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CurrentCost + PowerMeter

2010-05-17T23:15:32Z

I managed to get my CurrentCost thingy to submit data to Google PowerMeter, thanks to the tweet-a-watt hack.

Music of the Naugties

2009-11-23T13:18:05Z

The decade is coming to an end in one month and 8 days and an apathetic wave of Noughties nostalgia seems to be sweeping over the country, a breath of relief after the tentative steps of a new millenium in which nothing broke (except the international banking system, respect for international law and modern socialism) if you will.

Musically I would describe the 00's as a bit of a low patch from my point of view, the first five years were almost entirely taken up with my Ph.D. , an activity involving the purchase of almost no new music and latterly i became 30 which I think pretty much disqualifies me from having a valid opinion on music, if I ever had one in the first place. Thie NME has just released their top 100 albums of the decade and it's time to compare notes.

Of the 100 albums on the list I have the following:

* (100) MGMT Oracular Spectacular
* (97) Sigur Ros Agaetis Byrjun
* (87) Bon Iver For Emma, Forever Ago
* (83) Laura Marling Alas, I Cannot Swim
* (80) Danger Mouse The Grey Album
* (70) Glasvegas Glasvegas
* (65) Muse Black Holes And Revelations
* (60) Green Day American Idiot
* (46) Delgados The Great Eastern
* (33) Arcade Fire Neon Bible
* (28) Johnny Cash The Man Comes Around
* (24) The Libertines The Libertines
* (23) Klaxons Myths Of The Near Future
* (21) The Coral The Coral
* (19) The White Stripes White Blood Cells
* (18) The White Stripes Elephant
* (14) Radiohead Kid A
* (13) The Shins Wincing The Night Away
* (10) Radiohead In Rainbows
* (8) Interpol Turn On The Bright Lights
* (7) Arcade Fire Funeral
* (4) Arctic Monkeys Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not
* (1) The Strokes Is This It

23/100, hmm (not that comparing well to the NME is eactly something to be proud of); there are some in the list which I would certainly swap for things which I haven't bought and I'm not really sure I agree with the ordering (the strokes at #1?). Perhaps, if anything the list just goes to show that the 00s were largely a decade dominated by same-sounding moderate, intelligent(-sounding) indy and the absence of persistently good (the strokes??) and inventive acts.

Robot Chassis

2009-10-20T22:24:04Z

Whlie waiting for Hagen's thesis to print I did a little parametric design for my turtlebot chassis. It's done using GeoGebra. Stuff like the servo and battery dimensions are fixed but most of the other basic properties are variable or dependent thereon.

Now just need to figure out where to mount the brain and the lasers.

Laptop stand

2009-09-18T16:54:51Z

I'm trying to get into the habit of working with my laptop at the right level and with keyboard and mouse at work as it seems to be better for my wrists/general state of "wellness".

A while ago I saw these guys selling laptop stands made of cardboard and many other people who had made them from scratch, so I decided to have a go at making my own. Some (100% recycled) laser jet paper boxes, a craft knife, parcel tape and about 1/2 an hour later I ended up with this:

laptop stand

The results turned out quite well if I say so myself (no religious connotations intended, it's just a very stable structure!).

Phonetos

2009-06-16T23:52:18Z

Photos from my phone

MP3 Player Restoration

2009-05-27T01:18:51Z

Having stumbled through to my mid-twenties on a archaeic mix of personal music technologies such as "tapes", "minidiscs" and "listening to music through speakers in the privacy of my own home", about 5 years ago I got my first MP3 player. The player in question is a Cowon Iaudio X5 (which is very good by the way, especially with rockbox) but over time the battery has been dying and a year or so ago I managed to drop the mean time between intermittent failures on the disk to about 2 days by unceremoniously propelling it across the office in a cable-tripping-over incident. Instead of buying an iPod I decided to have a go at fixing it:

New battery (ebay) : £10.
32Gb CF card ( MyMemory) : £45 (it was on sale currently seems to be about £60).
CF- 1.8" Toshiba adaptor ( LinITX) : £10 .

