That last post was because I could hardly contain myself. Messing about with hardware, scripting and growing things all on the same project was right u my street and I couldn’t resist. I’m working my way up to producing a much bigger and high-res time-lapse project later this year, and this was something of a [...]
I’ve wanting to play with Redis, a super speedy key-value pair store, for a while, but there wasn’t readily available way for me to bolt it into my PHP framework of choice CodeIgniter. There was however a good PHP client for Redis in the form of Rediska through, so I decided it was time to roll my [...]
[updated] 30th June 2010 MushroomCam is now off line, the still below is the last image it took I’ll explain more about this over the next few weeks, until then, there’s a live (well, updates every 15 minutes) feed from my spare room. Also, the camera is only on from 6am until 8pm, because otherwise [...]
My finest ever one liner curl -q -o – ”http://content.guardianapis.com/search?q=fish&format=xml&from-date=2010-01-01&to-date-2010-01-02&order=newest&page-size=50″ |xpath “/response/results/content/@section-name” | sed ‘s/section-name=\”//g’ | tr ‘”‘ ‘\n’ | sort |uniq -c | sort -r Or … In which sections of the guardian does the word “fish” appear, and how often in the first month of 2010 By stagings… curl -q -o – ”http://content.guardianapis.com/search?q=penguin&format=xml&from-date=2010-01-01&to-date-2010-01-02&order=newest&page-size=50″ [...]
A rant I’ve been queuing up for a good couple of years, but haven’t yet got round to committing to ink (or pixels) is the strange phenomenon of e-things. It started reasonably enough with e-mail. Its like normal mail, but sent electronically. Fair enough. I’d argue that the UK should be talking about “I’ll drop you an [...]
Finally, I’m up and running with Virgin Media broadband at home. They give you a free wireless router, but all the setup instructions and the setup cd’s are for Windows. The bloke who installed the cabling suggested I rung the £80,000 a minute phone line. Panic not people, follow these instructions… With everything turned off… [...]
I received a very wierd email today. Somebody has signed up to the Barbie website, and given my email address as their parent (which I hopefully am not, or at least nobody got round to telling me). The site has then email me, giving their username. They’ve also included lots of helpful links which I [...]
I’m sitting this evening, watching TV, something I normally pour scorn on. Call me elitist, called me a snob, call me posh (if your vocabulary only gets that far) but most of the stuff on TV is just drivel. Thats why I’m watching a stack load of divx files, not whatever it being beamed into [...]
Last night I finally got my Ubuntu 9.1 box up and running properly. It talks to my wireless, it talks to my telly, it connects to my NAS box and it even has blue teeth! How? I plugged in all of my peripherals, and reinstalled from the latest download. I’d twatted about trying to get [...]
If you run a bunch of Linux boxes, or even just the one to be honest, there are a few tools which you probably know about by now, but will help you keep on top of your system. Linux has a lovely habit of just pploughing along quite happily for years (whilst not Linux I’ve [...]
One of the things that has bugged me for ages is how to track how many people are subscribing to my RSS feeds. Short of using Feedburner or other such tracking systems, there was no way I could do it on my own.. Then, in the shower this week (where I have many of my [...]
This is not exactly eligant, in fact is its down right nasty, but it does work! A few weeks ago I was given a Nintendo Wii Guitar Hero Drum kit to play with, primarily because it was broken. People often send their broken tech junk my way, and normally I pry the back off, manage [...]
There’s an old saying, and I suspect it biblical (though I’ve not checked even through it would take me less time in Google to do so that writing this sentence) that goes something like … “God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change; the courage to change the things I can; [...]
Ever typed a text message and had t9 screw you over? Well, I once tried to say “Late, fucking queues in tescos” and it came out with “Late, fucking steve in tescos”. Anyway last night I couldn’t sleep so I decided to write something that would take a text message and give you all of [...]
Funny what makes grumpy about things isn’t it. When I was a regular windows user and I was copying groups of large files around it was the totally bonkers time estimates that annoyed me. You really had not idea how long copying a thousand files around locally was going to take, but 7777623 minutes seemed [...]
So, it would appear that the government in it’s wisdom, has reduce UK’s value added tax to from 17.5% to, erm, less (15%). I wonder how far through this one was thought then? Firstly, how much different is it actually going to make? £2.50 in the £100. If that was a discount in a sofa [...]
It’s Sunday morning, and I’ve a list of things I should be doing, but one of them is clearing through a week’s worth of feeds. Here are a few that I’ve enjoyed: 8 meatless dishes for meat lovers – I’m no vegetarian cook, probably because I’m not a good enough cook. The tech behind Nine Inch Nails [...]
So – in the US a judge (who may or may not be a technically savvy person) has ruled that Google must handover 12 terabytes of information about who has watched what on YouTube to Viacom, who are pissed off that lots of their content is available in crap quality on YouTube. Thankfully the judge [...]
