You are browsing the archive for 2008.
This tiny box does two important jobs. Firstly it records any video source (as mp4 files) and secondly, it acts as a video jukebox (i.e. connects to the TV and can play video stored on a PC on the network). It’s a pretty useful gadget! I’ve been ripping old VHS videos and archiving old camcorder [...]
Web Usability, 9/10 – November 2008 It’s strange how much you can learn when common sense concepts are explicitly pointed out. This book is short and easy to read because it uses very simple language but it taught me (a new web developer) a lot. My favourite points: Steve Krung’s Law of Usability – User’s [...]
In my last week before starting my new job we laid our dining room wood floor: Before: After: It took 6 days, £600 and a lot of hammering and sawing. It’s a bit creaky and the room now has a echo but I like it much better than before. I just hope it doesn’t buckle [...]
I grew to hate our bedroom Hi-Fi because it was so bright at night and also sometimes made an annoying buzz and have wanted to replace it for while. I used Ebay to sell the Legatto II for £190 and buy the Squeezebox Boom for £170 as a replacement. The Boom doesn’t have as big [...]
Did I chop Cypher in half and mount her better end on the wall while Kix was out? No, I put up some unusual coat hooks:
To further prove our cat is a geek, her brush has the Gnome Logo on it! I have also realised that Cypher is a good Halloween cat seeing as she’s black and witch-like:
I have a new job. I’m going to be working at a small startup developing a recruitment website called www.peopleperhour.com. I’m very excited! It certainly ticks the boxes in terms of things I wanted from my next job: Must have: At the bare minimum, at least 50% of my time should be spent coding. Yes, [...]
After installing Ubuntu 8.10 on my Sony laptop (VGN-AR51E) this is a list of some of the configurations I’ve made: Fixes The web-cam (MotionEye – Ricoh USB r5u870) doesn’t work, I think the driver isn’t in the kernel for Ubuntu 8.10. In fact, /dev/video0 is completely missing (see bug 255678). This is how to fix: [...]
I upgraded to the new Ubuntu 8.10 release and found it included a few improvements. These are some of my favourite: Nautilus now has tabs so you can middle-click folders to open them in a new tab. The included version of F-Spot has had a bug fixed so it now correctly imports comment metadata from [...]
The bad news is that we’ve got a cat. The good news is that it’s a geek like us. She’s called Cypher (“Cypher Tarball Fotherby” in full) and cost £50 from a RSPCA rescue home. She’s already spayed and chipped but we need to get her some injections before she can go outside.
This laptop can be summed up in one word: “Cute”. It’s just perfect for traveling: 9 inch screen Weights only 1KG Solid-state disk drive (very bump/knock resistant) Wi-Fi Built in camera for Skyping Card Reader so you can store holiday snaps. I bought this laptop for two reasons, firstly to help plan our road trip [...]
Seeing as I have needed to organise my time more than usual lately (because I have more of it!) I made an update to my calendaring software called FothoFax and released version 0.41. It now supports events that span multiple days and has the ability to colour the background of a day. Anniversaries are handled [...]
Hugin works like magic to stitch photos into a panoramic even without using a tripod. After doing the tutorial on the Hugin website, Kix used 3 photos to create this larger one: The funny thing is that, if you look closely, there is a man in the photo that appears twice! This is because he [...]
You wouldn’t believe what they have as a optional extra at the Universal Studios theme park in Los Angeles… An unlimited food pass for THE WHOLE DAY. All the pie people (like me) walk around with bright pink arm bands that allow you, at any time in the day as often as you like, to [...]
We saw a lot of wildlife while in the US, it was one of the best things about our trip. Often the animals we saw were in their natural environment and protected from humans by the rules of the National Parks. These were our top five wildlife encounters: A Bob Cat in Yosemite Sea Lions [...]
