Kevin Dooley -- Flickr

A mini-celebration of reflection as I hit my 29th year floating around the sun. Although I may not of achieved everything I have set out todo in this decade I have a lot of achievements both career / academically and life through running etc.

So happy 29th to me!

British Library -- Flickr

Earlier this year Tim Weyrich directed me onto a dataset published by the British Library and since then my research has focused heavily around this. Within Computer Vision it is unusual to get a large dataset not skewed to achieve a specific research goal. Sometimes datasets can be repurposed, but this is requires extensive effort to get the data in its rawest form.

The British Library dataset is a quite literally a "dump" of all the unknown to OCR elements from the book scanning performed by Microsoft. Therefore is not just a collection of line art imagery, but also of elaborate charachters or section embroidery.

I intend to post more on working with this dataset as time goes on, but for now there is a github which contains the directory of images: Directory of Images (Github)

And what is the main repository on Flickr:Flickr Repository

After many (and many) years of using dynamic CMS, I have decided to take the plunge and move to an old school methodology -- static websites. Well when I say "static", I mean offline generated site, I'm not crazy after all. I don't want to spend the next years of my life changing tiny global settings on my website, but more I just don't see the need to actually have a heavy database driven site running all the time, when to be honest I don't often update the site.

So why did I stop updating, well that answer comes in two parts. Firstly I experienced some problems with the CMS I was using, naughty Mojo Portal! But this just limited my ability to post. The second and main reason is that I lacked time and I'm not saying I have more time now, but I just didn't want to spend the small amount of time I have allocated to my website on repairing the website.

So the the solution Jeykll! A perl based offline static site generator. I must admit the choice of this wasn't exactly done on an extensive search and making a grounded decision, but instead I used github and it seemed a logical extension. That is not to say I did no search, I glanced, but there didn't seem a big differentiator other than language. So Perl and Jekyll it is, why not learn a language at the same time after all, so even if this all fails I've learned something generalisable.

I have been coding for many years now (scarily > 15 years), I have always aimed to get higher and higher resolution screens or alternatively multiple screens. Sadly as mentioned in an earlier blog post the computer I am using at the moment is a desktop replacement laptop with a dying screen so I purchased a 27" 2560x1440, not quite my laptops 3200x1800 but still pretty reasonable and great for late night coding! The above is an example of me geeking out, library coding and demo/test rig coding in parallel

After having my beast of a desktop replacement laptop (ASUS n73sv) for a few years now the screen has become a bit temperamental. This and the fact I am using Lenovo Yoga2 Pro ultra book more and more (due to portability/screen res) has resulted in a void in powerful home processing.

Therefore I felt to solve this problem I would get a beefy screen to allow me to work more comfortably at home and in theory write more of my thesis (instead of this blog… shh). I wanted something above the 1920x1080 resolution, since I know that two screens isn’t an option used in conjunction with the old ASUS. Two competitors came to the fore the BenQ BL2710PT and a Dell, oddly the Dell had very bad reversed when used over HDMI and you have to do a lot of hard work to get over the locked down 1080p. So I opted for the BenQ and am very happy with the results.

The BenQ BL2710PT 27”

No one would ever say this is a beautiful monitor, but they would say it is very functional. It does what it needs and has wonderful colour and good true-blacks. Although my graphics card wasn’t over the moon about running at 1440 after a little convincing was happy to run 1440 @ 55Hz (don’t ask why not 60, I couldn’t coax it into getting up to that). I read some reviews of the equivalent Dell that you can only get 30Hz over HDMI with some converters and that it is fine if you increase the mouse rate, that is complete rubbish it feels laggy at 30Hz for a production machine it is simply not good enough.

The one criticism I have is the inbuilt speakers, they are pretty terrible (not that I have had much good experience with in screen-speakers). You have to remember this is marketed as a CAD monitor so you wouldn’t expect this to be a high interest feature. The addition of 2 USB3 ports on this side of the screen is a nice touch very useful extending out your storage options.

Some kind of conclusion

It is hard to have a decisive exciting conclusion from a screen, it does what it is supposed to. Would I opt for two monitors over this definitely, if you don’t have that as an option or you want to watch movies in bed then this is a great screen for you to get that extra screen estate. The only real hurdle to this screen is price, at £400 it is steep especially when you think a 1080 screen will set you back £150, a couple of those comes in a lot cheaper for more screen real-estate.

I do know there are some entry level UltraHD( 3840x2160 ) screens often these are locked to 30Hz. Ignoring that issue, I simply didn’t need it my GPU was being pushed to max-resolution poor little GeForce 560m so I opted to save the money and probably get a better UHD screen later when I get something to power it.