Thoughts and ideas of a dyslexic designer/developer
Saw this picture and started thinking its about time I fixed my scooter to either use it or sell it… I do believe it will get warmer and there is almost nothing better than riding around in the summer breeze.
Now I just need to find a decent motorbike repair shop somewhere near the centre of Manchester? Any pointers would be useful…
First up, its time to upgrade my XBMC box in the living room, to something more modern and smaller. Right now I’m using a Lenovo Thinkcentre A55 mini desktop machine to something smaller and can handle full HD without struggle (specially now I got my new full HD TV). A friend has suggested the Feteko MyGica EnjoyTV 510B, but what puts me off is the 10/100 networking and it runs Android.
My home network backbone is gigabit and most devices are gigabit including the Thinkcentre but after doing some recent reading and tests, I have concluded that the speed of reading data off the hard discs is slower than pushing it around the network. I was using NFS mounts for a while which seemed more efficient but I’ve switched back to Samba after not really understanding how NFS mounts work correctly and installing Plex Home server. Seems my Samba setup isn’t caching as much as I would have liked. This all in all means 10/100 device should be ok to receive media from around the network.
Android? My biggest issue with Android as the background operating system is I’m not certain its as flexible as Ubuntu and XBMC is still in beta on Android. Because this is my main XBMC box, it needs to be super reliable and play everything. I do want to get the live TV functionality in the Frodo release of XBMC working too.
On top of all that… I’m also looking to firmware of the Edimax BR-6574N router I have to the classic DD WRT firmware, mainly because I want to sort out a VPN into my home network.
Yes quite a few changes… luckily I got to use up my holidays before April
I like this idea from Martin Rue… startupsmanchester.com
The idea is pretty simple. Assuming you have a git repo for your project, you simply register your project/startup on the site and you’ll get a post-commit git hook script. Drop this script into your repo’s .git/hooks directory and it’ll start sharing your progress with the rest of the community each time you commit.
It doesn’t share anything sensitive and stores only the commit message, the commit author name and a count of the files changed. It also calculates some basic stats for each project to give a better idea of how much continual work is happening on the project.
Now we’ll all be able to see who’s actually doing stuff and who’s just talking. Maybe seeing 3 or 4 other startups doing lots of stuff will even encourage you to keep up the pace. It certainly will for me!
As he says, “put your git repo where your mouth is…”
Werewolf cards are expensive and so I decided I could make my own on Moo.com.
The results I’d say are pretty good for 15mins of work and a nice large discount for using Moo.
Today I’ll get to try it out for the first time at the Epic Powwow… Hopefully it will go down well in Newcastle.
Nimda is a computer worm, also a file infector. It quickly spread, surpassing the economic damage caused by previous outbreaks such as Code Red. Nimda utilized several types of propagation technique and this caused it to become the Internet’s most widespread virus/worm within 22 minutes.
What is worrying is the amount of devices in the internet of things which could be passengers or infected…
Over millennia we humans evolved a powerful and personal instinct — trust — that helps to protect us as we make our way through life. It is a vital tool for survival in the physical world and weaves the fabric of our society. When we are in a relationship based on trust we are less vulnerable, which in turn allows us to collaborate and to be creative. Trust is also context specific — you trust your mechanic to fix your car, but probably not to manage your bank account. This is the principle of “need to know”: in each context only information that is needed for that context is available, and nothing more.
I know I write about how hard of a problem it was but I’ve been rethinking it again…
OpenPhoto now called Trovebox still interests me and could be one model which could actually work?
At long long last… The East Manchester line is opening to the public! But there is a preview from Friday – Sunday for residents who were disrupted by the whole thing…
The new 3.9-mile (6.3km) Metrolink line from Manchester Piccadilly to Droylsden will open to the general public on Monday 11 February – and residents will shortly be sent their free travel invitation.
Once open, it will serve eight new stops – New Islington, Holt Town, Etihad Campus, Velopark, Clayton Hall, Edge Lane, Cemetery Road and Droylsden.
Only 1 year and 6 months behind schedule! (it was meant to be open for last seasons football, aka Aug 2011!)
My yearly pass will run out soon, and I really want to know two things…
So if someone from Metrolink would like to get back to me on some of these questions, comments should now work?
Now I have my twitter data/dump, I want to host it myself which is pretty easy because there is JSON and HTML (already thought about transforming it into XML for easier transformation in the future) but I don’t understand why Tent.io, Status.net, Facebook or heck Google don’t have an option to import your twitter data?
When Twitter made the data available to you, it was clearly yours. Aka you own the rights to all of it. So you can do what you like with it now. Including handing it over to someone else to mine and use if you so wish.
It was something we talked about again while at the dataportability group, data providers who would handle, mine and make sense of your data on your behalf.