Opened case, removed drive, de-soldered old battery, re-soldered new battery (make mental note, buy a new nib for soldering iron and some flux, curse EU for banning lead solder), reassemble.

Charge, test, play, woop.

House letterbox

2009-03-27T11:05:50Z

One of the most annoying things about our new house is the flapping letterbox, we are quite high up (175ft anyway) on a relatively exposed spot and the wind makes it flap continuously.

Fortunately I ordered a big box of Neodymium-Iron-Boron supermagnets a while ago from wondermagnet :
.

I was able to affect a successful repair by supergluing two connecting magnets to the flap and the letterbox respectively:

Prompt snubbing of those people who claimed that owning 100 assorted supermagnets would never be of any use for anything.

Plastering

2009-03-22T00:36:39Z

I do realise that decoration is very boring, but this will not stop me from inflicting my enthusiasm on you (and other people):

Dave the plasterer came and did a fantastic job on our fireplace :

There is something about taking a bag of powder and some water and making things which are not flat or solid-looking, flat and solid looking which I am unnaturally excited about. Either that or I've drunk too much tea (plasterers seem to drink a lot of tea).

aspviz-3d

2009-03-18T01:11:06Z

Last year Marina and I converted a few hours of frivolous time-wasting into a paper about visualsing answer set problems in 2D.

I've had a 3D block puzzle (which has belonged to the lab since I have been here) sat incomplete on my desk for the last couple of months and after a couple of hours of tinkering with the original visualisation code, I can now visualise problem solutions in 3D:

from

to:

Much joy; I no longer have 6 pieces of randomly shaped wood sat on my desk. Hoorah.

Arabic

2009-03-13T11:17:14Z

I have always liked learning languages, I suspect that this can be attributed to a subconscious feeling that being able to communicate with everybody will some how make the world a better place. Unfortunately, my enthusiasm has not always been met with an equal level of ability or study and so far (at 29 and three quarters), my efforts have led me to have smatterings of French, German, Russian and Spanish. I speak none fluently but by my reckoning I should be able to buy a train ticket, order a beer or have a brief conversation about the weather in the native language of about 20% of the worlds population (English included of course).

The University offers subsidised language lessons to staff which I decided to take advantage of (until the bean counters change their mind - which they appear to be doing at the moment) and rather than doing the sensible thing and actually learning one of the languages I have already started to some level of usefulness I decided that learning a new language would be a good idea.

I've always fancied learning Dutch or Greek but the university doesn't have any courses, Mandarin and Japanese frankly scare me, which left me with a choice of Italian or Arabic. No offense to the Italians (well not much anyway) but Arabic won on the grounds that it has more speakers (~250M in various dialects), and it sounds cooler and there are three speakers in my office I can inflict my efforts on.

Arabic is hard, no two ways about it:

Pronunciation is hard: being a semitic language, Arabic draws on a completely different set of vowel and consonant sounds than Romance and Slavonic languages. Arabic has 28 letters in the basic alphabet (with several additional letters), most of which represent digraphs (consonant + vowel). Within the alphabet there are, for example, three sounds for "H" (ح‎,خ,ﻫ) one of which can best be described as "breathing out loudly", three "S"s, three "T"s, two "D"s and Qaf (ق‎) which is a completely unfamiliar sound to the western ear which can best be described as "the sound you make when you are choking on a squirrel". There are plenty of cases where confusing similar letters will lead to offense, my favorite so far being: قلب (Qa'lb): heart/sweetheart and كلب (Kah'lb) which means dog.
Reading is hard: Arabic text is closely tied to the script, each letter may be written differently depending on whether it appears at the start, in the middle or at the end of the word, unless it is after other letters which break the flow of the pen, also in some cases letters roll together in unusual ways. In addition the vowel sound (long/short etc) associated with each letter is either left implicit (in most text), or supplemented by a complex set of diacritics which themselves are difficult to parse (used in dictionaries/the Quran).
The grammar is complex compared to Latin languages. Arabic seems to have a bit of everything: Complex verb conjugation (stem + prefix + suffix), genders, noun declension by case and gender, a ridiculously complex plural (which has permutations for singluar, dual and plural) which change by case and so on.
Almost everything about the language is irregular and so far (after 6 weeks) any mention of a rule or convention about the language has been predicated with a "well this applies some of the time but there are of course lots of irregularities".

