| Multitasking geekery |
[Oct. 22nd, 2009|11:14 pm] |
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As if playing with radios or computers on their own weren't geeky enough activities, I've just finished rigging up an interface to allow one of my computers to tune my radio. |
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| Chronography |
[Aug. 19th, 2009|05:12 pm] |
A while back I took a fancy to getting myself a new wristwatch. A particular Seiko pilot's watch caught my eye, and the lovely ![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) ljquin kindly decided to buy for me as an anniversary present.
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| Aya Revolution |
[Aug. 18th, 2009|08:33 am] |
Over the weekend months and months of planning and discussion came to fruition in the form of the sixth of the Ayacon series of conventions which started in 1998, of which this is my second time working as a committee member (although in 2005 my role was mostly 'in name only' as I was on honeymoon the weekend of the event)
Seeing ~1200 people (many of the sporting absolutely fantastic costumes) take over the University of Warwick conferences facilities and have themselves a great time was heartwarming.
Our guests and event organisers provided us with a wonderful programme, and the Warwick conference and technical staff were more than we could have asked for in providing all the assistance we needed.
Needless to say I'm now sore an exhausted, but overall very pleased with the way the weekend went. |
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| Technological Archeology |
[Jul. 24th, 2009|10:56 pm] |
My exercise in breathing new life into old hardware has taken another couple of steps forward - the first being the arrival of some drive belts for my Amstrad 3" floppy drives from PCW enthusiast John King, the second being the resurrection of my external 3.5" drive (the voltage regulator which provided a 5v supply for this had apparently gotten fried at some point, fortunately I had a suitable PSU with which to replace it).
The latter, and the fortune of having one other computer left in the household with a floppy drive gives me a means of data transfer to and from the machine. |
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| Cleaning and Concert Tickets |
[Jun. 28th, 2009|12:07 am] |
Spend most of today catching up on the housework - a bit dull and domestic but fairly unavoidable, and had a nice meal in town with Laura (marred slightly by a bit of a headache which had been creeping up on me all afternoon).
Inspired by seeing the film we've finally made our minds up and booked tickets for Ten Years of ATP this December, which from the (likely to expand) line-up that's been announced so far is looking like it will be a cracking weekend. |
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| music and bangs |
[Jun. 25th, 2009|10:06 pm] |
Had an evening that was in different parts fun and eventful.
The eventful part came before the evening had really started - whilst driving to the train station we had another car run into the back of ours at a roundabout with a very attention-grabbing bang. Fortunately the damage seems to be limited to some small scrapes on the bumper.
A blissfully uneventful train journey to Edinburgh brings us to the fun part of the evening - A screening of the 'All Tommorow's Parties" film. Pulling together material from a staggering number of contributors (ranging from professional DV to mobile phone video and super-8 film) the filmmakers presented a musical montage of the festivals ten year history offering a glimpse of both the on-screen performances and the off-screen character of the festival. Not quite as good as actually being there, but a reasonable second. |
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| Freeing the nodes |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|12:17 pm] |
Something I've been doing for the last few months and haven't written about yet is that I'm now a volunteer staff member on the freenode IRC network.
I've been participating in freenode as a user for many years, out of all the IRC networks I use it is the one I am the most active on.
During 2008 I started to take a bit more of an interest in the network outside of my usual haunts, and as well as joining a few social channels I started helping out in the general support channel, #freenode - answering the odd question where I could.
In February network head honcho Christel approached me and asked if I had any interest in coming on board as a staff member.
The months since then have been quite interesting as I've gotten to grips with the technical side (from my experience running an IRC server as part of the backnet and imaginarynet projects I knew a bit about what goes on 'behind the curtain', but freenode is on a completely different scale from that exercise) and gotten to know the staff team - who I've found to be friendly, professional yet fun to work with - and the wide and diverse freenode community. The work has ranged from the day-to-day technical stuff to liaising with users groups and helping mediate where there have been problems. |
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| Bones |
[Jun. 23rd, 2009|07:45 am] |
Had the 1-year on check on my hip yesterday.
Overall it looks encouraging - the X-rays didn't show any sign of serious deterioration. There's a suggestion of a flat spot on the top of the ball which the consultant reckoned might be a tiny bit of dead bone, but not enough to cause concern.
He doesn't reckon there is much they can do about the discomfort I get from it, about the only option he could offer would be having the metalwork extracted which wouldn't offer any guarantee of making things better (and, being quite intrusive, could possible make things worse, not to mention the inherent infection risk). As It has not gotten perceptibly worse in the last year we agreed that I'd just keep an eye on it and if I felt the pain was getting worse I'll go back and talk to them again.
