January 27, 2010
Treating the common cold
Will Vitamin C really prevent or cure your cold?
What about Echinacea?
October 1, 2009
Guy Kawasaki’s 10-20-30 presentation rule
Funny, practical, and well worth 1 minute 50 seconds of your life:
via the BootUp Labs Blog.
September 17, 2009
I’m on identi.ca and Twitter
I am sharing my thoughts, mainly about web technologies, on identi.ca and twitter.
The nature of the medium means those thoughts will be generally raw and truncated, but timely.
July 30, 2009
Quote of the day – monkeys
In response to monkeys stealing his coffee beans, an Indian farmer observes: If you start shooting monkeys, you’ll spend the rest of your life shooting monkeys.
via Bruce Eckel
May 27, 2009
Legal 1 Usability 0
The cooking instructions for my Tandoori Chicken Breast microwave lunch, are to cook…
…until internal temperature reaches 74C (165F).
How many office kitchens have a cook’s thermometer? Score nothing for usability.
Should you for any reason attempt to sue the manufacturer, it will rapidly become apparent that you didn’t follow the cooking instructions. Score one for legal.
May 21, 2009
OpenTTD: Trains and signals for beginners – a tutorial
I have been playing Open Transport Tycoon Deluxe, or OpenTTD on and off for a while, but I confess I only understood train signals very recently. The game gets a lot more fun once you can have complex track layouts, so here’s a tutorial on train track layout and signaling for complete beginners.
Building tracks the wrong way
If you’re anything like I was, all your train layouts probably look like this:
May 10, 2009
Micro-Zooids: A story
When I was 16, I wrote a computer game, called Micro Zooides. It was called that partly because on Windows .EXE files all start with the two characters MZ, and partly because it was about small creatures. Micro-Zooides was going to be about humanity’s progress, it was going to be Civilization, which didn’t exist yet.
The game had a splash screen of a Far Side comic, then a short video of me tromping through the woods like a Neanderthal, which my Dad filmed and which I digitized with a very early video capture card.
In Borland’s Turbo C++ 3.0 I wrote a basic graphics engine to display the tiles of the world, and an event loop so I could move the main character around the world. I drew sprites for a proto-human (the micro zooid), dirt, rocks and sticks. He could walk around the world, and pick up and put down rocks or sticks.
Then I took a break to plan. I have a proto-human, rocks, and sticks. How do I get to civilization?
May 6, 2009
Migrating from Picasa to GIMP
I’ve been using Picasa to edit my pictures for a long time, and it’s an excellent program. Recently however I’ve started shooting RAW, and I’d like control, so I’ve started using GIMP. It’s more powerful and more complicated than Picasa, so to start myself off I went through all the features of Picasa and made notes on how to duplicate that operation in GIMP. Here are those notes.
Most of what Picasa does can be replicated with the Colors / Levels or Colors / Curves tool. It’s well worth spending a little time experimenting with both of those (the documentation is very good too).
Crop
In the Toolbox, click the Rectangle select tool
In its options (beneath the tools), tick ‘Fixed: Aspect Ratio’
Enter 6:4 ratio (for 1.6 sensor, most DSLRs)
Tick Highlight.
Draw a rectangle on the image that you want to crop to.
Image menu / Crop to Selection
March 15, 2009
Math Dodger: A Flash game
Los Angeles is under attack, by trigonometric functions! OMG! Trigo-what? If I wanted to do maths, I’d go to San Francisco!! You, like, totally gotta save L.A man. Enter your name, then move your tank.
Use the left and right arrow keys to rotate, the forward and back arrow keys to move.
The barrel of the tank is the little black line. That’s the front.
No, your tank can’t fire. Avoid the mathematical blobs. YEAH!
The longer you live, the more points you get. A score above 100 is, like, totally AWESOME! Good luck Bro.
Let me know in the comments how much you score.
Read the rest of this entry »
January 19, 2009
This is me
Have I told you that I have never owned a TV, and never watch it? http://www.theonion.com/content/node/28694
December 9, 2008
On the American automobile industry
Joshua-Michéle Ross at O’Reilly Radar writes about the money the American taxpayer (government) is giving Genera Motors, Chrysler and Ford to save them from bankruptcy:
This is the privatization of profit and the socialization of loss.The very concept of “Too Big To Fail” points to a deeper truth: the U.S.’s auto industry does not operate within the “free market” at all. Far from it. As their moniker suggests, the “Big Three” are an oligopoly with a long record of eschewing innovation ( electric cars, hybrids etc.), killing off alternatives like mass transit and bullying public policy (lobbying against CAFÉ standards, environmental and tax policies [Hummer owners get a $34K tax credit!], the threat of relocating factories etc.) all in an effort to conform the not so “free market” to its lumbering non-strategies of pursuing short-term profit.
Full article: Catch 22: Too Big To Fail, Too Big To Suceed
The consensus in the comments to that article is that if the government is saving a company that is too big too fail, it should be split up into several smaller companies, so that we only ever have to save it once.
July 17, 2008
Using Ekiga softphone on Ubuntu Linux on a Thinkpad
For many months now I have been making and receiving telephone calls from my computer. There are two advantages:
- It is very cheap. Calls within the United States are about $1/hour!
- It makes your phone number virtual, and configurable, which means for example that my phone number will forward to my cell phone if my computer is offline. It also means you don’t have to be in the same country as your phone number.
I am running Ubuntu Linux on a Thinkpad, but most of this should apply to Ekiga on all platforms, and the principles apply to all Softphones.
February 12, 2008
Wine grapes from least to most tannins
Gamay, pinot noir, sangiovese, tempranillo, zinfandel, syrah, merlot, cabernet sauvignon, nebbiolo.
Please note that this is a general indication – the origin of the wine and process used (such as aging) may change the order of this list. See Somm’s comment below.
December 27, 2007
Migrate from Gallery 2 to Flickr
I have recently moved all my photos from a Gallery 2 instance I ran myself, to Flickr. This means I don’t need to keep my Gallery2 install up to date, it frees up lots of disk space on my server, and allows me to more easily share pictures with friends and family. Here’s how I did it:
August 16, 2007
On the road
The silence around here is because I have been traveling for two months. I should be back in December. In the meantime you can keep up with our adventures on our other site.
January 7, 2007
A week in the woods
From the 9th to the 15th May 2004, I went on the Fundamental Bushcraft course with the Ray Mears School of Bushcraft, in the Kent countryside. Here’s what happened:
September 16, 2006
Wine grapes
The reason new world wines use the grapes they do, is because those are the grapes from the big French wines. But which grapes from which wines ? To find out, you could go to the Institut National des Appellations d’Origine and read the text of each appelation. There are over 300. Or there’s the Wikipedia list of French wine Appelations. Or there’s the handy guide below on which grapes are in which French wines. Happy sipping !
June 30, 2006
Wine notes
Some notes from a talk / taster I went to on food and wine pairing. It was led by Tom Forrest – and a very interesting and knowledgeable chap he is.
10 ways to kill a pig
Art at work
This is the webgroup’s first online gallery show. It is titled 10 ways to kill a pig.
May 13, 2006
Halliburton solves global warming
I got the strangest email today, which I originally took to be spam. Read for yourself:
May 9, 2006 FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: mailto:EPDU@halliburtoncontracts.com Photos: http://www.halliburtoncontracts.com/EPDU/
HALLIBURTON SOLVES GLOBAL WARMING SurvivaBalls save managers from abrupt climate change
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