Today I’ve made a brief upgrade to the website so that it runs over SSL with an https:// at the start of the domain instead of the traditional less secure http:// version.
In theory this should make the site more secure, run faster + keep google happy.
It’s also now required to have an https:// at the start of the url for certain well known popular social media websites to allow your website to use their website for log-in & registration, such as Facebook Connect and similar website features.
UPDATE: 4th October 2021
The site has now been downgraded from using SSL as I needed the certificate for something else, and it wasn’t making that much difference to securing the site anyway from spammers.
It will be upgraded again at a later date when I’m better able to afford the £100 a year the webhosts charge for having more than the 2 included SSL certificates on the package when running more than 1 website on it.
There was one clip missing, likely lost in the Seagate hard drive failure, but it wasn’t all that brilliant to begin with. One evening in April/May 2008 I caught a glimpse of it doing a trial run to Whitby and back prior to the runs featured in this video which did survive.
Lately I have been adding extra options to help you find LocomotivesUK on the Interweb via Social Media, and connect with other enthusiasts of railway things from the smallest Z-Gauge model to the biggest mainline locomotives on the planet.
In addition to the Twitter page, Facebook Page & YouTube channel there is now a Reddit Group + a Facebook Group for you to choose from, as well as the forums integrated into this wordpress blog.
Just follow the links in the above tweet, or there’s also follow buttons from AddThis in the top-right corner of the blog (which also pop-up after you’ve shared the content here to your own social media profiles when you see something too good not to share).
On the 28th of August 2018 I made an impromptu follow-up visit to Grosmont with my Fuji F550EXR.
I wasn’t originally planning on going there, but I’d picked up a few items in town while I was down there for a “picnic” to sit outside somewhere to eat, and as all my usual spots to sit and eat in Whitby were packed with tourists I decided to pop down to Grosmont with it.
While there I took the opportunity to try grab some footage to create some content, and slightly over a year later, I’ve finally got round to editing and uploading it into a video.
It took me much longer than originally planned to edit it – 364 days 17hours 21minutes since I took the first still image of the trip through to when the finished video clip was done rendering and ready to upload, to be precise – but I finally did it.
On Thursday 2nd August 2018 I popped round to Grosmont in my car to have a quick play with my camera. I originally only planned to stay a short while once I got there at 1:47pm (that’s if the clock on my camera was right), but ended up staying until 3:20pm instead.
I took this footage on the morning of 6th July 2018 while trudging back from capturing footage from the Cook 250 Event going on in the town the same morning.
I only really caught a very short clip of video footage as the locomotive wasn’t really doing much other than sitting at the platform producing steam, but I also caught some fairly decent still images I was able to drop into this video to help pad it out a bit. Continue reading “NYMR’s 76079 Steam Locomotive at Whitby Station (6th July 2018)”
On Tuesday 20th July 2004 I made a trip on the Yorkshire Coastliner to York to go on the loose with my trusty old Olympus AM-100 compact film camera.
Once I got the developed pictures back, I made a webpage with the scanned pics from the trip that I never really fully finished but at least got the pictures from York Station onto it.
From what I can vaguely recall the page had a brief spurt of fame on Yahoo groups before fading into obscurity in the deepest, darkest depths of my webhosting space until now when I needed to make space. Continue reading “July 2004 Trip to York Revisited”
I’ve decided to try making quizzes a regular part of the blog, and here’s the first one I’ve managed to cobble together while tinkering with the plugin I recently installed in order to make them…..
My first digital camera of sorts was a thing called a Trust Spycam 100, which was basically a webcam you could unhook and stick in your pocket to use as a low resolution digital camera and a very basic video camera without sound that could record clips measurable in seconds. As far as I can remember I bought it probably some time around 2001/2002.
I eventually upgraded to something more usable in March 2006 as a 27th Birthday present to myself. The camera in question was a Fujifilm A345, a 4.1 Megapixel jobbie that could also record video with sound, and I picked it after much perusal of the reviews at Steves Digicams camera reviews website, which I used to read a lot more often back in those days.
The video footage it could record had 2 options:
160×120 pixels, which looked crap even back then
320×240 pixels, which was somewhat better
It recorded them to the old FujiFilm xD memory cards, up to a maximum of either 64mb or 128mb, I can’t remember which now.
Back then the playback footage didn’t look too bad on my old 15-inch Compaq 151FS monitor, which was manufactured in November 1995, acquired along with my first second-hand PC in the summer of 1999, and finally retired in Spring/Summer 2017.
In it’s place I now have a slightly newer 20-inch widescreen Samsung 2032 LCD jobbie which was a freebie hand-me-down from one of the customer’s in the family shop. According to the sales blurb page on Amazon UK it first became available in August 2008, but some other pages I’ve seen suggest it first became available in 2007.
While this new monitor makes it easier to see what the heck I’m doing, the 1280×960 screen resolution I have it set up makes it almost impossible to watch the episodes of Star Trek I have on iTunes, they look pretty bad if you try to play them at full screen (640×480 Standard Definition video files), and unless you stand really far back only look any good if played in a window around the size of a picture postcard.
This issue also doesn’t do much for my old digital video footage recorded on my older non-HD camera collection.
Having remembered how good the upscaling looks on my Panasonic EX-99 VCR/DVD/HDR machine, I got wondering if such a thing was possible with old digital home video footage.
After much poking around on a well known popular search engine, I ended up with 2 pieces of software to tinker with to see if it was possible:
After much tinkering to see what was possible, I ended up with the video I’ve plonked at the top of this blog post, which I uploaded back on 12th June 2018, and long forgotten what I did to it while procrastinating over getting round to this blog post amid an assortment of problems over the summer that held the job up.
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