Want free stuff?

http://gifts.freebiejeebies.co.uk/118970

Do it. Nao.

Arduino Weather Station - Working Prototype

A working protoype of my weather station. Lots of python, some C and a lil shell scripting to hold it all together.

Needs a case.

Needs paperwork. (groan)

Ooooh - Blood.

Quicktime X is Alienating My Enormous Brain.

Firstly, loving the new site layout.

Secondly, the enigma that is Quicktime X (or 10 for those of you who are uneducated). In the time that I've been using Snow Leopard I've found out about the Pro's which are few in number, and the Con's which are many. One of the Pro's i'm sure you'll all agree is the new Quicktime icon.

Amazing bit of graphical design, just like the new UI. Minimalistic and generally fit for purpose. Style is all very well of course, but what about the substance. Unfortunately, that question is unanswerable in more than about a paragraph, and this is my main gripe. The export settings have been completely raped. All you have now is the option to export in iPod/iPhone, Apple TV or iTunes format. This is obviously because Apple are attempting to both attract buyers into buying their shiny new toys and to make exporting video to their devices quick, simple and easy for their new users who are still ridden with PC AIDS. Two birds with one stone. How noble of them.

But what about us, the mainstays of the Apple fanbase over the last 10+ years, who know their way around OS X, and specifically those who want gloriously complex export settings that can be used to transcode their movies into anything that their heart desires? With Quicktime X, unfortunately, this just isn't possible. To make matters worse, Apple have done their best to prevent users from running previous versions of Quicktime along with Quicktime X on the same system. The only way this can be achieved is to take advantage of one of the many bugs in an early build of Snow Leopard which involves .PKG's, and then updating to the Gold Master.

This coupled with the fact that Visualhub has now been discontinued is already adding minutes to my often futile attempts to play newly downloaded movies on the plugin lottery that is the PS3.

Hu?

Haven't written a post of my blog for nearly a year, but then I got a load of views from my blog on flickr, so I had a look. 1860 views in a day?!

Its on this post http://alexburgess.wordpress.com/2009/02/16/close-your-macbookmacbook-prowhatever-without-putting-it-to-sleep-in-kitty-cat-style/

Turns out 562 have downloaded my slightly modded app. Cool

Hidden Google Triforce

Today i noticed one again that the google whatever themed logo had a small but visible triforce logo in it. This isn't just a one off either. Its perpetuates many holiday logo's maybe all.

Coming Soon...

Hardwired Festival...

Install signed app's on the college computers

1. Go find yourself a self extracting, "setup.exe" style app (important), for example, spotify. The app probably can't have access to any of window's "lib" files, so for example, apps with the windows theme seem to not run (of what I have seen so far) - which is why spotify is perfect for this example.
2. Run down to the library and go to the computers, and log on to the computer 3rd in. This computer doesn't stop you opening installers!
3. Make sure you install it in "my documents" or whatever, because otherwise it will default install onto that, and only that, computer.
4. Have fun! So far, I have spotifty, utorrent, chrome (although it currently only is on that library computer)

Run OSX/Linux/XP and in the darkness bind them.

Click to enlarge:

This picture shows a screen-capture of me simultaneously running Mac, Windows and Linux. Yeah!

This was achieved as follows:

Mac - Running natively, hosting the whole shebang.

Windows - Running in a VM provided by SUn Microsystems Virtual Box, with its special graphics driver

Linux - (This was by far the hardest) Was actually running on Dave's server, we logged in using SSH and tunneled an X11 session from the server to my Mac through the SSH protocol. 0_o

Actually you can tunnel all of Gnome (the Linux desktop) across but i couldnt screen cap it as it covered over my entire mac desktop =\.

www.dooyoo.co.uk

Need cash? Give dooyoo.co.uk a go. You can write reviews for anything and everything, and everytime you do you get 500 points. The reviews only have to be 150 words long. Once you get to 20,000 you can opt for a £20 Amazon Voucher or cheque, or wait for 50,000, 70,000, etc. for more money.

