Hello again – free wallpaper
The Internet connection to our house has been playing up for the last couple of weeks, so I’ve been unable to post anything on here (this is unrelated to how horrendously slow my site is running – been trying to get my host to sort that for a while now).
It was mine and Kat’s birthday last weekend, and we decided to go down to London on the Monday and Friday. Kat took her ‘blad, and I took my Bronica. Shot off a couple of rolls of Fuji Pro 400H, which I got back earlier today. As an apology for the lack of content on here for the past month or so, here’s a free grunge wallpaper from our London trip! Taken somewhere near Whitechapel if memory serves.
Click the image above for a better view, or right click and ‘save link as’ or ‘download linked file’ to save it to your machine. It’s a 1440×900 file, as that’s the resolution of my 15″ MacBook Pro’s screen.
Fixing the WordPress wp-admin redirect problem
I recently encountered a problem whereby I became locked out of my own blog, where attempting to access the admin page for WordPress would redirect me to the page I came from. Apparently this is quite a common (and infuriating) problem with WordPress blogs. Considering this, I thought I would be able to find a solution a lot quicker than I did.
Most of the advice online falls into one of 2 categories:
- Login using [blogroot]/wp-login.php instead. This is the easiest method to try, as it doesn’t involve changing anything. Once you’re logged in, you should be able to access your wp-admin dashboard without any problems. If this doesn’t work, then the next most popular piece of advice seems to be:
- Backup and then delete the .htaccess file from your blog root. .htaccess files are the usual method for managing redirects within WordPress, so this advice makes sense.
It seems that a combination of these methods seems to resolve most peoples’ problems. However, neither worked for me.
It turned out that the problems that I was having were related to a faulty plugin. Without access to the dashboard I was unable to disable my plugins, so I had to disable them via FTP instead. If neither of the above methods work for you, try this:
- Login to your website via ftp, and navigate to /wp-content/.
- Rename the /plugins/ folder to /plugins-backup/ or similar. WordPress will be unable to detect them, and will deactivate them.
- Attempt to login to WordPress using your usual method. If your problems were due to a faulty plugin, you should now be able to log in.
- Rename your /plugins-backup/ folder back to /plugins/. Your plugins will remain deactivated on WordPress as a precaution.
- You can now reactivate your plugins on WordPress one by one to find out which was the culprit.
How to Develop Film in Coffee
A good friend linked me to this slightly unbelievable video, which demonstrates how to make a apparently very usable black and white film developer using just coffee, vitamin c power, water, and a little washing powder (via a post on Engadget).
It looks incredibly simple, and the results that the narrator seems to achieve are almost suspiciously good. You’ll still need conventional store-bought fixing chemical, of course.
I have personally been paying around £18 a litre for Ilfosol DD-X. I push practically all of the black and white that I shoot at least 2-3 stops, at which DD-X excels. This home-made processing chemical (which users have apparently named ‘Caffenol’) might make it worth shooting a roll or two at ISO 200 or 400 just to see what sort of negatives it produces.
Ed Miliband vs. Journalism
This isn’t directly photography related, but I’ve just got back from a holiday to Cyprus with my girlfriend and am still working through the stuff I took over there.
I stumbled across this article on the Guardian through people linking to it on Facebook, and thought it was significant enough to post up on here. It’s recommended reading and explains the context behind the video better than I could.
There is a difference between preparing responses to an interview, and trying to hijack an interview and turn it into a party broadcast. This isn’t journalism. If a politician doesn’t have the capacity to form coherent answers in an interview, then they have no business pretending to be a politician. At best they might make a rather mediocre PR rep.
I do appreciate that the ConDem’s decision to systematically deconstruct the country is largely based on a report that Miliband’s party commissioned, but if he wanted his statement to have any sort of validity you would have thought he would have taken some sort of ownership over its delivery. A written statement would at least have been a little less embarrassing.
This man could well be the only alternative to the Conservatives and the Lib Dems at the next election. How depressing is that. I don’t really think that attempting to make a choice out of those options really constitutes a ‘democracy’.
