Some time ago I bought a Powersled kite (pictured right), a medium sized, single line lifter kite. It's a great kite with a considerable pull, and I decided to take advantage of that and build something to lift a digital camera up high to take aerial panoramic photographs.

This article describes the build of a so-called 'AutoKAP rig': a rig that holds a digital camera, programmed to perform an automatic sequence of panning, tilting and picture taking without intervention from the ground. The idea is to take the kite and the rig to a place of interest and then make a bunch of aerial photographs (and hope that some are not too blurred).

I'm regularly uploading selections from my photo collection.

Latest additions

• May 2010: check out my new and awesome Kite Aerial Photography photo gallery, made when on holiday on the island of Vlieland.
• February 2010: started 'The Daily Snapshot' photo galleries. The intention is to take and publish one photograph, every day. The subject can be anything and everything. I'm usually only packing a small camera and the photographs will be made 'as I go along' - hence the 'snapshot' qualifier .

I wanted to capture the splash that objects make the moment they fall into a liquid, but this is pretty hard to do if you have to operate the shutter release by yourself: you need a lot of luck to capture the right moment, and a lot of time trying to.

The drop from the point where the object is released till the surface of the liquid or the point where it has to cross the lens, is in this case about forty centimetres (16") and only takes a few hundred milliseconds. You'd have to take into account the delay of the camera, the available light, etcetera.

I figured I needed some electronic assistance. So I took to the drawing board and used a combination of hardware and software to help me out.

So a couple of months ago I bought a ReadyNAS  Duo for my online personal backups and to host the Logitech Squeezecenter software that I use for streaming audio in my home. It serves its purpose very well and I'm very happy with it (although the Squeezecenter software itself is a little sluggish, but then, what do you expect from a 186 BogoMips Sparc CPU).

My computer is a laptop (running openSUSE), and when I make backups or access my music collection on the NAS, I mount its file systems (wirelessly) over NFS. Here are the fstab entries for that (the NAS is called 'betelgeuse', by the way):

betelgeuse:/c/media     /export/media   nfs     auto,user 0 0
betelgeuse:/c/backup    /export/backup  nfs     auto,user 0 0
betelgeuse:/c/home      /export/home    nfs     auto,user 0 0

The only problem I had with this setup is when I suspended my laptop with NFS file systems mounted and then later powered it up again at a moment when the NAS was not available. In that case the system would be confused and whenever I tried to access a file system, lock up completely. Only a reboot would get me out of that situation.

This article is about the building of a small practice 'room' in my attic. It first appeared as a series of posts on the Sax on the Web forum.

I live in a 1950s town house which is build well enough, except for the fact that they soundproofing is not of a very high standard. I am a witness when someone three houses down the block is drilling a hole in a concrete ceiling, or when the neighbours are frolicking in their bedroom.

Needless to say, playing a saxophone (especially practicing top tones, and scales) or learning to play the trumpet, is not always amusing to listen to for someone else but me.

So I decided to build myself a small practice room in my attic. It only needs to house one person, and it does not need to be 100% soundproof since its not a recording studio. Just enough to be able to play at any length of time at any part of day without upsetting the neighbours.