I see lots of blog posting about developing web-apps and online stuff using agile-dynamic-insert-your-favorite-buzzword-methodology-here, but lots and lots of software is not developed in this way, and sometimes I think some of the lessons learnt developing monolithic and sprawling software can be useful to everybody, you AJAX powered-django hacking,python boys included. A few years ago [...]
I love my Synology cube, it serves up music and file goodness to all the flat, but I have a problem. I like to mount the various shares as different users, for example I like my /music share to be read only (so iTunes or Windows Media Player don’t get excited and retag/re-shuffle/remove anything), but [...]
I don’t often post code (in fact, this might be the first time) but using a bit of google foo, a bit of bodging, heres a motion detector in Processing.org (my language of choice at the moment). So here’s the file for you…movin and here’s a picture of it in action Possibly Related Posts: Home-brewed [...]
There’s lots of buzz about cloud computing, virtualisation, and elastic scalability at the moment, with some of the really big players throwing money, time and people at it. When you first start to thing about it, virtualisation makes a huge amount of sense. The ability to have new instances, virtually instantly, from snapshot (and thus [...]
Tonight I finally got all my favorite technologies talking to one another and now when i wave my wiiMote about in the air, little lights in my room get brighter or dimmer (and when I work out how to multiplex the serial signals you’ll be able to change which lights are on so change the [...]
So today another good idea got made into something. With everything ever for sale being available on the web, the price wars were always going to happen, and in some ways we’ve moved past them (I’ll buy from Amazon because it’s easy even if Jeff’s Mega Book World is a pound cheaper). Once you go [...]
My brain (and my rss feeds ) has been going into overdrive today. Managing your time thought your calendar, diffiuclt to switch over to one imagines. Only works if people don’t expect instant responces to emails. An interesting paradigm shift, not having a bad table, rather than having people thing ill of you (and websites [...]
I bought a wiiMote a little while ago because, well, they looked fun. No other real reason. Here’s how I got it up and running with my favorite programming environment, processing.org Firstly, you need to make your laptop have “blue teeth” luckily my iBook came with these coloured nashers, which I’ve not really used and [...]
Now I’ve got myself into a huff about nation id cards before now, but it would appear that the government is steaming ahead, regardless as to whether people want them, re interested in them, or would pay for them. I listened to a discussion on Radio4 as I drove into work this morning with an [...]
Looking though the logs for this place tonight I noticed how many people are going to old URLs which haven’t been active for months, years in some cases. 500 people a month were accessing www.coldclimate.co.uk/blog, which I retired about a year ago. Another 500 people were munching down on 2 of my homebrewed feeds www.coldclimate.co.uk/1.xml [...]
I spent ages (nearly two years) researching boids, flocking and autonomous character programming, but I still find articles such as this one about giving each member of a digital crowd its own personality could make animated mob scenes more realistic facinating. I’m sur e the name Demetri Terzopoulos is familiar too. Possibly Related Posts: Home-brewed [...]
In the last week I’ve come across some brilliant tools to make my digital life easier, so I throught I’d better share. The Refresh Newcastle group put me onto some, and Google did the rest as and when I found I needed something. MAMP I do most of my development work on a php/mySQL stack, [...]
On my Windows boxes I install PDFCreator, which is generally very good. Tonight I went looking for an equivalent for Macs and luckily ran across a screen grab showing that… it does it natively! In any program which can print (and I only need to make flat PDFs, nothing exciting like links or embedded programming), [...]
I love bashing Windows, but having nearly finished reading Joel’s books, he makes some excellent points about Windows and the rigiour of the Microsoft testing process (I’m taking it with a pinch of salt, but I’m willing to believe it, especially the amazing story about Simcity and Windows 95), so I might slow down a [...]
Wouldn’t it be cool if my separates stereo could fire data up to last.fm? CD text and a little bit of hardware, it should be possible shouldn’t it? Possibly Related Posts: Home-brewed time-lapse fungus growing 101 Getting Redis and CodeIgniter to play together Mushrooms, live! Train + wifi + bored + guardian api + unix [...]
vlookup – really helpful. Will flesh this out later but for the moment. Has three key fields, the value we are looking up, a table with the index key and the reference value, and a method of search. VLOOKUP(A2,D:F,3,FALSE) A2 is the value we are using as the index key D:F is the table with [...]
BBC iPlayer is available on Linux! Sing and dance! It’s making programs available in Flash, but it should work! Yay! Possibly Related Posts: Home-brewed time-lapse fungus growing 101 Getting Redis and CodeIgniter to play together Mushrooms, live! Train + wifi + bored + guardian api + unix tools = …. E by gum
Edit: Completely forgot to add the link! It is here: Guantanamo Bay Manual diff’d Two copies of the Guantanamo Bay working manuals appear to have leaked out. No idea how accurate they are, but by diffing they you can see all the changes. Interesting interesting: “MP”s changed for “guards”, “golfcarts” changed for “Gators”, many other [...]