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A little bit of web design

I was looking at Mark’s my365 page as he’s also doing a daily photo project, and rather liked his presentation on there.

So last night I put my mind to developing a few lines of code to try to put something similar together. So a bit of Perl code to parse the XML from the RSS feed (yes it’s technical, but fun in a geeky way) from my flickr oneaday feed and I was able to put together a web page of my own which automagically updates whenever I add a photo to the oneaday set on my iPhoto album on my mac (which synchronises with flickr).

Suzy helped me out today with the CSS for laying out the page and in the end this tutorial on floats was also very helpful to end up with my oneaday gallery.

I’l probably tidy it up a little in the future, but it’s not bad for a few hours of work, especially when I consider how long it is since I coded in Perl and php. Definitely a worthwhile exercise, it helps to keep the coding muscles in trim, and I’m teaching web development tools in a couple of weeks.

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One a day

Patch - in the fresh snow
The closest the I’m going to get to a new year’s resolution this year is that I’ve decided that I will be taking at least one photograph a day. I got the idea from this post on photojojo which explains some of the reasons behind doing it.

Now today is the 3rd of January, and yes I did start taking photos on the first, and actually posted the first two up to flickr yesterday. I was trying to upload them to facebook, but couldn’t get the syncing from iPhoto to upload more than one photo from the set which had two pictures in uploaded at a time, add hat to the fact that each time I added a new photo to the set it appeared to create a new facebook album meant that I eventually gave up on that and switched over to flickr. Publishing is now easy for me, I just add the picture I selected as today’s photo to the album in iPhoto and it all gets updated in flickr automatically.

The album is called One A Day in my photostream.

I’m actually pretty new to flickr, so I’m still working out what all the features are and how to use them, so I hope that this will also prompt me to learn to use some more of the features in the future.

Have a happy new year and enjoy your photography.

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Join the FSFE

Are you interested in Free Software, then why not join the Free Software Foundation Europe?

I’ve been a member for a number of years now, and it keeps you in touch with the goings on in Free Software with a European emphasis.

If you want to join, then click the link here: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php?ref=richship

Oh, there is a little bit of a competition at the moment to refer new members, and the winner gets a cooking session with the Fellowship Coordinator, and that sounds kinda fun.

FSFE fellow Button

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Woodburning stove

It’s been a long time in planning, but I finally have my woodburning stove so that we can have a nice controllable fire when camping.

Woodburning stove

Suzy got all excited and had to cook fried eggs on it straight away.


Woodburning stove

It needs a bit more of a burn, and then some stove paint and it’ll be ready for Herofest in July

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iPhone iPhoto popup woes…

Whenever I plug in the iPhone, iPhoto used to open. This is a pain, and there’s a lot of complaints about it on the web. Most people advise turning off the application to open when a camera is connected in the Preferences of iPhoto, but I came across this in the cooments section, which made more sense…

“A simpler solution that I use is to create a new smart album that consists of all of the pictures from an iPhone. Just set Camera Model – is – Apple iPhone in the smart album. Then, in iTunes go to the Photos tab, and include the iPhone smart album. That way you can import all of your pics to iPhoto, and they will immediately pop back up on the iPhone, no fancy hacks involved.”

The original post is http://arstechnica.com/journals/apple.ars/2008/02/25/restore-sanity-stop-iphoto-from-auto-launching-with-iphone

It works for me, and is a nice elegant solution.

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IRC in aber

Especially for freshers…

There is a technology called Internet Relay Chat, which for many years was one of the few ways of interacting with your friends and colleagues around the world on the internet. Now we have lots of IM clients and protocols, but the cool kids all still use IRC.

There is a long and colourful history behind IRC at Aberystwyth, but to summarise (you can read the gory details in other places) bitternet is dead.

IRC is alive and well at irc.aberwiki.org.

Get yourself onto a Sun machine, start up a terminal window and type the following…
$irc
*** Connecting to port 6667 of server change.this.to.a.server
*** Unable to connect to port 6667 of server change.this.to.a.server: Unknown
+host
*** Use /SERVER to connect to a server
/server irc.aberwiki.org
… lots of joining stuff here…
/join #fresher
… stuff…
Hello I am a newbie

You may find yourself in a quiet empty channel, or it might have other folks around. If you feel really brave you might want to try joining #aber, but beware, here be dragons and *shudder* graduates of the department. You need to have a well developed sense of humour to survive for long on #aber, but it is worth the effort getting to know the regulars.

You may want at some point to graduate to another client with different features, but before using scripts, beware they may get you kicked or banned.

Also, get aquainted with http://www.aberwiki.org/ it is a fount of useful (and pretty useless) information.

Enjoy, and see you around

Richard

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Acetylene is a wonderful gas

album519/DSC_7972.jpg
Acetylene is great. I love it – especially when combined with Oxygen and set on fire in the correct way you can heat up metal!

In preparation for some camping, I’ve been looking for some bits of kit, a couple of them being a cooking pot, kettle and a tripod to suspend them over a camp fire. Now there are some of these things on that great tat sale eBay, but the tripod I fancied was £40 plus postage, and that’s too rich for my tastes.

Fortunately, I had some spare time between trains at the railway over the weekend, and I looked out a couple of bits of spare steel. I had to make a bending jig up first from some scrap, so out came my friendly little welder. A couple of minutes later a jig had been fabricated from a piece of scrap “I-beam” and a short section of pipe.
album519/DSC_7976.jpg
A quick chat with Graham and he got me set-up with the Oxy-Acetylene kit, and I was off bending the P shape into the top of a couple of the bars, then the final one, which was slightly more difficult as the first two had to be looped through before finally closing the P. The final one had to be reworked a little, as it was too big the first time, but my new friend Oxy-Acetylene can help persuade metal back to close to its original shape (ish) and then re-bend.

I was enjoying myself so much, I made a couple of “S” hooks from round bar, and with the bit left over I made a lifting handle. When I got home I looked out an old chain that I used to lock my motorbike up with, that is pretty chunky and looks like it’ll work well to hang a pot from.