January 29, 2010 – 10:42 am
We recently acquired an Asus O!Play HDP-R1. This is a small box which connects to the TV and the home network so it can play video shared over the network. Since our main source of entertainment is downloaded video, we’d been looking out for something like this for a while, and this one had the […]
January 21, 2010 – 12:06 pm
Since I have a growing number of pictures of my baby daughter, I wanted to randomly select some to use as desktop wallpaper. I put a bunch of pictures in my ‘wallpaper’ directory and wrote this script to deal with them. #!/usr/bin/env ruby require ‘pathname’ require ‘dbus’ $wallpaper_dir = Pathname ‘/home/edward/wallpapers’ $screensize = […]
December 7, 2009 – 9:07 am
It appears from a couple of confusing arrangements recently that Americans1 who say e.g. ‘next Friday’ mean ‘Friday next week’. Whereas I, being literal-minded, interpret it as ‘counting from today (which is Monday), the next Friday is Friday this week’. In other time-related language, people here say ‘quarter of’, and I still can’t remember if […]
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November 24, 2009 – 8:57 am
There are probably lots of variants out there. In fact mine is largely copied from here Inspired by BLT #!/bin/bash # a twitter client (uses .netrc for auth) confdir=~/.bt seenfile=$confdir/seen feedstyle=$confdir/btfeed.xsl if [ "$1" == "-h" ]; then echo " use: $(basename $0) -h | [ tweet ]" echo " -h help" echo […]
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November 14, 2009 – 10:50 am
I seem to be in a phase where I play with lots of new software things without creating a whole lot in any of them. Google App Engine is interesting due to the promise of getting massive distribution/scaling for ‘free’. I started trying to put together a Java application to try it out, but it […]
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November 10, 2009 – 12:13 pm
Different languages are good for different things. But unix shell style trumps all. An example: bin/urlencode #!/usr/bin/js function urlEncode(str){ str=escape(str); str=str.replace(new RegExp(’\+’,‘g’),’%2B’); return str.replace(new RegExp(’%20’,‘g’),’‘); } if(arguments && arguments.length > 0) { for(var i = 0; i < arguments.length; i+) { r = urlEncode(arguments[i]); print(r); } } else { importPackage(java.io); importPackage(java.lang); S […]
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August 13, 2009 – 8:20 am
I’ve been meaning to write comparing British and US health care for a while, but it’s not a very easy topic to get around. However it is the main subject in the news these days so it’s about time I weigh in. The most emotive piece I’ve heard on the radio this week was from […]
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Having got the old computer hooked up to the network I proceeded to work on its setup. My main intention for it is to play music from the network drive, while I’m down in the basement working on my other hobbies. I upgraded it with the latest Debian, since that is about the only Linux […]
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A while back, I put our old computer elizabeth on a shelf in the basement. Frustratingly, it was fairly close to our cable modem, which is connected to the home network, but there is only a single cable run up to the router which is on the first (ground) floor, and which is where it […]
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The ‘Digital Television Switchover’ took place here a couple of weeks ago. Not long after, we received this letter from Comcast[PDF 900kB]. While I suspect it doesn’t say anything that is actively illegal, I do think it could be highly misleading and is taking advantage of less well informed people1. Q: How do I get […]
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