struggled to score.

 

Sussex had won the other match with Surrey only managing to get 41 runs in their twenty overs.
So lunch was a bit early and we had only had had one short spell of rain. Most of the time it had been sunny spells and a cool wind that kept the spectactors well covered up. Maybe I was the only only spectator that was not a friend or family member of a player.

Here, Middlesex are batting and Sussex are in the field.

 

There was a lot of verbal encouragement from one player. As expected this was Aaron Brindle. Middlesex only managed to 61 runs in their innings.

 

I went back to the Kent v Surrey match. Surrey had won the toss and chose to bat first. They managed 62 for 9 from their twenty overs.

Now it was time for Kent to bat. This time Charlotte Edwards was back in form. The red cricket ball dipping in from the far right of the photo is about to get crashed into the woods.

 

Rhiannon Dick at the other end gets this ball just above her pads. I am sure it hurt but at least it was from a slow delivery.

 

Charlotte connecting with a ball that was coming in my direction for another four.

 

Charlotte got 31 before being caught out. However Kent soon chased down the required total in just six overs.

So Kent and Sussex won two games, while Surrey and Middlesex lost both of theirs.

Tomorrow the remaining games and final will be played but as the weather does not look good I will not be attending. The British summer strikes again.

Peewit

How I fixed a faulty Toshiba RD100KB video unit

Firstly a warning. This unit has no earth connection via the mains plug. It is therefore double insulated. The power supply has some very high and potentially lethal voltages on it. I measured 334 volts dc on one capacitor.
Only somebody who has had suitable training should undertake this repair.

The Toshiba RD100KB is a tv freeview tuner with a 320 GB hard disc and a DVD recorder built in. This is not a HD unit.

Just after the 12 months warranty ran out, the unit failed. The fault symptom was that you could not turn it on. On applying mains power there was a click followed by another click a second later.

I was not keen to scrap it especially when it has some recorded programs on the hard disk that had not been viewed. After having unplugged everything, including the mains supply, I removed the cover. I could see the power supply area and this had extra plastic safety shielding over parts of it.

Further disassembly revealed a complex power supply arrangement with multiple output dc voltages. I could see that one section of the power supply was permanently connected to the mains input and this produced a 5 volt rail. Pressing the “power on” button caused a relay to close a pair of contacts on the power supply board and produce the multiple dc outputs require for the logic and various devices. As I said the relay only closed the contacts for a moment and then dropped out again. I decided to entirely remove the psu board from the unit and this meant disconnecting quite a few ribbon cables and some mechanical disassembly. Once I had got the psu board onto a flat and non conductive surface, I applied a link to short out the relay contacts. This meant that mains would be applied to the main power supply and I could chase down the fault. It seemed that the power supply would only work properly when the other bits were connected as a load. However I was able to determine that the 12 volt rail was missing with everything connected.
After breaking everything down again, and with the mains supply unplugged , I probed around the 12 volt supply components looking for short circuits. Indeed there was a short circuit. I removed a capacitor as they are the usual suspects, but this was not the problem. Cutting a track threw suspicion upon a couple of Schottky diodes that were in parallel. I de-soldered the end of one and lifted it. The short circuit disappeared. This particular diode was a short circuit. The diode is a SK3B and is D2204 on the board. I tested the board again with just the remaining diode in circuit. It was now working. I re-assembled everything and removed the link from the power supply board.
A functional test showed everything in working order. The Schottky diode has a 3 amp rating and as there were two in parallel they must be expecting currents of up to 6 amps. For this reason I ordered some replacement diodes so that I could change them as a matched pair.

It was pleasing to get this unit working again. Modern electronics are usually reliable but there do seem to be a lot of fake components around these days.
This experience makes me wary of Toshiba products. It was certainly not designed for ease of servicing and I could not get hold of a circuit diagram.
Personally I prefer to see a proper mains earth for the metal case.

Peewit

Trip to Greenwich

As my youngest brother and his family who live in California were over in England on holiday, I thought that it would make a good day out to go to Greenwich.
It seems like I was wrong.
I had visited Greenwich on my own a couple of years ago and had found that the place was a building site with access denied to many areas. They were filming the most recent, and most boring of the Pirates of the Caribbean series at the time. However I did at least manage to get to the Greenwich Observatory to see the Harrison clocks, and the Prime Meridian. Most of the points of interest around Greenwich are free of charge to view.

The weather in England has been very poor with endless rain and little sunshine. This day was looking to be much the same , but one has to make the best of it.

We took the train to Waterloo and then walked to the quays by the London Eye.
Here we boarded a river cruise to Greenwich.

The sky was grey but at least it was not actually raining.
The recently opened Shard now dominates the skyline south of the Thames.

On arriving at Greenwich we saw the Cutty Sark which again has just been recently re-opened to the public after it was partially destroyed in a fire.
It does seem that many attempts to renovate things actually end up in a fire engulfing the object in question. Maybe this is a tactic to extract greater sums of money for the renovation, or maybe it is just plain incompetence.


We decided to get some lunch and visited this Pie and Mash shop where we had "pie and mash". It was very nice and excellent value for money.


After our lunch it was time to go exploring. However we did see "The first shop in the world" nearby.


As we walked towards Greenwich Park it soon became clear that once again the whole place was a massive building site. It seems that some Olympic events were being carried out here. The entire Park was closed. The amount of building, steelwork, seating, electrical and communications infrastructure being installed was staggering. It must be costing millions. Most of it looked brand new and there were hundreds of construction workers. All this for a temporary structure.

We did attempt to walk around the Park to see if there was any access at any point but there was not. The best we could manage was to find a plaque in the wall on a northern boundary.


What a disaster, and it was threatening to rain all the time.
We made our way back down the hill and did at least pay a quick visit to the Maritime Museum. Soon after we boarded another river cruise boat back to Waterloo and a train ride home.

Avoid Greenwich.

Peewit