Dooyoo.co.uk

Cleaning out (ya Momma)

Thats 1GB of RSS Feeds

HardWired on Film: Star Trek (2009)

Let me start by saying that I watched Star Trek a few weeks back at the IMAX cinema in London, the biggest screen in the UK. One of the major pulls of watching films here is that the screen is as tall as 5 double-decker buses stacked on top of each other. Add this to the 11,000w, 42 speaker surround system and you've got yourself the ultimate cinematic experience. I urge everyone reading this to go and see a film in this format at least once in your lifetime. However, the experience that I had watching Star Trek may differ from those who saw it on a normal size cinema screen.

That out of the way, Star Trek is a stunning work of cinema. Don't make the mistake of assuming that you are reading a review written by the average "action is the only and best genre" teenager. I'm a film student and therefore can appreciate any and every film genre, in any context. This being said, however, many of the technical film reviewers have complained that the lens flair has been overused in this movie, and I wholeheartedly agree. There is a line with this kind of effect, and Abrams molested it good and proper, but this is the only bad thing I have to say about the entire film.

Let's start with the casting. Trekkies around the world have been sweating ever since the reboot/prequel was announced, and the main worry was that the casting wouldn't accurately depict the original crew of Kirk, Spock, Bones, etc. Many have even suggested that finding new actors to play the established characters would be impossible. Luckily, they couldn't have been more wrong. Chris Pine was amazing throughout. Funny, angry, womanizing and intelligent, often all at the same time. The best part of his depiction for me was the way in which he managed to mirror the characteristics of Shatner's Kirk exactly, as well as adding his own legacy to the depiction. Zachary Quinto (Heroes) also does a great job with Spock, despite competition others playing the role throughout the film. As a character, Spock is one of the most difficult characters to play, as you need to portray emotion effectively without physically showing it, and Quinto does about as well as anyone else has in the past (or present). The rest of the cast are all excellent, Bones is the perfect casting and he sounds exactly like the original in every way. Simon Pegg as Scotty didn’t get as much screen time as I would have hoped (that’s probably just my bias towards the actor), but in the small amount of time he is given he delivers the famous Scotty one-liners as humorously as the first time they were said.

Concerning the storyline, J.J Abrams uses the famous Roddenberry effect (Google it for spoilers), which allows him a lot of room in which to tell the story of this film and that of subsequent sequels. Fast-paced and full of action and comedy, Star Trek is highly enjoyable for both action fans and those who are looking for more of a personality in their movies, with intricacies such as character development based on past events (as it turns out this aspect in particular is key to the narrative throughout). The enemy is as ruthless and fearsome as we have come to expect from most Hollywood antagonists, and he has the mother of all motives, which always helps improve the realism.

All in all, Star Trek is a giant of 2009 action cinema and cinema in general, and is easily the best Star Trek film to date (yes, it’s better than The Wrath of Khan). Perhaps most importantly, however, it will please both die-hard Trekkies and new audiences alike.

9.5/10

Your salvation is here !

Okay... maybe it isn't but myself and Pgreen saw humanity's salvation today on the big screen.
At first from all the mixed opinions I have heard of this film I must say I held reserved feeling towards the film but soon not long after the curtains opened and the screen lit up I ate humble pie and big fat slice too.
From an average Joe's point of view the film is 'quite good'. However from my point of view (being a film student) it really is a good piece of work, with a few interesting opening scenes (no spoilers here) I couldn't help but take in the techniques used and think to myself "I haven't seen any other film use this for awhile." We have some crafty uses of great camera angles, filters, CGI and a good use of a Christian Bale.
Despite what you may think of Batman fighting machines instead of the joker is.... *AHEM*. I mean Christian Bale pulls off this character of a war worn and battered John Connor quite well if sometimes, a little OTT in doing so with a few uses of the infamous Batman voice (doing it again).
I was most impressed with how the film was syncronised with the others and how well it fit, as I can safely say I did spend a good 80% of my concentration trying to pick apart it's fitting with the other three films but was happily pleased with it. More importantly though I personnaly love a film which features cameos or references to others, in one scene we hear "You could be mine - by Guns 'n' Roses" appear which was the soundtrack to Terminator 2 and as your well aware if you've seen the trailers, Connor's line of "I'll be back", enough said there really.... and a really good few others which I'll save for myself ;)
All over I would reccomend screwing the bad reviewers with a giant 70ft mech with a 70" cannon for a head (like in the movie), or if you can't manage that going to see the film will do just as well as this really is worth your money in your pocket to go see.

