Frost on the middle meadow

Here a shot taken this morning of the middle meadow with the low sun shining through the trees.

The colours and aspect ratio seem to be very different to that seen on the iPhone. It was too cold to fly this morning.

Aerial photography

I am thinking that I will dedicate this blog to Aerial Photography as unlike some of the visitors to this site I do have other interests other than promoting myself.

This blog has nothing and never has had anything to do with who I am and what I do for a business. I have expressed an opinion on various issues but these were in isolation from anything that effected my livelihood. If I have seen or come across something that makes no sense to me I have made comment. There have been a few occasions where my views have not met with a positive response from those that I have criticised. I make no apology for this.............

Mavic gimbal problem and missing rear foot.

Having thought that the morning frost would make a good photo I managed to get stuck in the apple tree!

A ladder was fetched from the shed and much prodding of branches finally brought the Mavic back to ground with a thud. I am guessing that it landed on the gimbal as apart from some broken propellers and a missing foot the Mavic would not initialize the gimbal on start-up.

As you can see in the photo the gimbal/camera assembly looks normal but the foot was AWOL.

I managed to fix the gimbal problem by some judicious "adjustment" of the bearing of the axis of the gimbal that was sticking. Manually moving the camera in the gimbal, in this case from left to right, as shown with the camera oriented as shown above, I could determine where the gimbal was snagging. Applying some pressure in the direction away from where I thought the bearing was binding freed it and it then returned to a more-or-less central position when released. Performing a gimbal calibration and on start-up the gimbal was sticking in this position. Now the calibration proceeds with flying colours (literally).

I am now flying without the extender legs but I did get a downward sensor calibration error which I now know how to fix!

SEA as opposed to SEO

Google are really just interested in Search Engine Advertising. The overtures that they make to webmasters about SEO is just a means to an end. This being that they get revenue from both the website owners and their customers.

Reading some of Google's advice for SEO it has become clear that there is little new in what they have been saying all the time that they have been in business. There is a lot of talk bout KEYWORDS. Keywords in URLs, keywords in page titles, keywords in anchor text in fact keywords in everything. As all webmasters can confirm Google is very keen to sell you KEYWORDs and ADWORDS. This, I think, shows their real motive. Unique content seems to feature pretty low in their list of recommendations. To my mind it is the content that is key to a well designed and run website.

The use of keywords in the way that Google suggest will only work if the keywords are relevant to the website on which they are used. In addition the value of a keyword, such as "real estate" is only relevant if you have paid Google to promote your site in their SERPs. I generic term such as "real estate" will only be relevant if you have an external mechanism that will list your site when a local Internet user searches for "real estate" in your area. The use of a persons name in a websites domain or page URLs will include the site and pages in Google SERPs but do nothing unless the person making the search already knows the name. In fact, the use of a real name in a website is of secondary importance as the real reason that you should be producing a site is to promote a business and not an ego trip. This, of course, is the case unless your name or company is something like John Lewis. 

The joys of rural broadband

Last week we were "out" for 8 days, Moles had chewed through a fiber cable in a distribution box linking our house with the neighbours. BT is unable to provide us with an ASDL connection s we are reliant on a Point-to-point service. The problem with this is that there is no line-of-site from any of the towers in the area. Our connection comes from a fiber connection from the house down the road. This seems like over-kill but at least it works. Fiber sounds like we have high speeds, well we don't!

Planting some seed

I realise that it is a little late in the year but let's see if it germinates.

I am now well set for the spring. My intention is to get the middle meadow nettle-free and with a reasonable turf. More pictures to follow.