On subdomains, DNS and explodery bits

You might have noticed a minor change in this blog. Well, a fairly major change. I've renamed it to use one of the various random domains I own rather than the rather naff blogspot URL. This is a fairly simple configuration in Blogger blogs, but it's been something of a nightmare getting my 1and1 hosted domain to work.

The problem stems from the requirement to use Google's own DNS servers for it, coupled with the fact that Blogger won't let you host a blog on a "naked" domain. Subdomains only. I tried using the provided IPs, and that didn't work. 1and1 simply disallowed them. So I used resolveip to find out their hostnames and used those. That seemed to work!

Then, an hour or so later, I noticed that my domains were broken. DNS errors, apparently. Something about those servers just caused 1and1 to break horribly. I couldn't use the IPs, I couldn't use the hostnames, but I wanted to work around it somehow.

I figured that the only requirement is that the configured subdomain points at the IP the blog is being served from. Turns out this is actually really simple; they're all hosted on the IP that resolves to ghs.google.com. I created a CNAME record for my www subdomain and set it to ghs.google.com, then used 1and1's admin utility to force a redirect from the naked domain (lazyrobot.org.uk) to the subdomain (www.lazyrobot.org.uk).

This worked a treat, and didn't require any changes to the configured DNS hosts at all. One day, I hope to use a provider that doesn't explode my domains when trying to use Google's DNS. Until then, this little hack works well enough.

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Another canal walk

The sun has started being a little more present lately, so some mornings are actually quite pleasant. On one such morning I decided to have a wander up the canal.

The clouds made everything look a bit Toy Story, and the low sun gave a lovely light and contrast to everything else.

Of course, it wasn't sunny everywhere. But even in the darker places, such as right underneath Leeds railway station, the sun had a go at peeking in.

Shooting the Enterprise

I was recently asked if I could help out providing an image for a magazine article about stress management. For reasons as yet undiscovered the requested image would be of the USS Enterprise flying through a storm in space. Unfortunately I didn't have a lot of time (just a couple of hours), but I did have a very nice model of the Enterprise D I could use to build the image around.

Thinking fast, I rigged up a rather slapdash rig consisting of a black reflector backdrop, an umbrella and stand from which dangled the model by a thread, and a couple of strobes. One light above, diffused, to provide the key light, and another, reflected and lower power, to fill some of the very dark shadows. It ended up all looking something like this:

Using a fast shutter, f/16 and cunning flash positioning I managed to keep the background black and give the model suitably textured lighting so it didn't have that flat, uniform, shadowless appearance of, well, a model. The narrow aperture obviously…

Leeds Hyperbeastly

It's been five long months since I posted anything to this blog. Including this post here, I have posted no less than three times in 2014. As you can tell, I am nothing if not prolific.
A lot has changed since the last time I posted anything. I sold all my SLR gear, for a start, and switched to micro four-thirds. I got a lovely, lovely little Olympus OM-D E-M10 and a small selection of lenses including the must-have Panasonic 20mm f/1.7 pancake and the stunning Olympus 45mm f/1.8. Marvellous, and the camera, four lenses and spare batteries and SD cards in a bag that wouldn't fit the SLR and a single lens. Cracking stuff, because it's now small enough to carry all the time. In fact the body and pancake lens is barely bigger than my Fuji X10 compact!
Anyway, the point of this post; I've taken several walks through Leeds while I've worked there over the past few years and I've been finding it more and more difficult to find non-boring subjects. Everything is so dr…

Lazy Robot

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