Wednesday 21 September 2011

The console gamer in me returns

As the years have gone by post Playstation 2 era I lost something in me that caused me to not game so much anymore, it may have been that the consoles I owned after the PS2 were a Gamecube and Wii which may not have helped my cause and so after the Wii I became a PC gamer which I did enjoy and can still enjoy if I want to, but the support for the platform and the fun factor is not there like it is on the Xbox 360

But having recently purchased an Xbox 360 I have not even wanted to touch my PC games at all lately, I think the gamer inside me has always fancied console games more even though during my few years as a full on PC gamer I adapted some sort of approach to consoles and thought they were all inferior to my PC which was sort of funny, graphical wise PC will always be superior, one day that may change but it is not the case right now, but it has never been about just graphics for me, I love both modern and retro games, still, so you can guess my take on graphics, but the better graphics is always a bonus and a nice thing to have obviously

I love the support the Xbox 360 has compared to the PC platform which is I am guessing is mainly due to piracy on the PC platform, lately I have been enjoying some good classics as I have been unable to afford any new titles yet apart from a few but lately I have been playing Soul Calibur 4, Forza 3, Lips and more which have all given me a challenge and if not a challenge sure have provided me with hours of funs

Well thats about it then, not sure what else I could add, but I will give you my gamertag on Xbox Live and maybe you can add me! Gamertag is kevcampbell, like my username is at most places across the web, so please add it because one I could do with more friends on there and two, I would like some challenges thrown my way if you would be so kind haha

Sunday 17 July 2011

The complete guide to Google+

Google+ is the hot social network on the block. In just three weeks, the competitor to Facebook and Twitter has amassed more than 10 million users, and its users are sharing more than 1 billion pieces of content daily.

Google+ is not the easiest thing to understand though, it has plenty of features that can confuse beginners. Even advanced users can miss a lot of the little gems that define Google+.

That is why we decided to dig into every aspect of Google+, from Hangouts to Circles, from Google+ for businesses to what is next for the new social network. The result is an extensive guide on all of the key features of Google+. There is also an introduction to the service and the important things you need to know about it. We have included commentary, videos, photos and more in our guide. In addition we will update this guide regularly with the newest information on Google+

So here now I present to you the complete guide to Google+ written by Mashable

Friday 15 July 2011

Get a Google+ invite right here, or add me to Google Plus

Google+, Google Plus, G+. Whatever you want to call it is one of the hottest and one of the fastest ever growing social networking websites going today, invites were very rare and difficult to acquire, not so much now, but there are people still out there searching for invites, being people scammed for invites and people asking what the hell Google+ is

In this second paragraph I will cut right to the chase, if you want a Google+ invite, simply just leave an email address for me in the comment field which will be seen to usually within an hour of you posting the comment as I am usually always nearby a computer so the comment you post containing the email address will be sent an invitation and immediately after the comment will be deleted to protect privacy, alternatively you can go through my other websites and email me if you found out how from the other websites, however I will not advertise my email address here

As for adding me to Google+, please do by clicking here

If you are new to Google+ or have never heard of it before I suggest you take a look at this page here to learn more about Google+ or simply by watching the video below, of course all of this will not tell you everything about Google+ but I found the best way to learn was to read that same link, watch that same video, using the actual Google search engine to find out about Google+ and joining the new social networking website I found also helped me a great deal to learn more about how everything worked

So ask for an invite and receive one, I will not scam you and I will not ask for anything in return, I am just inviting those who want to be invited out of decency, if you want to thank me though you can link to this post or my blog as a way of saying thank you, which is also not required

The point of this post and me wanting to invite you to Google+? Well I must admit I am a Google fanboy and user of many Google products, which I would also like to see others using for no specific reason. So get an invite, join me if you will and hopefully be a happy user of Google+ like I can proudly say now after about 3 days of using the service.

Thursday 14 July 2011

Recipe: Sizzling Beef (Jamie Oliver) (Edited)

Seeing as I have not posted in a long while which indicates I have run out of ideas on what to post, anyone got any suggestions? But however I do see some posts are very popular and still receiving loads of hits per month, but in the meantime instead of letting this blog go more months without any new posts I figured I would feature some recipes.

