Tiree Tech Wave Six

Before I go into that, can I just say...wow!  in 19 months we've had over 10k views.  I know that's not 10k different people but it's still very impressive.

So, TTW6

This one was actually during a school half term so Jo got to visit too.

We had a nice sized turnout this time and folks mingled well.  It included five Tiree folk which was rather cool.

I did manage to snap some shots of folk.







Also achieved "photoception":


This is Peter; he was having fun with his camera and is also a Minecraft buff:



Even 2" long hair can get windswept:


There were also some not-so-human wavers:







This is "Ducky" The most spoilt duck in the country.  Amanda was woken by her brother and the cry of "There's a duckling, it's Mum stood on it, you have to look after it!"  So after taking it in, trying it with a surrogate duck and it's mother Ducky is now Amanda's pet.  She's (assumed to be female) a muscovy duck and the claws on those feet can be a tad scratchy.

Rumble also visited for a day:





The two animals were most amusing to adults and children alike and both needed some serious snoozing afterwards:







So, what did everyone get up to?

Well, the Lancaster team are investigating energy sources and usage.  I'm still not entirely sure to what end, I don't think they were either.

A regular was writing either a short book or a dissertation, depending how he was feeling.

We had some new folks doing a video documentary and I got some great camera advice for night sky shots.  Turns out you can get a Canon G series 9 or later with manual shutter speed reasonably priced via EBay so I can do that in the future.

Amanda was doing some fantastic graphic design of a "bad guy" character she'd come up with.  She also helped me design a sheep sillhouette tea cosy pattern for my mother in-law.

The days were full of planning and doing.

Amanda and I had the idea at the previous wave to see if we could start a Tiree mapped Minecraft server.  This wave we put together Jo's old PC, put Ubuntu on it, installed minecraft server and Jo and I spent a few hours faffing and reading up.  Rhoda helped me understand Ubuntu and between her and Google I got it running!  Right now it's in test phase.  Partly because we need mods to "lock down" some aspects and partly because places like Crossapol bay, which should be a short cliff, are 10m+ high sheer faces.  It's the issue of using greyscale to map height, there are hundreds of shades and each is defined as a different height, yet human eyes can't differentiate quite as easily so what we *think* is a smooth gradient is read as a drop off.

There's also the fact that the PC is sitting in our house and we're unsure of the bandwidth usage.  The next stage is to get the map finalised; install mods and then approach people in the Trust and at the school and make the whole thing public.  That's new year we think; lots of bits to faff with and stabilise.

Apologies it's not a longer write-up, I was distracted by server things.

TTFN.