Notice: No more updates

Hey all,

After almost 4 years of figure reviewing and blogging I’ve decided to stop updating. I’ve had a review in draft for over 3 weeks now and I’m just not progressing with it – so that’s been the trigger to decide I no longer want to be doing this anymore. I still enjoy the photography aspect of this blog, it’s more the review write up that I’m not enjoying. I thought about just posting reviews with pictures only, but then there would be no audience interaction. I also considered writing the review after I pre-order a figure in preparation but again had no luck. I started this blog mainly as a means to show off my figures and talk about them with others, but over the years I feel as though I need to keep improving on what I previously did. And sadly that takes more effort and more time – and I’m just not prepared to commit to the requirements anymore.

I’ll still be collecting figures and photographing them for myself. I may also upload one or two to MyFigureCollection since it’s a way of still being able to show off my collection without having to write a ~1000 word review.

It’s a been a good run and I thank you for all your views and comments. I’m also glad I’ve been able to (hopefully) improve my photography and writing skills over the years. But it’s now time for me to return to becoming a content consumer rather than provider. I’ll now be some guy with a UK IP address adding a +1 to your view count.

High Power LEDs – an alternative light source?

In some of my posts and comments you may have read me banging on about how I use primarily LED lights for my photos. I like LEDs – they’re quite different from your conventional light bulb. Being an awkward little bugger I decided I only wanted to use such systems for photography and put up with any of their draw backs. I’ve been using standard off the shelf LED bulbs for a while now – the ones with clusters of many LEDs.

The biggest disadvantage of these LED bulbs is their directional and relatively low light output – compared to a standard and equally priced halogen/florescent bulb. So in order to get more light output I decided to investigate high power LEDs – plus it’s a good excuse to put my electrical engineering skills to the test again. Ultimately though it’s worth remembering it’s how you use the light that makes a picture; I just thought I’d share with you my in-development high power LED lighting set-up. Who knows maybe you too might give LEDs a try, or maybe it sparks an idea that you might want to try.

It’s also worth stating I’ll be going into a bit of detail about the circuit I’ve assembled. If you don’t have a clue what voltage and current are you’ll probably not have a clue what I’m blabbing about. I’ll try my best to keep things simple, let me know in the comments section if you followed.

Custom Display Case Lighting

In my last post I briefly mentioned I’d been working on a little project for myself. Well I’m at a point I’m quite happy to share the results with everyone. Basically I’ve setup some controllable display case lighting using RGB LEDs. I can control their behaviour, colours etc using a C# GUI on my laptop which communicates with an mbed microcontroller over USB. Read on if you want to find out more about the system.

A “little” February update

I’m probably not going to have much time (or content by the looks of things) to write any other posts for the rest of February so I’ve decided to post about some of my recent goodies. They’re nothing exciting, just a few DVDs and little trading figures. Also with the recent burst of figure news from Winter Wonfest ’11 I thought I’d post about the figures that caught my attention. So this post will be in three sections – Trading Figures, DVDs, and Winter WF ’11.

I’ll try my best to make my way round the blogs I usually visit, although it looks like weekends will be the only chance I’ll have to write comments. I don’t think I’ve ever been this busy before, I’ve pretty much had to put all the anime I’m watching on hold. I’m hoping March will become a little quieter .

Whaa? o.O

Look what came knocking on my door this morning.

29 Nov.

01 Dec.

Think I’ll just not answer .

Treasure Hunting

Sorry it’s been so long since I last had time to do anything. But as of today, well yesterday, I finished both my dissertations.

Snow like?

Like most people across Europe we are getting heavy snow here. At the moment over 40cm deep snow is just lying around; blocking up the streets and roads.

I’ve been keeping track of this by taking pictures at various points, and I thought I would share some of them with you.

What have I been up to

Been a while since I’ve posted and commented. Just finished my last exam today, so all is good.

First Post

So I’ve decided to start my own blog.

I hope to use this to write small reviews and post new pictures of any figures I get. I’ll also use this space to post anything interesting happening in my life (computer games, uni work – whatever I feel like at the time).

So, yeah, we’ll see how this goes.

For anyone interested about me, I’m currently finished my 3rd year of a 5 year course in MEng Electrical and Electronic Engineering at Heriot Watt University. I really enjoy what I do at uni, and hope it will help me with getting a job in either the Electronics or Power/High Voltage industry. In my spare time I’m either messing about with computers, or playing MMOs on them. I also enjoy watching anime, and have recently started collecting figures from them.

I’m currently on my summer holidays from uni and have been given the opportunity to work on a Wind Farm that is being built near Dunbar. Hopefully this industrial experience will help me out for the 6 month work placement I have to do as part of my MEng next year.

BT