Weather report - Update

CHANGELOG

TODO:

Fix the need to be in the current directory for the file to be located

RSS capability nearly works. Just add an option for auto-detection. (i think i have done this now)

To save the repeated entering of options, load the config from a file

Use son, father, grandfather backup scheme to search for the weather in a file LESS THAN A WEEK OLD

Done:

Made bash script to automate everything.

0.3 - Lots added

Function to find the position of the nth colon

A parsing function that extracts the 3 relevant bits of information from the relevant line - success

0.2 - More features and bugfixes.

Allows the user to specify is the serial communication functions are on or off. This fixed the issue of the program trying to write to a serial device in /dev/ that isn't there.

Moved the weather file to the same directory.

Allows the users to overwrite which file the program gets its data from.

Changed "4" to "3" in data file name. Also fixed in automator script.

Added a function to extract the general summery from the relevant line.

0.1 - First Semi-Functional Build

Works out what day it is.

Allows the user to add a dayshift to skip to other days.

Outputs relevant line of file.

Sends a serial command to the arduino to display a red LED for failure and a green LED for success.

#!/usr/bin/python

# Filename : weather1.py

import datetime

from datetime import date

enableser = bool(input("Enable serial, (True or False) : "))

if enableser:

import serial

ser = serial.Serial('/dev/tty.usbserial-A8004Iyv', 9600)

import time

def getday():

dayshift = int(raw_input("Enter dayshift, (eg 0 for today,1 for tomorrow.) : "))

now = datetime.datetime.now()

year = now.year

month = now.month

day = now.day + dayshift

dayofweek = ['Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Saterday', 'Sunday']

daytoday = dayofweek[date.weekday(date(year,month,day))]

return daytoday

def findcolon(no):

for x in range(1, len(strweather)):

if strweather[x] == ':' :

no =no -1

if no == 0:

return x

def parseline(str):

if 'xml' in file.name:

minus = 6

else:

minus = 1

strsky = str[ findcolon(1)+2 : str.index(',') ]

print strsky

strmax = str[ findcolon(2)+2 : str.index("C") -minus]

print strmax

strmin = str[ findcolon(3)+2 : str.rindex("C") -minus]

print strmin

today= getday()

fileoverride = bool(input("Override default file, (True or False) : "))

if fileoverride:

newfile = raw_input("Enter the path for the file : ")

file = open(newfile, "r")

else:

file = open("Next3DaysRSS.xml", "r")

for line in file:

if today in line:

strweather = line

occurs = True

break

else:

occurs = False

print "The day is", today

if occurs:

print strweather

if enableser:

ser.write("Y")

parseline(strweather)

else:

print today, "is not in the file"

if enableser:

ser.write("N")

Apple sucks

*watches while everyone cries*

... Yeah. £742. Fuck off

Diving right into python.

This summer i am undertaking quite a big project, which, hopefully you will hear all about. A very small part of the project is to get the current day of the week. I decided to code it in python. After a few hours of self teaching i began coding. A bit of research on the net and many many failed attempts at syntax later:

#!/usr/bin/python

# Filename : date-to-day.py

import datetime

from datetime import date

now = datetime.datetime.now()

year = now.year

month = now.month

day = now.day

dayofweek = ['Monday', 'Tuesday', 'Wednesday', 'Thursday', 'Friday', 'Saterday', 'Sunday']

daytoday = dayofweek[date.weekday(date(year,month,day))]

print daytoday

As i couldn't find a solution for this i thought i would post mine here. =]

Python is actually very good.

Doom 1 - Retro Goodness!

