Since my last post I have been along to a few more heats of Krakatoa's battle of the bands. For some of them I took pictures. And I have now got round to processing those pictures. Definitely still rusty but I think getting better.

The heat numbering seems to have gotten broken: there was a heat between heats 4 and 5 in the listings so I'm just going to go for dates.

24th June

25th June

Last Friday was the first round of the local battle of the bands at Krakatoa. I went along (and brought camera with me). It was nice to see things getting back to something resembling "normal".

I am definitely out of practice taking pictures. Most were really poorly framed, and I really should have mixed up the lens used to get some variation - I took 4 lenses with me but didn't bother actually changing off the 50mm f1.1 that was on the camera when I started. This was the first time I'd taken that lens to a gig, I was impressed with how much light it was pulling in and letting me get reasonable ISO and shutter speeds despite the low light. I think could have actually got better results stopping it down a bit to get sharper images.

Got a few pictures that were OK and one that I'd go as far as calling good:

Last week someone gave me their age using a numeric base larger than 10 to reduce the number of years. This got me thinking about other ways to mess with ages.

Years are different on other planets and we probably know of enough exoplanets now to give pretty good translation to any age you want...

I've long had an idea to make a clock out of progress bars. I needed to figure out how to handle time based events in karax/nim/js for a bigger project so figured this was a good little project to poke at that some.

I have a garden that I don't use. It's about the same size as the footprint of my flat. I think it would be a much better use of the space to put another house on it. I'm unlikely to ever actually do that because planning application to do it would cost money and be a lot of hassle. I don't know the odds of actually getting the planning permission but "low" is likely a good first approximation.

There are 27.6 million households in the UK and 80% of people have access to a garden so I think there is decent scope for there being more than just me with a garden that would be better off as another house.

If someone were to offer to do the planning application (and build) for me in exchange for a split of the sale of the new house, I'd be keen to take them up on that. (If anyone does want to make that offer please get in touch.)

I think there is a workable business model in making that offer. The odds of getting planning permission for any one application might be "low" but make enough of them and some will come through. If you're making a bunch of planning applications you'll have some economies of scale. You could go nuts and automate the whole process (plonk plans for a kit home on map for the site; submit that) and just spam them at planning offices, but I think that's likely to just piss off planning officers and get them all rejected. Something with automated preparation and having a person check them over and only submit ones with best chance of getting approved is likely to work better. Should be able to learn (either with machines or people) what features influence the probability of getting approval.