These recipes most of the time will not be mine but however they will be edited most of the time and I will always provide the source material, so lets begin

Serves: 2

Ingredients:

Half cup of basmati rice
1 egg
250g  rump steak
Small thumb sized piece of ginger
1 clove of garlic
3 spring onions
Half a pack of Blue Dragon Black Bean Stir Fry Sauce
A good lug (or 3 tbsp) of soy sauce
1 lime

Prepare:


1: Measure half a cup of basmati rice to 1 cup or 2 half cups of water and add water and rice to saucepan. Bring rice to boil and transfer saucepan to a very low heat hob (setting number 1 on my electric cooker) and wrap saucepan lid in a kitchen or hand towel and cover the saucepan, what this will do is soak up the moisture from the steam, leave it to cook for about 15 minutes
2: Once rice is cooked remove from the heat and add rice to a sieve and run cold water over it, once rice has been drained add to a bowl and refrigerate
3: Trim away any excess fat and gristle from the steak and cut the steak into strips
4: Peel and finely chop the garlic and ginger
5: Slice the spring onions, and on the chopping board combine with ginger and garlic and continue to slice to remove any big parts of spring onion of ginger
6:  combine steak, spring onions, garlic and ginger in a bowl and sprink with a small amount of oil and mix everything together with hands

Cook:


1: Preheat a wok or large frying pan and once very, very hot add some oil (I used olive oil) but you can use whatever you want
2: Be very careful and add the chopped ingredients from the bowl to the pan and keep everything moving quickly to avoid burning and sticking
3: Continue to stir fry until beef is browned/cooked or for about 3 minutes
4: Add in the black bean sauce and give it a stir around
5: Quickly remove from the heat and add in the juice of 1 lime, return to heat quickly and give everything a quick swirl around
6: Transfer everything to a clean bowl
7: Crack in the egg along with some soy sauce (the egg will cook quickly so keep stirring) and once scrambled add in the cold rice, scraping the sides and the bottom as you go
8: Keep stirring until rice is hot
9: Serve between 2 bowls or plates and add the meat with its sauce to the top of the rice

Source video

Saturday 14 May 2011

Recording my ride at Ingrebourne Hill

Today marked the first time I had properly got to use my MD80 mini camera on a bike ride, there was not much preparation for today's ride, good thing though I had porridge this morning for breakfast, something I have not had in some months, and there was no other healthy food in our cupboards or something that was ready to pick at as a fortnightly shopping trip is due very soon, so I raided my fridge and got knife happy with some salad, sliced up some small raw button mushrooms, a quarter of a bell pepper diced, some diced up cucumber and and some chopped spring onions, and it did not taste too bad and I think it actually kind of helped as a mid ride snack as far as keeping me going went

So moving away from the food talk, I set out with the camera attached to the handlebars and eventually I reached Ingrebourne Hill in Rainham which was when I started recording, and from here on the video does the rest of the talking, but I will mention some things, firstly it looks like I am riding as slow as a baby on a bike, but it must be the angle of the camera or something? Next time I will angle the camera differently on the handlebars, and another thing is that there at 3 laps I recorded, but I stopped and started the recordings of each lap and joined all 3 video files, so you may notice some strange changes in the video if you watch it through, oh and lap 3 I started recording late, about 30 seconds into the lap, which was simply because I did not hit the record button properly so it was not recording, but it does not matter, the video is below that I hope you will find of some entertainment or you will enjoy



Of course I stopped recording after the 3rd lap, as all I was going to do now was ride back home, which I could not have done even if I wanted to as the Micro SD run out of space right after I completed the 3rd lap, so that sure was close, looks like I may need to invest in a larger Micro SD Card if I want to record some long journeys or loads more laps over at Ingrebourne Hill. Well if that happens which I guess it will that will come at a later date, for now I hope you enjoyed today's video and I hope you enjoy future videos that I plan on recording for everyone to see.

Thursday 12 May 2011

Cycling, free swimming, what do you do to keep active?

As you are visiting this blog I assume most of my visitors are cyclists, but in addition to cycling what other cardio exercises do you do? or what sports do you take part in?

Up until about 3 weeks ago my only keep active sport I took part in was cycling, but 3 weeks ago I started to go swimming because me and Sarah could get into swimming for almost nothing, how you say? well there are lakes that are free and very cold, but of course I am not talking about that kind of swimming, I am talking about the more expensive type, in a public swimming pool. Since I have been buying bottles of Schweppes Abbey Well bottled water we have been going swimming for next to nothing, around £1 for 2 bottles, and that will get 2 of us a free swim, there are terms and conditions, like at some swimming pools you are restricted to certain times, but I am not complaining as we have been having a good time lately and getting much healthier at the same time

So the cardio exercises I take part in, you now know. Cycling which is free and swimming which costs almost nothing, what a result we have there

Let us all know what you have to say, in the comments, and if you never knew about the swimming bottle caps that can get you into swimming for free, there is no better time to start swimming if you have not already.