Saying that, It's been quite fun.

Eating out

2009-03-05T00:24:51Z

I've just got back from dinner at Aqua on Walcot st., great place for a restaurant; in a converted (presumably methodist) church, high ceilings and all that, swanky modern decor, relaxed atmosphere, all good.

Shame that the service, food and wine were a bit crap really. There were about 15 people in the restaurant, being served by 4 waiters who managed to be both slow and, when prompted for service, rude. I had mussels which tasted of nothing and lacked the advertised crostone, and liver with a balsamic sauce which seemed to be lacking any ingredients other than balsamic vinegar, yeilding what I can only describe as pickled liver. Cost £30 inc 1/3 of a bottle of wine.

Tonight was the seventh time I've eaten out in the last nine days and it was probably the worst, which, considering that one of these places was at schipol airport, is saying something.

Dinner

2009-02-25T12:25:46Z

Went to Lieve on Herengracht for dinner last night. Food was amazing and each of the (4) courses was accompanied by a specially selected beer(e47pp inc drinks). After that we did some more drinking, my head hates me.

Lounge phase 2: dismantling

2009-02-02T12:55:20Z

Lounge floor is still not finished, unfortunately replacement boards are not easy to come by with modern ones being either too thick or too thin and reclaimed ones being both expensive and out of stock at our local reclamation yard.

In an attempt to at least get something done this weekend I opted for removing the boxing on the side of the chimney breast in the lounge (this used to hold the water, gas and electricity for the old boiler of doom).

First step was removing the plywood and frame, then disconnecting and re-patching the ring-main which ran down to the old boiler control box, then cutting and where possible removing the dead pipes (they should all have been disconnected when the heating was installed, but you never know...). The boiler installers were kind enough to completely remove the gas pipe to the fireplace which made life a little less stressful (because being squirted with water and electrocuted is less scary than being set on fire).

The white box is a patch box for the upstairs ring main which ran down to the boiler (the other wires are just control wires which (hopefully) are now both disconnected at the other end and I will pull up next time i get the floorboards up upstairs).

The boiler pipes are still largely in place and I will get rid of them when I do the fireplace. You can just about see the soot from where the boiler flue gas appears to have been leaking into the lounge...

Emmy the great

2009-01-20T19:29:03Z

Are playing in bath on friday the 6th Feb, anybody want to come and see them?

Lounge phase 1

2009-01-11T23:31:42Z

First stage of lounge re-decoration is replacing/reinforcing some worm-eaten joists.

Needless to say this was not finished in the anticipated time frame (some confusion over the number of mm in an inch and how exactly to use a circular saw). On the plus side the lounge now looks a bit like a set for the crystal maze.

Lounge video

2009-01-07T12:06:30Z

Lounge in 3D

2009-01-06T00:44:34Z

Instead of doing the things which I probably should have been doing this evening (see previous bathroom-related construction work), I've been making a 3D model of our lounge under the cover of "seeing what our floor might look like". It's probably fair to say that I have got a little carried away, in fact I suspect I passed that point when I started looking for my digital camera to capture realistic textures for our existing upholstery and obsessively re-measured all of our furniture.

Anyway the initial results are here:

There is also a walkthrough movie in the making, but, for the want of my own personal render farm that won't be ready till sometime tomorrow.

DIY 101

2009-01-04T19:20:28Z

Today we broke the first rule of DIY:

Do not, under any circumstances try and do more than one room at once.

The sealant around our bath was going a bit mouldy so we decided to replace it this turned out to be a bigger job than we'd originally estimated:

Science Museum

2008-12-11T00:25:31Z

I was in London today to see off a friend who is going to Singapore for a few months. Shaking off the necessary hangover from last night, it was decided that a visit to the science museum would be a fitting thing to do.

