Tom Fotherby
Not much success with our veg
We tried growing a few pieces of veg this year. We tried carrots, potatoes, beans, salad, mushrooms and strawberries. We failed to get anything decent except perhaps the potatoes (we got about 10kgs). I was most excited about the carrots but we ended up with vegetarian veal:
Facebook Friend feed via RSS
If you use RSS and you have grouped your Facebook friends into lists, you can subscribe to all activity in a given Friend List using the following URL: http://www.new.facebook.com/feeds/friends_status.php?id=your_facebook_id&key=your_friends_list_key&format=rss20 Where your_facebook_id – To find this, go to your facebook notifications page and copy the link called “Via RSS“. The URL will be something like http://www.facebook.com/feeds/notifications.php?id=668921524&viewer=668921524&key=1c9c72f322&format=rss20 […]
Artistic music video
If you have a interest in art, you may enjoy this genius music video called “70 Million” by Hold Your Horses. See how many renditions you can recognise: Answers are at flavorwire.com. My favourite renditions are The Scream (Eduard Munch), Portrait of Dora Maar (Pablo Picasso) and Las Meninas (Diego Velázquez). Thanks goes to Rodrigo […]
Session sharing in PHP – The easy way
I used to think that a hard part of scaling a website from one webserver to two webservers was sharing the sessions between the machines to keep the users logged in whichever machine they were served by. I was pleasantly surprized that it is possible to accomplish sharing sessions between two servers by changing only […]
WordPress spelling auto-correction now fixed
In WordPress 3.0, my WordPress logo image (on the left) broke. So I opened a bug and six weeks and 100 bug comments later, I have upgraded to 3.01 and it is working again. Thanks guys! The reason why the logo image was broken was quite interesting(?)… In v3.0 WordPress automatically started auto-correcting Wordpress to […]
Repeal the Digital Economy Act
There’s a fantastic new UK government website called yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk which gives us the chance to tell the government which laws and regulations we think they should get rid of. Please take a minute to vote 5 stars on repealing the digital economy act. Why? What’s so bad about the Digital Economy Act? My objection to […]
Masters of Doom (David Kushner)
History, 9/10 – Mar/10-Jun/10 A great computer game history book about how the two Johns started a company and developed some of the epics games of my childhood, in particular: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Loved John Carmacks programming dedication and legacy – what a hero!
WordPress image gallery plugin
When I was building the property gallery for greekislandpropertyfinders I wanted to use a fancy javascript image gallery like Galleria, however I came across a problem with Galleria in that it couldn’t display more than one gallery on any page. It’s open-source so I used the source code to help write my own version and […]
PeoplePerHour Trailer
PeoplePerHour (my primary employers) have a new trailer. It’s fun watching webpages I have helped build woosh past a’la star wars. It’s bold and upbeat, I love not doing things by halves:
Mini Keyboard (Rii mini, Model: RT-MWKOI)
This gadget should be really good because it is nice and small, works in Linux out of the box and it is super convenient having a mini combined mouse and keyboard at hand. However, unfortunately, the mouse isn’t sensitive or responsive, the key-presses have unpredictable delays, the range isn’t good enough and it completely stopped […]
Sponsored fast
My brother is doing a 72 hour sponsored fast with some friends to raise money for MS: Three whole days without even a single scrap of food entering our bodies, only having water to keep us going. I’m joining in – it started at 11am: I ate the following a few minutes before 11am: Massive […]
Matter (Ian M Banks)
Sci-fi, 7/10 – Jul/08-Mar/09 This story is set in a Shakespearean-like era with kings and princes and swords and battles – minus the romance. Actually, it’s more like medieval Merlin and the knights of the round table because the civilization is shrouded with myths and has the equivalence of dragons because it is semi-integrated with […]
Batch optimise Images with a single command
I find the Page Speed tool from Google extremely helpful for optimising my websites. I have a tip which can save time if your website is failing the “Optimize Images” test. Using the in-built Smush.it is one option but if most of your images are jpegs, you can achieve the same result and save time […]
Default search engine in Ubuntu Firefox
Ubuntu will be switching their default search engine from Google to Yahoo in the next release (v10.04) because they have struck a deal where they will get a cut of the money made whenever a user clicks on a advert after doing a search. The only reason that this is interesting is that Yahoo search […]