This is not a review: Canon EOS 500D
This really isn’t a review. Instead, just have a look at some lovely photos I’ve taken with my 500D so far 
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Posted on 22 January '10 by Kyle, under photography. No Comments.
Posted on 1 December '09 by Kyle, under Random. No Comments.
The words “Full Time Education” scare me now.
Summer’s come and gone, freshers week at the university past by at lightning speed and now, going into the third week of the third year at university, I’ve realised that this semester is the equivalent of a 9 to 5 job. Until this semester I’ve never realised the term “full time education” (at university) actually meant something. Somehow I got the impression university was an easy task; occasional work surrounded by lots of parties and playing Nintendo. At least that’s how it’s been so far.
I presume it all started in first year, the time of my life I lived in the central part of the University of Aberdeen. It took me a mere 5 minutes to walk to the furthest lecture hall, or about 2 minutes to most others. Mario Kart races were a norm between lectures and going to the pub down the road was a near daily activity. Course work was simple and easy, exam revision was a quick task and getting into second year was quickly accomplished. At the time I never realised just how much spare time I actually had.
Then came second year. Having moved into the city centre I had stumbled across a daily walk of around 45 minutes to university. I never had a problem with the walk, and still don’t, but spending around 1/12 of your day walking doesn’t help when your time table starts building up. Still, I managed to find time to go to weekly pub quiz’s, gigs, Mario Kart sessions at friend’s flats and all the other usual student activities.
Then this happened;
A monster of lectures, workshops, tutorials, practicals, mentoring sessions and group meetings attacked my timetable. I think I’ve finally figured out why this course is part of this “full time education” program.
This is not a review: Flip Ultra HD
Adding to the list of my lovely gadgets is a Flip Ultra HD. I’ve always wanted a gadget to record everyday life with, but traditional camcorders are always so bulky, expensive and require those annoying DV tapes. The Flip Ultra HD isn’t one of those.
Small enough to fit into my pocket, I find myself carrying the Flip Ultra HD around a lot. It’s really simple to use as it basically has just one feature: record HD video using the big red button. The reason I picked the Ultra HD over the Mino HD was mainly because at the same price (roughly £150) you get double the memory (8GB rather than 4GB), Stereo microphones (rather than mono), Slightly better lens, HDMI connection and I find that the colours seem to look nicer on video recorded with the Ultra HD. Of course this all comes with a drawback; the Ultra HD is noticeably bulkier than the Mino HD, but as I mentioned it fits into my pocket perfectly fine. A very nice feature is being able to plug the Flip Ultra HD into any laptop or PC with extra wires as the USB dongle is built into the camera. The software is also right installed on the camera, both for Mac and PC so it’s very easy to share your movies on YouTube.
Check out my YouTube channel to find several videos taken with the Flip Ultra HD.
Overall Impression: Great buy!
Mixtape vol. 3: Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 2
Tony Hawk games introduced me to the world of music [July 2009]
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Posted on 19 July '09 by Kyle, under Mixtapes. No Comments.
Moo.com Business Cards!
Rather than getting the usual bills, ads, vouchers and newspapers in the mail I actually got something pleasant! My [free sample] Moo.com’s business cards have arrived! I always liked the idea of having some, even though I know I’ll never use them the way they are meant to, and when I saw that moo.com was doing free samples I didn’t hesitate to start my design. The free samples do have a small ad banner across the bottom of the front, but I didn’t really mind this since I mainly wanted to see how my design would look on paper and how the actual cards felt.
The design I went for was something I’ve seen many do these days; simple and effective Google logo with your name as the search term. When you Google Kyle Saric you do in fact get a page full of results linking to several of my sites. On the back I decided to simply put the logo of my website on there with a couple of words describing me. Have a look below!
Posted on 27 May '09 by Kyle, under Mixtapes. No Comments.
5 simple ways to avoid studying.
It’s the day before my first exam and I’ve just been thinking of all the random stuff I’m doing when I should be studying for exams. Here’s a list of the 5 most time consuming, study time wasting tasks you may want to engage in yourself:
- Completely redesign your website, blog and twitter profile so that they all have the same design layout. Task roughly takes 20 hours.
- Clean your room, wash your clothes, do your dishes, empty out all bins, and repeat every day until exams finish. Each cycle can take roughly 3 hours.
- Partition/format a drive and isntall Windows 7 on it. Once all drivers are installed and Win7 is fully working move on to install Steam and your favourite games. Whilst these games are downloading and installing be sure to not revise and waste more time by watching trailers, previews, reviews and gameplay videos of the games you are downloading. Once the games are downloaded be sure to try and max out your Steam stats by gaining achievements and getting a Steam rating of 10. I can suggest The Orange Box (currently just £16.99) as a perfect set of games to get as a pre-exam time waster; there’s something there for everyone (fantastic single player FPSers, awesome online multiplayer FPS and an amazing puzzle game!). This task varies anywhere from 4 hours to 20 hours.
- If you ever do find yourself finding the urge to start studying don’t worry! It’s always simple to find another excuse to get a break. Make sure to drink lots of liquids throughout the day as to make yourself go to the toilet as often as possible. Make sure to eat often in small portions. This helps you get away from the desk especially if you live in a two floor apartment you’ll have to spend more time walking down to the kitchen. You’ll probably find yourself running out of food too so a stop by a local sommerfields (or equivilant) to pick up haribos is always welcome! While you are on your way back why not stop by the the nearest (or furtherst if you want to waste even more time) Starbucks for a lovely Dark Berry Mocha to make yourself feel better while studying. These tasks can vary anywhere from 5 minutes to 1 hour.
- If you still find that you’ve not wasted enough time before the day of your exams why not blog about it? This is an excelent way to share your thoughts with others and waste yet another half hour. Of course once you’ve finished blogging about it you’ll have to twitter, facebook and e-mail a link to your closest friends. Total time for these tasks combined is roughly 1 hour.
So there you have it! A list of 5 excelent time wasters for that special pre-exam time!
Posted on 25 May '09 by Kyle, under Random. 4 Comments.
Half Life 2
Just wanted to mention Half Life 2. I honestly can’t think of a game that’s better in any way than this. It’s been roughly 5 years since release and even playing it now it feels and looks better than any game out on the market. Just thought I’d pop in a quick comment about the game, now go get it yourself on Steam!
Posted on 25 May '09 by Kyle, under Gaming. No Comments.
Redesigning my virtual hub!
As some may have noticed, kylesaric.com, the blog itself and my twitter profile have gone under major redesign works!
In my previous blog post I mentioned the design I’ve come up with for my mothers website (which will stay under construction until my exams have finished!). I totally loved the design and have decided to redo my personal website and that led to completely scrapping the old design, html and css files and start from scratch. I learnt a lot on the way and have used various new coding methods including more CSS and some PHP that I never used before. Credit goes to @adammachin for finding the simplepie php extension and helping me use that to get an RSS header on my main site. I won’t bore anyone with the underlying architecture of my website since I will post a portfolio blog post detailing everything at a later stage.
As per usual, one thing led to another and I’ve decided to also redo my twitter page which, of course, was no way near as much work as my personal page! It quite simply involved changing the settings to match colors represented on my personal site and coming up with a .png background image. That then led to changing the one left over piece; my blog. I have yet to still create my own wordpress theme (it will happen one day!) but I still love the simplicity of my current theme (design by Igor Penjivrag) so I decided to simply change most of the CSS to match colors represented on my website!
As mentioned above, look out for a blog post in the near future explaining in a lot more detail some of the underlying architecture of my new website, how things came about and why I chose the current colors.
Posted on 21 May '09 by Kyle, under portfolio, website. No Comments.