Any of you old enough to remember Doom and DoomII will appreciate that the game (and its engine) were pretty groundbreaking and caused one of the biggest declines in employee productivity in the 1990's.

Anyhows, the source engine was hence released to the public. The Doom user community worked hard and the result is a much improved version of the game. For it to work though, you need to get a copy of the original WAD file, "Doom.wad". This contains all the game data and maps... etc. This is still available to buy from Ravensoft. However you can obtain a community made WAD file freeDoom.wad which will work just as well. Infact this engine supports all wad files, including Heretic and Hexen. (Both great games, i LOVED heretic.)

SO when you first load it up, you notice some obvious improvements. But the next step is to download the addons. Which make the game even better, as the computers of now can do much more than the computers the game was first designed to work on. This includes 3D models, lighting and high resolution textures. =0

Get it here.

Yay! working laptop

Okay so the story is this... Typical me, always wanting more so I went to put the best OS on my laptop (vista Ultimate 64bit) and totally forgot to back up the default factory settings and drivers so long story short my laptop didnt work :P well the OS did perfectly but not the ACER drivers, but now its all working fine with Vista 64bit as planned with nothing lost but some common sense.

Although to activate this I did have to fool Mircosoft into believing I was paying to my Copy of ultimate on no more than one machine only :) not that I would of put it on my desktop, my familys desktop e.t.c...

FoodFail

I found this FAIL on the back of a food packet yesterday. So i captioned it with the lolbuilder at icanhazcheeseburger. Maybe failblog will like it.

Not much

iPhone finally dead. Really dead. Will never be alive again (I doubt anyway - think it needs a new logic board).

Not made of much is it?

Microsoft Flames Apple, Fails

The Register - Microsoft Flames Apple, Fails

This needs to be read. Apple Tax!? Seriously Redmond.

The worst laptop ever.

Presenting the Macbook fail. The laptop that fails so hard it will make you sick.

Basically its an old powerbook, with the screen removed (hacked off). This machine is instead pluged into an CRT monitor so old and fat its positively leaking eyeball melting radiation.

This work of art is packing around 600Mhz of sweet processing power, and a whole 512Mb of ram.

FAIL

E71

Just got offered the nokia E71, and its pretty good. Battery that asts more than a day, quick interface, FREAKING MMS, you can actually send stuff over bluetooth. Y'know, things any phone can do.

The new iPhone had better match this. If not I'm put off the idea forever. And it better have a autofocusing camera.... Makes such a difference. Try taking that on an iPhone.

Basically, the iphone is a crap phone. Pretty good ipod, and like, toy, but as a phone for calling + texting and stuff, it sucks

April Fools Roundup

Alpine Ledgend - Xbox, move over Guitar Hero

Guardian to move on to twitter. - "Experts say any story can be told in 140 characters"

CADIE - Google is taken over by "buggy" artificial intelligence.

Flights to Mars - Expedia

And my personal favorite

Qualcomm - Wolf-Pigeon:

Oh and Youtube have made video's play upside-down. Just add "&flip=1" to the end of the URL.

The iPhone OS is too broken

Just want to highlight why the i-OS is still not good enough. I know I'm fussy, but whatever. To create a more complete phone, install cydia, and install the following:

• Notifier - displays text message, email, voicemail, missed call notifications in the menu bar. Just like every single other phone on the market.
• MyBattery - simply displays how much battery you have left, in %
• iBluetooth - send photos + files over bluetooth
• Lockdown - My essential application, locks applications (text messages, eBay, anything else)

And, to do things which apple should have done from the very begining, try

• WeatherIcon - updates the weather icon with the action weather
• LiveClock - makes the clock real, it works, it ticks, it tocks

Second MacBook has died

I'm posting this from my iPod because my laptop has just broken. Some of you may know that my first laptop, a white MacBook, was recently broken too. And now my blackbook has gone. I'm seriously fucked off. Apple need to concentrate less on new software and more on building good quality hardware, or I'm buying a fucking PC. I'm not even joking, I'm sick and tired of this, and it has to stop.

...