Having read about it in the press I decided that we should go and see the Japan Car exhibit which alleges to provide an exploration of Japanese car design and its relation to the growing city. The exibit, it turns out, is a gross dissapointment (especially when you consider that it costs £8 to get in), consisting of a mixture of boring (the cars themselves) and a pile of pretentious and patronising design twaddle which fails to excite in any way.

Some small consolation comes in the fact that the exit to the exhibition hall leads you directly into the "Listening post" installation which, I think is one of the best examples of public art that I've ever seen.

New central heating, in pictures

2008-09-19T10:15:55Z

As anybody who has been following 561's blog will know, we have had our central heating replaced over the last week. Mostly things have gone well except for the discovery of more exciting features of our house (cracks and woodworm).

We started by removing the skirting boards and lifting the (cheap) laminate flooring in the lounge, this turned out to be hard work, especially as the screws attaching the skirts to the battens were covered in what appeared to be epoxy plumbing putty rather than say wood filler. The laminate flooring was of the old, glued together type so (to my relief) we decided to abandon any hopes of putting it back down again and ripped it to shreds (this was fun after the hassle with the skiring boards).

In the process of getting everything up we found some interesting things including the 1980s majorette truck which fell out from behind the radiator and obvious signs of woodworm in some of the boards in the lounge.

On monday they arrived with the radiators and a large amount of pipe. We had to rearrange the spare room (again) to give them access to the floor boards not having finished unpacking yet, this was not much of a problem. During the day they put in most of the new pipework upstairs, including routing the gas pipe around the kitchen to get to the new boiler.

On tuesday almost all of the radiators went in except for the spare room. When they took the radiator out of the lounge, a number of exciting things dropped out including 16 matchbox toys, a child's slipper and a bart simpson doll.

Wednesday was mostly spent installing the new boiler and connecting it up the gas and it's new pipes, by the end of the day we had both heating and hot water.

Thursday was all about removing the old system, they took out the old boiler and rough-plastered the fire place (we might open that up again when we finish the lounge). Like me, the boiler was manufactured in Preston and around 30 years old and aparrently well onto it's last legs. We were left with a big pile of stuff outside the house which they came and collected on Saturday.

One of the installers noticed what appeared to be some slipping behind the wallpaper upstairs and suggested that there was probably a crack underneath which of course there was. Just one more thing to look at.

Leaving the house to one side for a few days, on Saturday I hired a petrol hedge trimmer and opened a new front in our ongoing war against our remarkably vigerous Leylandii (which I've now sworn to chop down when funds/time allow). Six hours and fourteen garden recycling bags later, the hedge had been placated for another year. In the process of doing one side I got a bit carried away and cut through a section of the chain-link fence, hedge trimmer didn't blink an eye.

zootalures @ 2008-09-01T10:05:00

2008-09-01T09:06:43Z

Police go after leaders of anarchist group, get confused.

Wouldn't it be cool if?

2008-08-17T10:22:57Z

Wouldn't it be cool if the whole world had sprung floors?

Grrrdening

2008-07-14T17:56:18Z

nPower meter services are incompetent fools, spent 1hr on the phone to them this afternoon (mostly on hold), I got angry. They are giving us another £20 and we still do not have a new electricity meter.

To relax I attacked our brambles. To put it simply, the brambles lost and I won... now I need to decide where to hide the bodies.

I also spent some time transplanting gastropods from all over the garden to the side with the ground elder in the hope that they would do the same job on that side as they did on the other one.

Internet

2008-07-08T22:12:19Z

Internet broken please not to be breaking it any more.

Gong fail

2008-06-15T22:40:47Z

Moir Lockhead, occasional ~~labour party donor~~ friend and employer of people who choose to make spontaneous donations to the labour party and CEO of the public transport company that bought you the £125 saver return to London and the £1.50 a mile bus ticket in Bath got a knighthood for.. services to public transport... sigh.