Photos by Glen Sloss for sale soon!
You you will be able to buy individual photos from Glen Sloss\\\\\\\'s collection More »
Glen\'s Photos are now for sale!
Glen Sloss has been making a bit of a name for himself recently and now his photos are for sale, right here! More »
Cheap Jeep Air & Oil Filter Replacement
Looking through the past service invoices for my recently bought Jeep Grand Cherokee I noticed that the air filter had not been changed for 5 years. I set about searching for
. The good thing abut the 1996 Grand Cherokee is that there are a lot of parts readily available, and they are cheap! I found a replacement oil filter and air filter for under £16.
Granted they are probably not the best of the best, but that’s not what I’m after. I bought this to replace my old peugeot that was starting to fail, so i bought this Jeep with a full years MOT.
New Jeep Air Filter, on the left, and the old air filter on the right
I got my oil filter (yet to fit) and air filter from ebay, but I also found out you can buy the same AIR OIL FILTER SERVICE KIT Jeep Grand Cherokee 4.0i SUV Z [1991-1999]
though amazon as well. So you can take your pick, make sure that whatever service stuff you buy for your Jeep that its the right shape, size, and that it will actually fit properly or your model.
Rear Wiper Motor Seized, then fixed!
When I bought my Jeep Grand Cherokee 1996, the Limited 4.0 Straight six version, my rear wiper motor never worked. It’s not a problem during the drier weather, but when its raining and snowing and the roads have been gritted the rear liftgate glass gets dirty very quickly. I set about searching jeep forums for a solution and found out its quite a common problem. I followed the step by step guidelines from the forum here. There’s no point writing it all out when this guy has done it so well! I will however, put my photo’s up to show the difference in the state of the rear wiper motor shaft and spindle. That guy used a normal claw hammer to tap the spindle with the gear on it out of the shaft. I had to hold the motor body in a vice and use a medium sized mallet to get enough force to ease the spindle out, 0.5mm at a time. The only down side with that was that i mashed the top thread for the wiper blade retaining nut. So I filed the top thread off completely and then used a mahoosive wrench to get that nut back on. I should hope I don’t have to take that nut off again! Heres The photos of my jeep rear wiper motor before, during and after, taking it out and fixing the seized spindle. It’s also worth noting that before I tried this i replaced the fuse, its a yellow one, after i replaced the fuse i could hear the motor “click”, so I knew it was alive…it just needed an extra bit of tlc to get working!
Rusty spindle – no wonder it seized
I can still solder, kind of! resolderd the motor power connections back to the circuit board.
Russian Meteor Fireball Videos
An incredibly terrifying sight! Usually you can see wee meteors burning up in the sky but only at night time. This was huge, this was incredibly bright, and the shock-wave from the explosion shattered windows in the Russian town where the fireball exploded overhead.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XjCSozoLxLM
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=onmCHDqlwDE#!
Some of the chaos and confusion it caused:
This is how Winners are made
This is one the most inspiring video’s I’ve found to date, it’s proper motivation!
WordPress Updates
Just spent a few minutes this morning updating WordPress to the latest 3.5.1 version, no hiccups! The Auto update feature is nice and handy, especially when it works like a charm updating 23 plugins automatically at the same time 
Today I am thinking that I will change the theme of the site, still not 100% happy with the current one, and don’t feel its very easy to navigate. That’s something that I will work on. I also need to monetise the front page, I’ve done an experiment for a few months where I don’t show adverts on the front page, whether its Adsense, Amazon, or Ebay PartnerNetwork (EPN). To see if the user becomes more “engaged” which would lead to a lower bounce rate. It didn’t, and o course, it didn’t make any money!
So coming up this afternoon:
- New WordPress Theme, Free of course!
- Add in my “Fajja’s Ram head logo”
- Organise front page menu links to something more logical!
- Add in Google Adsense and an Ebay Banner (never tried a plain ebay banner before)
- ensure Google Analytics is set up
- All posts will now follow john chow’s 3 lines to a paragraph rule!
- Make use of wordpress’s new media manager, since its not always been the easiest thing to handle images in posts
But first, I must go a swim! Then once this is all set up, I’ll add some posts about my Jeep Grand Cherokee, and then its time to make some money!!!
Night Sky Photography Presentation
In October I was approached to give a wee presentation of my night sky photos. I had never done anything like it before so I thought why not, after all it’s a great experience for me, and something to tick off my “to do” list.
I needed to talk for 45 mins…eeek! I had actually never spoken for so long before. I approached the day by categorising my photos. So on the day we went over the Moon, Meteor Showers, Milky Way, Aurora Borealis, Satellites & International Space Station, and some camera tricks such as Startrails which can be achieved through long exposures.
In preparation for the day I also got 40 prints of my photos, I’m now ready to sell them! I’m still planning on having a section on this site where you can buy a digital copy of the photo that way you can print it whatever way you like, or just keep it digital., but you wont be able to re-sell it, or sell any variation of my work. after all…it is my work!
Anyway… the presentation went quite well, I managed to talk for a full hour on all my photos and a bit about the background behind them, everyone seemed very interested and the only criticism was that some of the hard of hearing couldn’t understand what i said all the time, but they still loved the photos. Overall, despite being nervous, i enjoyed it and think I performed well, and won’t hesitate to speak in a public setting if asked to do it again.
Gearing up for New Year
Nearly the start of a fresh new year, 2013 is already just days away! Doesnt seem that long ago we were all panicking about the millenium big in the year 2000!!!
Next Year is the year I make something of myself, I’ll acheive some of my ambitions, I WILL do it!
Career wise, social wise and sporting wise, I’ll set goals, set targets and work towards them. Just need to finalise the plan!
Samyang 8mm F2.8 Fisheye Mirrorless Lens for Emount
Purchased Late on monday night, my first ever lens-only purchase arrived today, wednesday morning. Very prompt delivery and well packaged. I opted for the Samyang 8mm F/2.8 Fisheye, it’s basically the same lens as the Walimex version but it was slightly cheaper, haven’t had much chance to play around with it properly yet, hope to get some milky way shots tonight and see how it performs. Because its not a sony lens, theres no electronic coupling to tell the camera what lens is being used, so you need to enable the “release w/o lens” option in the camera settigns menu. Focusing and Brightness adjustments are done manually via the dials on the lens itself. Feels a solid build and everything clicks positively. Clicks when it locks into place onto the Sony Nex body and also the f stops click nicely so that you know where you are. Handy for me since most of my photography is in the pitch black! Heres some pictures from my phone of the Lens in, and out of it’s box.
Stay tuned for some sample photos!
