McAleavy.org

On Wednesday my latest eBay purchase finally arrived from the Ukraine – A LOMO Sputnik stereo TLR. It’s basically two Lubitels fused together – a Bakelite monstrosity with all the light leaks, shiny internal surfaces and dodgy engineering familiar to owners of Soviet cameras. At the very least some internal flocking will be required to make it serviceable.

It is, however, enormous fun and shoots stereo images that are considerably less blurry than my stereo Holga, although that, to be honest, isn’t saying very much.

I’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.8.4 and Domain Mirror is working without any issues.

I’ve just had the pleasure of being interviewed for Univers d’Artistes, the blog of Carrie Leigh’s NUDE magazine.

Univers d’Artistes interview

A big hello to everyone who has found my site from there.

I’m going to be working in Nottingham for the next couple of weeks if I can get there through the snow tomorrow. So I’ll be spending my evenings in a hotel room with no internet access, which should at least give me plenty of time to catch up on some image editing…

I’ve just been somewhat surprised to see Domain Mirror at position 586 on a list of the top 1000 most downloaded WordPress plugins. This has reminded me that I have a new version that allows different post categories to be shown on each site. If anyone is interested in testing it give me a shout.

I’ve also been looking at updating the ancient version that’s posted in the WordPress Plugin Directory, but because of the way the repository packages things I would need to rename it so that it will automatically install into the correct directory. There would also be issues with the config.inc.php file being overwritten during updates unless I can figure out how to detect it’s presence from within the plugin.

Both of these issues are likely to cause breakage with the first auto-update, so if you’re using the plugin let me know and I’ll make sure you have an updated version before I update the repository. That way I can avoid breaking mirrors all over the place.

One of the greatest disappointments of my musical life was the day I bought the ZZ Top album Tres Hombres on CD. What I heard on that disc wasn’t really the same album that was released on vinyl; it had been remixed and re-effected to make it sound more like their current post-Eliminator sound.

In its new form the whole album is bathed in a thick reverb that hides a lot of the detail. The original sounds like the band are in the room with you; the new version sounds like they’re playing in the tiled bathroom next door. Possibly inside a locked filing cabinet. Hopefully with a sign on the door saying “Beware of the leopard.” I took that CD straight back with a horrified look on my face.

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