I would consider allowing Google mine the data, if it improved my already great Google Now experience.
I would also like to see my Tent.io allow me to upload all my tweets, therefore making it a heck lot more interesting and useful.
Update… Imran reminds me Timehop supports your twitter data, actually I’ve been looking at singly.com recently…
If you don’t already know my own personal experience of BBC Three’s year of making love and the crazy things which have followed…
However last night it was time for the whole thing to be played out on BBC Three. I had feared the very worst but what was churned out on TV wasn’t so bad. Nope the TV magic or the beauty of editing pretty much cleaned away the slate of last year. With it also the grand claims of a record breaking attempt, 500 couples, blah blah, etc…
Interestingly during the show there was no official hashtag, so we used the #yoml hashtag which a few of us had been using during last years recording. Most of the comments were reasonably positive about the show which seemed to focus more on the couples than the experiment and process.
Even Laura said…
Looks so smooth, sleek, quick and efficient.. The magic of television!
Was I in the show? Yes I saw myself twice but only really passing shots. The clearest is when Cherry Healy is talking to a guy and there’s me in background.
Most of the shots for the show focused on the start of the day when everyone was happy and still expecting great things to happen. However there are some shots where its clear the audience has thinned and are a lot less enthusiastic about the whole thing. In actually fact there was other signs of the conflict which was unveiling…
Loved seeing all the empty seats – that looked really really good……. Not
Steve G said on the unofficial YOML Facebook group
Nicely edited…the only evidence of the farce that day turned into was when Cherry and the scientists were discussing the matches you could hear the unmatched being called out like cattle like we were…
YOML is a good advert for online dating algorithms! isItscienceOrLuck
To which I said no its not… Actually the science or luck is a interesting one… Being TV and the heavy editing they will show a selection of couples with a bias to the ones who last the longest. If we go on the first week, a possible one serious relationship out of 4 isn’t too great. I would suggest luck is in play more than science at this moment. This is why I’m very interested in the science behind it all as it gets to the bottom of something much greater…
With enough Big Data can algorithms work on some of the most human of things… falling in love?
Unforgettably, this show isn’t going to provide any answers…
Matthew S and Matthew K pointed out…
They didnt talk about the compatibility test at all!
Yeah, very true, the science was brushed over very quickly. TV has really strict guidelines about faking things, and we know there was lots of manipulation going on so they clearly had to be very vague about it!
Actually we were asked to make personal videos which you will see popping up on the show now and there… Of course I did my own and I have now made it public here.
BBC Three turned a smouldering wreck into a tiny little pebble which will satisfy the BBC Three audience I’m sure.
My part to play in it was minimum which was good because frankly Laura is a great woman and I have to say my match which I finally got after many months, seemed slightly off on the face of it. Actually would you like to know who my match was? Well it was woman called Olivia Pinder. I did write to her once but never heard anything so just decided she wasn’t interested or she was as fed up of the whole shame as myself. Then my YOML friend Cristina Conti asked if I had heard anything from my match and convinced me to give it one more shot. Of course I didn’t hear anything, so that was it. Plus frankly I had enough of it by a certain point…
Would I ever do anything like this again? Well if its a dating show/experiment no. I felt like I brushed close enough with those people who have words like “model” and “promotions” in their résumés & had been on other TV shows! Just there looking for stardom?! This so isn’t me and I am still very surprised they let me take part at all.
Steve G posed a interesting question,
Gotta feel for the people who had sat through until 8pm (like myself and it was 9pm) and didn’t get a match however I don’t know whether I would of preferred that and not knowing then having being matched last minute…
Personally I always wanted to know who my match was… the not knowing was frustrating because I knew someone knew but didn’t want to tell me unless it was in front of broadcast cameras. The moment I knew, it wasn’t such a big deal anymore. Even when I heard nothing back, it wasn’t a problem. I think the not knowing was the problem.
My brush with mainstream TV has been too close for comfort, to date I’ve gotten away with it. Maybe thats a sure sign I should avoid at all costs from now on… I’ll keep watching just to see if some of the friends I made are on there but otherwise this is one experience I can mark up as a close shave.
Let’s cut the crap. Life is short, you have less time than you think, and there are no baby unicorns coming to save you. So rather than doling out craptastic advice to you about Making!! It!! To!! The!! Top!!™, let me humbly ask: do you want to have a year that matters — or do you want to spend another year starring-slash-wallowing in the lowest-common-denominator reality show-slash-whiny soap opera of your own inescapable mediocrity-slash-self-imposed tragedy?
If (congratulations) your unquenched desire to have better than a smoking trainwreck of a so-called life exceeds your frenzied mania for spending another 365 days wallowing in a sea of junk-food wrappers, then — don’t worry, I’ll be gentle — here are a few tiny questions.
