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Home-brewed time-lapse fungus growing 101

July 7th 2010

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 [...]

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Getting Redis and CodeIgniter to play together

July 1st 2010

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 [...]

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Mushrooms, live!

June 26th 2010

[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 [...]

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Train + wifi + bored + guardian api + unix tools = ….

June 4th 2010

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″ [...]

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E by gum

February 8th 2010

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 [...]

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Making your wireless router from Virgin Media work with your Mac

January 23rd 2010

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… [...]

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Child security gone wrong

January 13th 2010

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 [...]

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The state of the nation

December 22nd 2009

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 [...]

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XBMC on Ubuntu running really slow?

December 22nd 2009

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 [...]

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Open source monitoring tools

November 29th 2009

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 [...]

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Make your RSS feeds trackable

October 5th 2009

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 [...]

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Quick and dirty hardware hack

June 28th 2009

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 [...]

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Spam

March 16th 2009

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; [...]

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Insomnia + UNIX tools = txtr?

January 26th 2009

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 [...]

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The warm fuzzy feeling of feedback

November 28th 2008

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 [...]

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Charging VAT? Foolish to say the least

November 26th 2008

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 [...]

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Link brain dump

September 14th 2008

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 [...]

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Google, Youtube, Viacom and the judge

July 3rd 2008

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 [...]

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Do the important, not the urgent

June 24th 2008

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 [...]

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Mounting remote Windows shares on Mac

May 18th 2008

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 [...]

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A little bit of webcam trickery

May 17th 2008

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 [...]

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Fear of leaky clouds

May 15th 2008

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 [...]

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Wiimote + Arduino + iBook + leds = YAY!

April 28th 2008

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 [...]

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April 3rd 2008

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 [...]

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Brain dump/link trap version 0.1

March 26th 2008

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 [...]

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wiiPong (or, how to make a crappy games from exciting technology)

March 21st 2008

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 [...]

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National ID cards

March 12th 2008

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 [...]

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.htaccess redirects

January 31st 2008

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 [...]

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Flocking still rocks my world

January 10th 2008

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 [...]

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A week of great tools

January 8th 2008

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, [...]

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Creating PDFs easily on a Mac

January 5th 2008

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), [...]

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Windows Vs Apple Vs Linux

January 4th 2008

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 [...]

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Hardware uplinking?

December 23rd 2007

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 [...]

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Quick excel help

December 19th 2007

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 [...]

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BBC iPlayer on Linux!

December 14th 2007

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

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UNIX tool uncover Guantanamo manually changes

December 11th 2007

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 [...]

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