JimPulse: A blog by Jim Randell

A Variation on the West Mendip Way

2012-01-12T11:52:00.001Z

Last year (2011) I walked various bits of The West Mendip Way, and this year (2012) I thought it would be nice to do the whole thing.

The walk goes from Wells Cathedral to Weston Bay at Uphill, just south of Weston-super-Mare. (Officially it goes the other way, but I think it might be more aesthetically pleasing to finish at the sea).

I've made some variations to the official route, these are:

Avoid dropping down to the road at Draycott, instead cut through Draycott Sleights Nature Reserve.
Walk along the cliff edge from Cheddar to Blackrock Gate.
Go along Velvet Bottom and up to Beacon Batch (the highest point in the Mendips), and then rejoin the official route at Rowberrow Warren. (Although an even further extension could be added here to take in Dolebury Warren).
A minor detour from the official route to visit the summit of Crook Peak.

Here's the route on Google Maps. This variation comes in at around 31 miles (50 km) (without going to Dolebury Warren). And it's bound to turn out a little longer in real life.

The route could be split into 3 stages of around 10 miles each:

Wells to Cheddar, 11 miles (17.4 km).
Cheddar to Winscombe Hill, 10 miles (15.8 km).
Winscombe Hill to Uphill, 10 miles (16.0 km).

My initial research (on Google Maps) indicates that it should be possible to get a bus between Wells and Cheddar (Tweentown) for Stage 1 (33 min), between Cheddar (Tweentown) and Winscombe Hill (17 min) for Stage 2 (or you could extend the walk by returning to Cheddar along the Strawberry Line).

The last stage is trickier, you would need to get a bus between Winscombe Hill and Weston-super-Mare, and then another one between Weston-super-Mare and Uphil (Beach End Road), which will take over an hour. It may be easier to arrange for someone to meet you at the beach for a celebratory ice-cream.

Or it could be done in 2 stages of around 16 miles each, by breaking the route at the summit of Beacon Batch. That way you get to do the highest point in the Mendips on both days.

Well to Beacon Batch, 16 miles (25.8 km)
Beacon Batch to Uphill, 15 miles (23.4 km)

The car park at the top of Burrington Combe is handily only 1.3 km from Beacon Batch.

My plan is to do this when there is a fine spell of weather in the spring.

Enigmatic Python

2012-01-10T22:31:00.002Z

While attempting to find a programmatic solution to Enigma 1602 (which really is much easier to do with pencil and paper) for the Enigmatic Code Blog, I briefly toyed with the idea of writing my own code to solve sets of linear simultaneous equations.

Then I discovered the rather marvellous SymPy library, which can do that and much more, and made for a very neat solution.

I've really only scratched the surface of this module, but I expect to use it more in the future.

Along with other Python modules that aid in the writing Enigma solutions: unlimited precision integers, set, itertools, collections, fractions, probably lots of other standard modules I have yet to discover, and, of course, my own set of useful routines.

And finally, to squeeze that bit extra out your Python programs you can always try using PyPy, which is a Python interpreter, written in Python. It includes a JIT compiler and often ends up running faster than the standard CPython interpreter.

I tried it on my code for Enigma 1653 - one of the trickier ones - and I got the following runtimes:

CPython 2.7.1: 2m01s
CPython 3.2: 1m52s
PyPy: 0m10s

Enigmatic Code

2011-12-01T23:21:00.000Z

For the past few years I've been treating the weekly Enigma puzzles in New Scientist magazine as a programming challenge. I started writing programs to solve the puzzles in Perl (and occasionally C, when speed was all important), but more recently I've been coding up solutions in Python.

Now, I've decided to set up a blog to share programmatic solutions to Enigma puzzles. I opted for a WordPress blog, as I couldn't get Blogger comments to accept pre-formatted code. Whereas WordPress comments let you use HTML <pre> tags.

I aim to add new puzzles (and solutions) as they are published (usually on a Thursday in the UK), and also retroactively add old puzzles that I have coded solutions for, or found from the New Scientist archives on Google Books, as time allows.

If you'd like to join in, please visit the Enigmatic Code blog.