Nice to have that bit of worry off my mind, at any rate. |
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| Countdown |
[May. 31st, 2009|05:57 pm] |
I was back in Coventry yesterday for another visit to Warwick university. The weather made for a very pleasant drive down, and the traffic was light enough for me to make good time.
The meeting was a productive one, and I've now seen the bits of the site that were not available for us to view at the last meeting (as I was absent from the last Ayacon in 2005 I am not as familiar with the site as I would like to be).
Now he programme is starting to fall into place and we have been discussing which rooms will be use to run which events the convention is starting to feel more imminent (a little over ten weeks to go).
I'm really looking forward to it - I've not been to an Anime con larger than Minami since the last Northampton Aya, and it's been even longer since I was heavily involved in the running of an event (mostly I pitch in when I'm needed, and enjoy the social side the rest of the time).
It's going to be fun :) |
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| Minamicon Portraiture |
[Apr. 11th, 2009|05:20 pm] |
For minamicon this year I decided to do something different on the photography side.
I've not been taking a whole lot of pictures at conventions in the last couple of years - the growth of fandom and the uptake of digital photography has turned the cosplay side of the con into a bit of a paparazzi scrum, and I can think of better things to do than fight for position with dozens of other spods with DSLRs.
As it happened I had an unused roll of Kodak C41 process black and white film in the fridge, so rather than my K100d I look along this film, a simple Cosina mechanical 35mm SLR body, Pentax 50mm prime lens an old auto-flash unit, with the idea of taking portraits of people around the con.
I'm fairly happed with the results, my composition was somewhat sloppy in places (practice makes perfect, and I've not been getting much practice lately), but I did get a few nice shots out of the exercise.
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| Masquerades, Mechanicals and Motorway Cafes |
[Mar. 31st, 2009|09:17 am] |
This weekend we were down south for Minamicon, Britain's longest running Anime convention and now in its 15th year.
It was a fun weekend, with the usual relaxed Minami feel to it, lots of old faces and some new ones, and only the odd somber moment due to Ewan's absence. Again the cosplay side of the con was big, with lots of clever and well executed hall costumes and a large number of very good masquerade entries.
The con committee have been working hard to pull up the non-video side of the program, cumulating in a very fun party on the Friday night and a number of interesting items over the weekend from Taiko drumming instruction to Sake tasting.
I decided to drive down again this year, something I'd hope would go off without incident but sadly this was not the case, although compared to last years overheating incident it was fairly tame. At a couple of points on the way to Birmingham I'd noticed an occasional rattle from the underside of the car when crossing rough patches of tarmac, and a very noticeable rattle when pulling away from the M6 tollbooths. As the car wasn't exhibiting any handling problems I perceived we continued, and we made it to Southampton without the rattle getting worse.
On Sunday I got the chance to look at it in some bright sunlight and noticed something underneath, which on closer inspection turned out to be part of the exhaust heat shield, which had detached itself from the bottom of the shell and was only being kept off the road by the fact the silencer box was in the way. On Monday I was able to find a Ford garage in the area to take a look at it and secure the loose part with a fistful of zipties (lending further evidence to the assertion that there is nothing you can't fix with the careful application of zipties or gaffer tape).
As it isn't far from Southampton Laura had suggested we visit the Little Chef restaurant near Popham which Heston Blumenthal had recently waved a culinary wand over. I have to say I was very impressed - the result is roadside catering as it should be (and, in fact, how I'm told it was when the first motorway service areas opened in the 1960s) - table service and good quality fresh food cooked to order rather than being left to languish on a hotplate. All in all it makes for a very pleasant way to break up a journey. |
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| Another glamorous evening |
[Feb. 15th, 2009|10:00 pm] |
On Saturday we visited the recently renamed O2 Academy in Glasgow for Club Noir's Valentine's night event.
Once again it was a lot of fun, with just as glamorous if slightly more conventional crowd that at the Halloween party, and again the entertainment, both the music and dancing, was great.
We explored the venue a bit more this time and discovered the the upper circle still has it's theatre seating intact which makes for a nice place to relax if you're not dancing.
All in all a good night.
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| 1986-2006 |
[Feb. 2nd, 2009|06:28 am] |
My Mac Mini has acquired a new desk mate in the form of a computer 20 years it's senior.
On a whim (partly inspired by stumbling on some video of an 8080 micro on youtube) I decided to dig out one of my Amstrads this weekend, dust it off and see if it still works.