Tuesday 10 May 2011

More VirtualDub tips in relation to MD80 videos

You may have recently read the post in where I wrote a tutorial on how to remove a yellow time and date stamp from videos recorded using an MD80 video recording device, today I am not going into too much detail about things but I will give some tips and quickly explain alternative options on how to remove the time stamp by cropping and will give some other useful advice while I am at it and I hope you find the information useful.

Cropping:

First today we are going to crop a video we have recorded using an MD80 camera, so first of all load up VirtualDub, if you are not sure how please follow the first steps in the previous tutorial about removing a time stamp. So you should now have VirtualDub opened up, now proceed to opening a video file by pressing Ctrl and O on the keyboard and now press Ctrl and F and add a filter, the filter you want to add is the brightness contrast filter, do not make any adjustments unless you want to, but for some reason for me this seems to be the only way to make an option for cropping to appear in the filters. So now once cropping is clickable click that and in X1 and X2 offset you want the number 15 in each and in Y2 offset you want 30. Alternative you can just adjust Y2 offset and leave X1 and X2 offset, but this is the way I do it. Now press OK to return to the main VirtualDub window and you can now proceed to save as AVI as also instructed in the previous tutorial. But wait there is something else, I am not finished yet.

Compressing Video:

Do you hate clicking save as AVI for the simple fact of oh no I am going to end up with another huge file on my computer, well lets solve that together. First I want you to download this Xvid codec named Koepi's Xvid Codec from here. Once you have installed the codec you may need to restart VirtualDub and open the video file again and make those cropping adjustments if you need or want to. Carrying on, now that VirtualDub is opened once again press Ctrl and P on the keyboard and select the Xvid MPEG-4 Codec from the list and click configure, drag the slider between maximum quality and smallest file for whichever you like, you may want to keep all the quality or you may want a tiny file size which will have horrible video quality, I have adjusted it so that it is at a level of 5.00. Once the adjustments are made continue to click OK to return to the main window and click save as AVI. the file should now start saving and you should notice the file size will not be of many many gigabytes.

I know this has only been a quick tutorial for today but I hope you have found it useful, if you have leave a comment letting me know or if not still let me know and I will try to improve it, thanks for reading

Saturday 7 May 2011

MD80 camcorder instructions for removal of time stamp

MD80 as it is best well known is a tiny DV DVR camera that comes with many different names under many different brands and the only difference appears to be the price in many models, I purchased my MD80 for just under £16 which included a free micro SD card and card reader.

These cameras can be used for many things including sports and may also come in handy if you are hoping to be the next James Bond, but you may think what you have recorded have been spoilt by some giant yellow time stamp in the bottom right hand corner of the video, well what I will try to do here is make these instructions very simple so that almost everyone should be able to follow my insutructions and be able to successfully remove that time stamp

Step 1: So here is the first of many steps, just follow each step and skip no steps at all. Firstly you will want to get that video off the Micro SD card so plug the card into a USB card reader and the card should now appear as a removable disk with a capital letter assigned to it. Now you want to open that up and once that is opened you will want to go through some other folders named DCIM and 100MEDIA to find all the video files you have recorded

Step 2: Once you are in the 100MEDIA folder you want to select whatever video file you want and copy and  paste it or drag it to a suitable folder or to the desktop

Step 3: You now need an application Called VirtualDub which you can download by clicking here, once you have downloaded VirtualDub extract the contents of the the archive to a suitable folder or you could extract the files to the desktop but it will make the desktop look messy. Now once you have extracted that archive to a suitable location open up the folder named plugins

Step 4: Now you want to download a VirtualDub plugin to put in the plugins folder, so download this plugin named Logoaway and copy it to the plugins folder

Step 5: Now open up VirtualDub by clicking on the VirtualDub icon and not vdub and once it has been opened click on File and after that click on Open video file or press Ctrl and O on the keyboard at the same time. Now you want to browse to where that video file is and open it in VirtualDub

Step 6: Once video file is loaded, in VirtualDub hold down Ctrl and F on the keyboard to open up Filters, once the box pops up click Add and now click Load and now browse to where the plugins folder is located and open logoaway.vdf. Now scroll down the list of filters, click on logoaway v4.01 and now click OK