Dice Emulator

2011-09-26T10:34:00.001+01:00

The Merry Game of Floundering

The other day Caroline came home with a charity shop find - The Merry Game of Floundering* - which I'm sure we used to play as kids (although my Mum claims never to have heard of it).

All the pieces were there with the exception of one of the dice (it needs to two). So rather than search for another die I did what any self-respecting programmer would do, and knocked up a dice emulator in Python.

Thanks to the pygame library and Unicode characters U+2680 - U+2685 I was able to get a program together quickly which we then triggered using the Apple Remote (using Remote Buddy's Virtual Mouse behaviour). Simple as that!

dice.py

The program is presented below. Be aware, though, it makes some assumptions about running on my MacBook. If you're running it on non-1280x800 screen size you'll probably need to change the font sizes, and if you're running on a non-Apple system you'll probably need to change the font for the die characters (or go back to using ASCII numbers, as it was originally), and the location of the sound that is played when the dice is rolled. Also there is some code there to highlight special scores (doubles, and 6 and 1), which are specific to the Floundering game - take them out, or define your own. Enjoy!

Download dice.py

[*] While searching for more information on the game I found someone selling a set on eBay as "The Messy Game of Floundering".

Gotta Catch 'Em All

2011-08-08T11:43:00.004+01:00

"Fade to Black"

From 6th July 2011 to 7th September 2011 there are 60 decorated gorilla statues roaming the (mostly) Bristol area. (See the Wow! Gorillas page for for details).

We're now half way through their visit and I've managed to collect 53 out of 60. You can see my efforts in my Facebook photo gallery. (Facebook registration not required).

So I'm missing 7:

Gorilla 5 ("Sky Gorilla"), Anchor Square, Bristol Harbour.
Gorilla 9 ("Willard"), A Marriott Hotel Lobby, Bristol.
Gorilla 25 ("Elvis"), Bristol Bus Station.
Gorilla 26 ("Hubert"), Holiday Inn, Bristol.
Gorilla 29 ("Ape Scape"), Bristol Airport.
Gorilla 40 ("Winston"), Avon Gorge Hotel, Bristol.
Gorilla 60 ("Guerilla Tourist"), Birmingham(!) Coach Station.

I missed #5 on my visit to Bristol Harbour - I think it must have been obscured by a fairground ride that was there.

I foolishly thought that the Marriott Hotel City Centre would be the one by The Centre, but it turns out that that's the Marriott Royal Hotel, and the City Centre one is at Broadmead (I suppose that's "City Centre" when compared to Bristol Airport or somewhere). So I ended up at the wrong hotel. (Although #9 is in the Broadmead one from today).

I don't usually happen to pass through Bristol Airport on my day-to-day travels, but I might be able to get out there sometime in the next month to collect #29.

But Birmingham seems a bit of a way to go. Although I know the closer I get to completing the set the more I will feel compelled to make a trip up to Brum.

But there maybe a solution. Apparently Gorilla #61 ("Doris") is currently floating around Bristol Harbour on the prow of The Matthew, and was organised too late to make it on to the official maps. So there may be hope of sneakily collecting 60 Gorillas after all.

Update 2011-09-04: I'm now on 59/61 - only #29 and #60 to get!

Update 2011-09-06: I went to Bristol Airport and collected #29 today. 60/61.

Update 2011-09-25: I finally collected "Guerilla Tourist" today, now that he's outside Bristol Zoo and no longer in Birmingham. 61/61.

Apocalypse - Not!

2011-05-23T14:23:00.001+01:00

So, the Rapture didn't happen on Saturday 21st May 2011. Still, it's not the end of world, eh?

But it was the end of my venerable Compaq Evo N610c that is so good IMDb didn't want it back when I left. The hard disk failed a mere 7½ years after being replaced. Oh well, it's been doing a good job for the last (almost) two years as a firewall machine with Ubuntu installed and a PCMCIA network card.

I recently retired it from firewall duty (as it's on-board network connection seemed to be playing up, although the problem disappeared once I'd retired it), so it was left acting as a local DNS server and a WebDAV server (for sharing iCal calendars). Both of which I would rather the Time Capsule would take care of - but it doesn't.