As it turns out it does - the floppy drive is in need of repair, but aside from that the machine seems to be in fully working order, and is happy to accept software loaded from cassette.
My playing around with the WRT router has rekindled my interest in electronics a little so I've a few ideas for hardware hacks kindling in my mind, particularly putting together some sort of serial interface or mass storage connectivity.
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| Full Throttle |
[Jan. 27th, 2009|11:56 pm] |
Had an enjoyable evening with as part of a group of people from work in a visit to a nearby Indoor Karting centre.
It's the first time I've tried it, and I have to say it was a lot of fun even though I was far from the quickest driver in the group (although luckily for my ego not the slowest). It took me a bit of time to get used to the kart and get over my nerves enough to start pushing hard, and I was only really getting into the swing of it by the final session - I think I'd do a lot better on a second attempt.
It was a bit odd getting back into my car after the karts - by comparison the steering and brakes are a hell of a lot lighter. |
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| Warranty Void If Removed |
[Jan. 18th, 2009|07:48 am] |
So, this weekend I've been doing a bit of hacking.
As I mentioned a while back our domestic internet connection is managed by a Linksys WRT54GS running OpenWRT. Now while this has been very successful it's flexibility has been hampered by the somewhat cramped 16MB of mass storage available on this device.
Fortunately some clever folks out there have figured out a method of attaching an SD/MMC card reader to these devices, by making use of some I/O lines on the cpu normally used to interface with switches and LEDs on the unit's front panel.
As the routers themselves are modestly priced I decided to obtain a second one for this project - if it all goes horribly wrong at least I'd have a working, configured unit ready to drop back in place.
So, armed with an SD card socket scavenged from a broken card reader, a spool of wire and a freshly void warranty I went about the task. Fortunately the board layout isn't too cramped so tacking wires onto the appropriate spots isn't that difficult, the most challenging being a couple which need to be attached to the end of surface mount LEDs.
With this done and the socket attached to the other end of the wires it was simply a case of slotting in a card, loading the appropriate kernel driver and bingo - one SD card reported as available to the system, providing a much roomier 2GB of storage. |
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| Ewan Chrystal |
[Jan. 7th, 2009|10:33 pm] |
As some of you may already know Ewan Chrystal, a long standing active participant in SF and Anime fandom, passed away at the weekend.
I've been fortunate enough to work with Ewan a number of times over the last 10 years, and there are few other people I know who could match his dedication, generosity, kindness or humour.
Farewell, Ewan - your memory is one that will not be forgotten.
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| The dekipplification continues |
[Dec. 13th, 2008|10:51 pm] |
Today turned into one of tidying.
The first job of the day was taking some stuff to the recycling centre - 3 crates of video cassettes, a useless set top box and a half dozen obsolete optical drives (these seem to be the most frequently upgraded components in the computers we've owned, so over time I've accumulated a number of 'outdated but functional' drives).
With that done and some shelf space vacated by the VHS clearance I decided to turn to our CD collection. I've been thinking for a while about doing something to optimise the amount of shelf space given over to it. A trip to IKEA furnished me with a suitable number of heavy duty cardboard boxes which hold about 22 disks each. An hour of so of sorting the CDs and assembling the boxes and things are looking much more tidy, and the entire exercise has liberated a few meters of shelf space.
Plus the usual weekend laundry rituals. |
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| Just a little pinprick |
[Dec. 10th, 2008|10:24 pm] |
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This evening saw me in Edinburgh attending a recruitment session for the Anthony Nolan Trust. It was a fairly straightforward affair - after re-reading the standard information leaflet, filling in a consent form + questionnaire (similar to the blood donation one but with some more detail due to the more intrusive nature of actually making a bone marrow donation should one be required) and a having it reviewed a small blood sample was taken which will be analysed and the profile kept on file for comparison against patients needing a transplant. |
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| New addition |
[Nov. 23rd, 2008|10:12 am] |
Yesterday we took a run up to Montrose to visit jennadragonfly, Fraser and their new arrival, Richard.
While planing the visit we discovered that Fraser had been planning to come down today to collect his dog, so to save him a run we offered to transport her for him.
Although she doesn't like cars as was evidently a bit stressed by the whole affair she was well behaved, and delighted to see Fraser when we arrived.
As jennadragonfly has said in her own posts both herself and Richard are fit and well.
I was pretty tired after all the driving, but at least we lucked on on missing the weather - it's all looking rather white out there this morning. |
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