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Today’s art & craft adventure… recycled material Christmas cards. Possibly coming to a letterbox near you, if you’ve been good this year…

I just finished watching A Crude Awakening, a documentary about peak oil. Brief summary: it’s going to be a bumpy few years.
Worth a watch, but don’t expect anything particularly new if you’re vaguely interested in this stuff.

Amazon S3 (Simple Storage Service) is an incredibly cheap way of making backups that will survive theft, fire or just a broken hard disk. You pay about $0.15/GB/month for the storage, $0.10/GB for data transfer and a few more cents depending on how many requests you make. I’m storing about 4Gb and I pay about [...]

On Thursday evening I went to the Friends Meeting House on Euston Road, for a public meeting entitled “How can we win the race against climate catastrophe?” It was a well attended event, run by the Campaign against Climate Change, with George Monbiot, John Sauven (Director of Greenpeace UK), Claire Fauset (Camp for Climate Action) [...]

Free decorations for the autumn.
Buy some laminating sheets. Find a tree. Get some leaves. Get some toilet paper/kitchen towel. Put a piece of each side of the leaves, squash in books. Wait a day or two. Laminate with an iron. Display proudly.

In addendum to amusing story about my donation from BAE Systems to CAAT and the subsequent printing of it in Private Eye, they printed the name correction last week, and included little titbit of information (which was new to me at the time).
HIGH PRINCIPALS
THE Loughborough University graduate who is donating his BAE-sponsored award to the [...]

I got a new toy recently - a NaviGPS device. It’s a GPS logger with Bluetooth and a bike mount. Partly for messing with, partly for navigation and partly for contribute to OpenStreetMap.
Of course, the device needs programming with waypoints before you set off, but allows for manual input of longitude and latitudes. It’s fine [...]

My email address seems to have been used as the FROM address for a wodge of spam. I’ve had about 300 returns so far, but I’m fully expecting to get completed deluged over the next couple of days. If you sent me something, please try again in a few days.

The quilt has progressed. If you weren’t in the last snapshot, you might be in this one!

I cryptically dropped my Private Eye mention on the site and then disappeared for a few days of music and cider. So let’s rewind a week and explain what happened…
I won a prize! Specifically, Most Improved Student. This meant that my exams results in the 1st and 2nd year were sufficiently low enough that by [...]

I’m in Private Eye today. Shame they got my name wrong…

After some complex mathematics, the quilt making is properly underway. Can you spot your material?

And some more photos.
(Back story, for those who don’t know. We asked people to give us cool material instead of ’stuff’ for our wedding, in order to make an uber-quilt.)

Having finally converted to the light side (MacBook Pro), I finally got round to processing my photos from our honeymoon. We’re off to Hackney Field Day in a few minutes, hopefully to catch Battles, Adem, The Aliens, The Concretes and many more. All is good.

I just saw a fantastic advert on TV this morning for the Government’s Act on CO2 campaign.

As the camera tracks a number of people going about their daily lives (washing, driving, etc), it slowly becomes clear that there is something wrong… Their footsteps are leaving behind black goo. As the folky twangs of The Kinks [...]

So, yeah. We got married, had a good party, went to the Hebrides and moved into our new flat in Hackney. Busy three weeks to say the least! I did some twittering from our trip, but suffice to say it was great. Photos coming when I have proper internet access and a computer.
We’ve taken a [...]

Some photos from the weekend - and now I’m away for two weeks in the Hebrides.

We’re just beginning a fascinating period in the growth of the web. The social tools that have been alpha’d, beta’d, and sometimes gamma’d by the geeks of the world are reaching critical mass and exploding into the mainstream. Suddenly we’ve got politicians desperate to catch up with Twitter accounts, YouTube channels and a whole new [...]

Surfaces
Microsoft Surface (buffering) is a multi-touch table interface - seemingly a commercial version of (buffering) Jeff Han’s beautiful workstation demonstrated at TED 2006. The site is short on details and high on Flash, but it is a fascinating concept. Of course, Microsoft being Microsoft will manage to do what they usually do - somehow mess [...]

Hypothetical question time. If the internet disappeared tomorrow, what could you do right now to prepare? What vital information do you have locked up in an online only resource? Who would you be unable to contact, and do you care? Perhaps more importantly, how would it affect your life? And how would it affect society?

I’ve been saving this post for a couple of days, until the bug fixes to the LocalSearchMaps geocoder that I’d submitted had made it into the latest release. 0.2.4 is now ready to download.
Graticule is a Ruby (and Rails) based geocoding API for looking up address coordinates and performing distance calculations. It supports a number [...]

During my regular trips back and forward on the train I’ve been listening to the TED Podcasts. Recently I have enjoyed…
Malcolm Gladwell’s talk on chunky spaghetti sauce (or how diversity leads to happiness):

And Steven Levitt’s talk about why crack dealers still live with their Mums. I read Freakonomics a while ago, but it was still [...]

To my MP.
Dear Cheryl Gillan,
As I’m sure you’re aware, climate change is the greatest threat to our planet. Statistics from a parliamentary question in 2004 indicate that flights release approximately nine times more CO2 than rail travel [1], and have a much more damaging effect (estimated at 2.7 times [2]) due to their release height [...]

I’m maintaining radio silence whilst I wrap up my final year project. It’s a minor struggle to not to be distracted by the mass of fascinating stuff that’s flying around my head, but I’m doing a good job. Looking forward to finishing and spreading my wings. I can hear the sound of interesting rumblings off [...]

I dropped into Generic Supermarket A on Sunday to grab a bottle of water. As usual when presented to a vast array of essentially the same thing, I froze. During this freeze I noticed a few bottles near the top of the shelf, claiming to be good for penguins.

Belu is a mineral water company making [...]

Holy shit. I just stumbled across this image on a BoingBoing post about talking CCTV cameras, and assumed it was a spoof. I looked a little closer, and it’s from BBC News.

Look how bewildered this poor drunk chap is.
Talking CCTV is said to have a 100 per cent success rate in tackling littering offences and [...]

I’ve gone a bit RSS crazy and added feeds for Flickr, del.icio.us, last.fm as well as a combined feed including the blog, Flickr and del.icio.us powered by Feedburner. Enjoy.

Seb James dropped me an email to say that he’s enhanced my BBC Radio recording script and added Ogg Vorbis encoding as well as cleverer file handling. He’s named it ‘listenagain’, and I’ve included the full script below. This follows JP Stacey’s Python wrapper, using rmrip, which skips the intermediate wav file and allows the [...]

It’s official, Powerpoint is bad for brains. Everyone’s favourite presentation aid crutch is detrimental to information absorption - Humans simply don’t like getting the same information visually and verbally at the same time.
Researchers at the University of New South Wales in Australia found the brain is limited in the amount of information it can absorb [...]

There’s a couple of Rails plugins that don’t get much attention but I’ve found invaluable during some recent work on the Medsin site.
The first is Authorization Plugin which adds dynamic methods for setting and checking roles on specific objects, as well as system wide. For example, “user.is_member_of? bristol” returns true. The documentation has some good [...]