The retirement of the illustrious and hardworking Helga and Mark Hill has triggered the (re-)formation of renaissance and baroque dancers and musicians with whom Rod has danced for over 40 years…

We are now the Courtly Arts Performers (of Victoria) and can be found at https://www.courtlyarts.com/.

I put together the new site with the help of daughter Kat – and those with any interest can now acquire music, book events, see the pretty pictures and catch up on news of coming performances. The group has done its first season of concerts – with a level of attendance that I think surprised (and pleased) us all. We have also had a large number of attendees at an introduction to dance course, held last month. So the future is looking bright…

A book of images of palaces and gardens in central Italy is now online and available through Blurb in hard copy form. You can also download a PDF.

Palazzi e giardini del centro Italia

By Roderick Laird

I have owned an Epson 4900 for 3 years and have been delighted with it. Outside a blocked ink line due to a sludgy ink cartridge (which admittedly was expensive to fix), it has been trouble free. It can however have long idle periods when I am traveling and this usually (actually, come to think of it, always) results in nozzle blockages – albeit ones that have always cleaned easily.

I have however always thought that a utility that regularly sent an auto-nozzle check would largely eliminate this problem – of course at the expense of some ink usage. “Just the job for an arduino project” thought I and started capturing IP packets to analyse the dialogues going on during maintenance and cleaning operations. At this point my son pointed…

Examples of Rod’s garden photography is available online in a couple of ways. You can download PDF’s of the currently available three books… Please do note that this combined download is many hundreds of megabytes; but it will give you the full resolution of all the images to enjoy.

Or you can buy the physical versions online from Blurb; they are quite beautiful in large format hard cover – albeit not cheap.
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The maturation of HTML5 media publication tools and the demise of flash have converged to a point where this new web site can now host all my media properly and efficiently – and also not use any flash code! Huzzah!!! (With the exception of some links to external sites such as Blurb – that still use it…)

The new site template also does a fine job of holding any blog posts too, making my old blog site now redundant as the target for new photography related materials. However, it still has lots of fine stuff and will continue to accumulate technology posts, so I will leave it live and you can still see it here.