Step 7: Logoaway configuration should now have loaded so now what you want to do is first click Show preview and click one of the large buttons named XY. and now you want to adjust the values for the logo border positioning and the logo border size, for the logo border position I use 325 for X and 445 for Y and for logo border size I use a width of 370 and a height of 35. Once all those adjustments are made you can adjust the sliders for Blur power and X-Y weight to whatever you think looks best, if you can not decide yourself you could try just having both sliders positioned in the middle. Now all is done and you now want to click OK to close the configuration window and click OK again on the next window

Step 8: Now click File and look for Save as AVI, click that and save the video file. Warning, the file size of the output video will be huge and you will want a video converter to convert the video to a suitable size

Step 9: The following steps are now optional, what you will now want to do is download a video converter, this one right here is free with no catches and is a very useful and simple video converter that I use regularly

Step 10: If you have downloaded Freemake Video Converter and still need help read on. Now what you want to do once the video converter is installed is open it up and simply drag and drop a video file into the main window. Once that is done it is now time to click one of those large buttons at the bottom. For today click on the button named to AVI and now you can select many presets, for today just leave it as DVD Quality and select where to save to and now click on Convert and once conversion is complete we are complete for todays guide on how to remove a time stamp from those videos

Now all you have to do is upload the video to YouTube or do whatever else you want to do with it.

I hope you found this guide useful, I am sure you found moments where it dragged on but my aim was to make a guide everyone could understand and follow and I hope I achieved that today so if I have helped you please let me know and if you want to use this guide on another website please let me know and I will be happy for you to use it if you ask me first

Thursday 28 April 2011

On the bandwagon

I am now a member of the bandwagon of the continuously growing helmet camera club. Having received the product today that I had recently purchased for £16.49 from Amazon I was like a child on Christmas morning, saying that though the packaging and contents are still in one piece

The camera I have is a clone of the more expensive Veho Muvi which I may purchase at some point if I get on well with using this clone that I have. So far even though I have not had much chance to use the camera I have recorded some short videos around the household and been playing around with an application called VirtualDub in order to remove that horrible yellow time stamp, there will be a tutorial coming soon that anyone should be able to follow as when I write the tutorial it will be in loads of easy to follow steps

I guess you thought I was not going to mention why I had not written a blog post in just over a month, well truth is there is not much reason as to why but I have seen the blog has still been getting views while I have been away so of course the blog will not be going away and the same applies to me, well if I go away again it will only be temporary, but just for a quick update I have been slightly busy while not writing on the blog, me by myself and also me and Sarah have been going out for the occasional bike ride exploring new places to ride and conquering old places. We are also eating more healthily than ever, although the smoothies have slowed down but we still drink healthily too. There is more to update on but that can be done another day as can some more blog posts like this

For now, bye bye

Wednesday 16 March 2011

Recipe: Flapjacks

Flapjacks are a good treat for on the road and are also delicious if you make them the right way. You can also enjoy many fillings in the flapjack too, enjoy this recipe that can be found below in easy to follow steps, I advise using digital scales if you have them for a more accurate reading, I also advise using proper measuring cups so you get the correct measurements of ingredients, alternative you can search Google for cup to gram conversion charts.

Ingredients:

3 cups of rolled oats (I use Scott's Porage Oats)
Half a cup of demerara sugar
Pinch of salt
4 oz unsalted butter
2 heaped tbsp golden syrup or honey

Method:

Step 1: In a large mixing bowl put in the 3 cups of rolled oats and a pinch of salt
Step 2: In a small saucepan combine the sugar, butter and golden syrup and melt over a medium heat
Step 3: Combine melted ingredients with dry ingredients in the mixing bowl and stir all ingredients together until you have a sticky mixture
Step 4: This step is optional because at this point you have the option whether to add any other ingredients or not, you could add raisins, sunflower seeds, pumpkin seeds or anything you like
Step 5: Grease a 20cm square baking tray with butter and line with greaseproof paper
Step 6: Pour ingredients into baking tray and compress down with the back of a spoon or a spatula
Step 7: Put in an oven that has been pre heated to 180 degrees Celsius and bake for 12 to 15 minutes
Step 8: Hide them

Quick Review:

A Delicious treat and snack that is not too unhealthy. You can enjoy flapjacks with so many fillings too, my favourite filling is raisins and raisins combined with oats will provide an excellent source of energy, you could also try making these flapjacks with honey instead of golden syrup for an even healthier flapjack recipe. These flapjacks will keep for days if stored right, I always store flapjacks in an airtight container to keep them tasting fresh for days