I've managed to resurrect it for now using the 160GB drive that I removed from my MacBook when I expanded that, attached to the Evo using a cheap USB enclosure, put another Ubuntu install on it and installed dnsmasq and got lighttpd running as a WebDAV server, and everything seems dandy again.

But I can't help thinking I'd be better off with a proper low power server to do this kind of thing.

Javascript Speed Tests

2011-03-16T12:59:00.003Z

Every so often I think about changing the browser that I routinely use. For the last five years or so I've been using Camino, first on my PowerBook, and now on my MacBook.

Today I decided to try the sunspider-0.9.1 Javascript benchmark on a variety of browsers that I have to hand, and here are the results:

Camino   2.0.6        3085.3ms
Chrome   10.0.648.134 319.0ms
Firefox 3.6.15       1014.6ms
Firefox 4.0 313.8ms
Opera    11.01         347.9ms
Safari   5.0.4         333.7ms

So it seems I am currently using the browser with the slowest Javascript performance (by a factor of almost 10x), and although I've become very used to Camino, maybe it's time to consider a switch (again).

Update 2011-03-22: Added in Firefox 4.0 (which is the current leader, and means that all the alternatives are about 10x faster than Camino in this test).

Top Time Machine Tip

2011-02-10T19:34:00.004Z

Here's a Top Tip for those using Apple's Time Machine...

If you are backing up multiple computers to a single Time Capsule, and one of the machines decides there isn't enough space to complete a backup, try compacting the other backups - especially if they are quite large.

Open a Terminal and the following command:

# hdiutil compact /path/to/backup/sparse/bundle

I did this on the backup of my machine, when another laptop was deleting old backups trying to make space, and it freed up over 90GB of space. Plenty enough to allow the other machine to complete it's backup.

I turned off automatic backups while it was running - remember to re-enable them afterwards.

This is something that Time Machine will run itself if it's runs out of space, but it will only compact the backup for the machine that it is running on, so if there is a potentially large amount of free space in a backup for a different machine that won't get reclaimed. Instead the first machine will start sacrificing it's older backups to make space.

Note: I'm running Time Machine on OS X 10.6.6

These Boots Are Made For Walking

2011-02-02T22:01:00.002Z

How long should a pair of walking boots last?

Berghaus - worn out after 6 months.

In March 2010 I bought a pair of Berghaus Explorer Trek lightweight boots, and was a bit disappointed when the soles wore out after only six months of use. However, thinking about it in a bit more depth - six months is 26 weeks, I probably walk around 20 miles a week with the dog, and so the boots could easily have gone for 500 miles or more before the soles wore out - at a cost of around 17p/mile (interestingly a similar amount to what petrol costs are for the car).

This compares fairly favourably with my "proper" walking boots (Meindl Burma Pro), which have, by my reckoning, covered around 650 miles in the last 7 years (albeit quite tough miles in some cases). But given they cost almost twice as much as the lightweight boots they are currently coming in at around 25p/mile - although they are still serviceable, so I expect them to clock up a few more miles. But it is sobering to think that they will have to do almost 300 more miles to reach an equivalent economy to the lightweight boots.


Zamberlan Trek Lites - 480 miles.

My previous walking boots (db Mountain Guides) covered around 660 miles, to come in at 18p/mile (although they had been replaced early in their life, when the eyelets in the original boots failed). Eventually they became too uncomfortable to wear, rather than actually failing.

Before that I had a pair of Zamberlan Trek Lites, which although they only managed 480 miles before one of the soles started coming off, also came in at around 19p/mile.

Hawkins Kestrel - 5p/mile.

But all of these have some way to go in order to beat my first pair of boots - a pair of Hawkins Kestrel boots, bought for £23.50 in 1986. They managed 550 miles (including the Wolds Way, the Coast to Coast and the 10 Highest Peaks in Britain, along with many other walks) before one of the heels finally fell off while backpacking on Beinn Challum, clocking in at under 5p/mile.

So looking back, it seems that 500-600 miles is about par for the course for a pair of walking boots, and just because I covered that distance in several months rather than several years I shouldn't feel that the Berghaus boots have underperformed.

Setting Camino to be Colour Managed

2010-11-04T21:45:00.000Z

I've wondered for a while why photos sometimes look a bit washed out in Camino.