Hello All

Hello everyone! Well, I suppose I should introduce myself: My name is Ben and I live in Hereford. I'm (just about) 16 years of age and go to the Bishop of Hereford's Bluecoat School. I will be coming to Hereford Sixth Form in September where I will be studying Computing, Business, Physics and Politics. My main hobby is flying! I am currently training towards my PPL (Private Pilots License) and have 15.5 hours logged in a Cessna 152. I will be taking my Air Law exam very soon and that means that I will also be going solo in the near future!
So, what I want to talk about today is more to do with flying but there is a huge element of tech involved.

On the weekend I did something quite amazing: I flew in a Boeing 737-300 Classic "ZFT" simulator. (ZFT stands for Zero Flight Training. This means that the pilots do all of their type training in the simulator, and don’t actually fly the real thing until they have passengers (or cargo) in the back!) The simulator itself costs around £20milion and so it is very similar in price to the real aircraft, but considering the amount of training that goes on in this sim, it doesn’t surprise me!

I signed up for a shared "Future Pilot Program" flight with Virtual Aviation (www.virtualaviation.com) which included half an hour of briefing, two hours in the sim with three other people (so 30mins on the controls) and then another half hour de-brief. This package in total cost £450 ish - which, to be honest, I thought was a great deal!

I arrived at BMI, London Heathrow at 11:45 bang on time but was told that I was over an hour early. After much confusion the nice people told me that there was a mix-up and I had actually been upgraded to a singular course, which meant I would get only one hour in the sim, however I would have the controls for that full hour! This course was worth £650 ish and I was being upgraded free of charge!

I had just sat down and started to make myself comfy whilst waiting for my turn when one of the pilots approached me. He said that, because I had been upgraded, there was actually space on the course I was originally meant to be on! He then said that, because I was so early, it would be fine for me to go on both courses!

In total I ended up flying a massive £1100 worth in the sim and paid only £450! Now that’s a bargain by anyone’s standards!

I thoroughly enjoyed my time in the simulator at BMI and I would strongly recommend it to any other pilot, or aircraft enthusiast! The 737 is a real man's aircraft and requires you to be quite physical at times. She was generally a joy to fly, and a huge difference from my usual C152s!

Thanks,
Ben Bishop

eBay seriously kicks ass

The laptop was mine already, but... 5 G5's anyone?

iPhoto '09: Faces...

Don't worry, I didn't really die. I fell asleep and woke up days later during the post-mortem.

Afro Ninja - Movie!?

Okay, we all remember Afro Ninja. The guy with the nun-chucks who backflips and fails. If you don't, hit up on this link right now.

Mark Hicks , the star of the Youtube video is a Hollywood stunt actor, who has doubled for many actors including Chris Tucker and Marla Gibbs, is now creating a feature film based on the short clip. Afro Ninja - Destiny!

I've rememebered!

Tried explaining this to Tommey - but found it now!

http://www.apple.com/downloads/macosx/internet_utilities/addressbook

Crazy Monkey Men

This is frankly an amazing and highly refined state of unison between both body and mind. This is also absolutely nuts.

"You f***ing piece of log im gonna scream and hit you with my belt untill you die"

A lot of fun would ensue upon dubbing this monkey madness.

Whats the point?

Arduino Synth

A granular synthesis engine using the Arduino platform. Note the stylish gaffetape casing.

Project thanks to these guys

Oh, and while we are at it

flickr.com/photos/alexburgess/

From new to old

Firstly - brand new gripe with blogger... You can't reorder the photos? I was going to do this post REALLY pro, but it looks like that's not going to happen.

New camera in the post today - yay! Well, not really 'new' - its an olympus OM-30 from 1982 (... So I guess 26 years old). Got a wicked ass lense for it - completely retro, you 'pull out' to zoom.

Anyway, new camera to play around with.

My hangman completely sucks

..... Yeahhhhhhhhh....

Gentlemen, your attention please...

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If the answers to the above questions are "YES!" then don't hesitate, click this button, and give something back! After all, as god is my witness, I deserve it!