If thats not a welcome kick in the groin I don’t know what is….
Then the points which are summarised in these headings.
The first and last three are the kind of questions I asked myself when I was lying in hospital after my brush with death. Ok it wasn’t true north but what really drives me and what really gets me down.
And just when you had enough of this stuff, a little more harsh reality…
I don’t pretend any of the above is revolutionary, or new, or anything less than obvious. Yet, the lessons of a life well lived rarely are: they’re simple, timeless truths.
So let me ask again. Why are you here? Do you want this to be another year that flies by, half-hearted, arid, rootless, barely remembered, dull with dim glimpses of what might have been? Or do you want this to be a year that you savor, for the rest of your surprisingly short time on Planet Earth, as the year you started, finally, irreversibly, uncompromisingly, to explosively unfurl a life that felt fully worth living?
The choice is yours. And it always has been.
Awesome and great to hear this type of thing being delivered at a different level than most times
Therefore, I want to post a blog post, everyday, for the month of February. What’s more, I want to challenge my friends, my colleagues … neighbours … pets etc to join me.
Rules:
- Your blog must be public
- Virals/Images/Videos posts are allowed, but only if you comment somehow on the content.
- 1 post per day, for 28 days of February, by the same person
Questions:
Q: Why?
A: Why not? Being able to write coherently, repeatedly is a valuable skill. Doing it on your own can be boring/lonely. Knowing other people are also having to rush for the 23:59 deadline is somewhat warming.
Well I guess this is your challenge accepted…. Although I might double post once in a while…
It still amazes me that I’ve been blogging for almost 10 years… Although I do need to alter my archived posts as they all point to blojsom/blog still…
One of my new year’s resolutions was to Be fitter and heather
Been consistently loosing weight at a slow pace but I do need to do more exercise. I’m hoping to find more of the things I like doing including volleyball in the next year. I’ve been consider a lot of what happens in the QS (quantified self) world and eying up the FitBit Ultra as it seems just open enough to do interesting things and work with my setup. My family got me enough Amazon credits to buy one which is great.
So I bought a Fitbit Ultra… Unfortunately its certainly a pain… More of a pain that I was prepared for originally.
First problem was the fact you need to get it started by using its own proprietary dock and software. I don’t have a spare Virtual Machine on my new laptop and I rather not go through the hassle of running a VM just to setup it up. So I went to my neighbor and he set it up instead.
Once that was done, I was able to see the stats on the website and the android apps which I installed. However I wasn’t getting updates…
In the end I saw they launched another Fitbit, titled Fitbit One which synced over Bluetooth 4.0 instead. So I swapped it and paid the difference on Amazon…
Although I still had to do the original setup using a mac or pc. The hope is I will be able to do the syncing from now on over the Bluetooth connection of my ubuntu laptop, or my phone/tablet with the fitbit app. Weirdly I can’t seem to find Ubuntu drivers for Bluetooth 4.0, altought Bluez says they have some support. Frustratingly this “feature” is still coming on Android although it works on iOS devices (as usual)
I’m holding out hope for the OpenYou project. But right now, it seems to be a process of waiting and waiting. During that time I’ll keep using it and hoping it keeps the data till its sorted…
I’ve been re-watching the Seinfeld TV series and getting a whole new outlook on the series. In some regards seinfeld’s life is very similar to my own and I seem to share the geeky level of critical analysis of the mundane. Maybe because that’s what makes life much more interesting. The analysis of relationships and life isn’t just smart but ever-so perfect…
Anyway I came across important life lessons learned from watching seinfeld
An important life lesson from Jerry Seinfeld
The reason that dating can be so brutal is the scrutiny that you put each other through. Because whenever you think about this person in terms of the future, you have to magnify everything about them.
The guy will be thinking “I don’t think her eyebrows are even. Could I look at uneven eyebrows for the rest of my life?”
And of course the woman’s looking at the guy, thinking “What is he looking at? Do I want somebody looking at me like this for the rest of my life?”
Good stuff…
I was half watching Newsnight and working on my laptop, on Thursday 31st January on BBC2. Newsnight finished and the weather came on. Now the #uksnow is pretty much out the way, I’m not so interested in the weather.
Anyway as the weather man ran through the upcoming weather forecast, I looked up when the man mentioned Manchester. A few moments passed and I thought well its related to rain, so Manchester is a obvious target. A few moments later, Manchester was mentioned again and I looked up again. My glance become more of a stare as I thought about perceptive media.
The moment of attention or as I like to think about it, a moment of deja vu. Was powerful enough to make me lift my head and divert my attention to the weather for a few more moments at least.
The ability to connect and engage with people using slight differences in narrative. It doesn’t require huge sweeping changes, just clever well written narrative.