It turns out it's because Camino is not observing the embedded colour profiles in the images.

And the way to switch on Colour Management in Camino is:

Go to about:config.
Set gfx.color_management.enabled to true.

For more information on Colour Management in browsers, see this post: Web Browser Color Management Tutorial.

Orange PAYG Fail

2010-10-11T15:27:00.004+01:00

So, Caroline wanted to get an iPhone 4 to run the Hipstamatic App.

I did a bit of research and it seemed like the best way to get an iPhone 4 without being tied into a contract is to sign up for the Orange PAYG package, especially as it comes with 250MB/month free data usage for the first 12 months as standard.

What follows is the ongoing saga of our attempts to get Orange to actually provide the service they claim to offer "as standard".

Day 1 (Thursday, 23rd September 2010)

We walked over to the Orange Shop at Clifton Down Shopping Centre to pick up an iPhone 4 on a PAYG tariff (I had called the previous day to check that they actually had them in stock) and bought £10 of credit for it.

By buying the phone from the Orange Shop I thought it would all be set up to work properly at the shop and we wouldn't have any problems getting going. Boy, was I wrong about that.

Orange offer several animal based tariffs, but we wanted to go for Raccoon as that is the easiest to understand (12p/min calls, 12p/text). The assistant told us that once the phone was charged we should dial 343 to select the package.

We got an SMS message on the phone saying that "you can start using it [the phone] straight away".

OK, I tried calling 343 from the phone several times during the day, and always got an automated voice response system telling me that the request couldn't be processed due to an error in the system.

Day 2 (Friday, 24th September 2010)

I called 343 and managed to talk to a human being and get the phone set up to use the Raccoon tariff. I mentioned that I was concerned that the free data package had not been activated and they said they would attach a note to the account, but it didn't sound very convincing.

Day 4 (Sunday, 26th September 2010)

Caroline got an SMS message saying that there was only 19p credit left on the phone - despite the fact we've made no chargeable calls/texts on the phone.

OK. I'll take it back to the shop and they can sort it out. I checked on the Orange Web Site and it said that the Clifton Down Shop was open on Sunday from 11am - 4pm. However after I walked over I discovered that this information was incorrect, and the shop was not open on a Sunday.

So I got back home and tried to call Orange. However it seems that you can't call Orange Customer Services if you have no credit on your phone (they want to charge you 25p for the privilege), even if the reason there is no credit on the phone is because Orange themselves have stolen it.

I sent an email to Orange, via their web site, detailing the problems we had had so far and requested them to get them sorted out.

Day 6 (Tuesday, 28th September 2010)

Having not heard anything back from Orange, I walked over to the Orange Shop at Clifton Down Shopping Centre, to see if they could get the account sorted out.

A very helpful guy was on the phone for about 30 minutes, and said the data package was enabled and the £10 credit would be refunded in 24-48 hours.

Day 7 (Wednesday, 29th September 2010)

There was no sign of the missing credit. Someone from Orange rang back (apparently in response to the message I had sent via the web site on Sunday). They promised they would double check that the problems had been resolved and would sent me an email confirming the following day.

Day 8 (Thursday, 30th September 2010)

No sign of the missing credit. No email from Orange.

Day 14 (Wednesday, 6th October 2010)

There has been no indication that Orange have done anything. The missing credit has not shown up, and we are unable to use the phone on the Internet except via the Wi-Fi at home.

I composed another email to Orange and submitted it via there website. However this time I got a message saying "Oops, an error occurred. Try again later". A few hours later I was able to successfully submit the message.

Day 16 (Friday, 8th October 2010)

I got an email back from Orange saying they were unable to deal with the problem via email and that Caroline should call Orange Customer Services (even though you cannot do this if there is no credit showing on the phone).

While I was out walking the dog and quietly fuming about the inability of Orange to provide the standard service they have offered, a representative of Orange phoned Caroline, took the IMEI number of the phone and promised to have everything sorted out in 24 hours.

Day 17 (Saturday, 9th October 2010)

24 hours later - nothing seems to have changed.

Day 19 (Monday, 11th October 2010)

Another trip to the Orange Shop at Clifton Down Shopping Centre. A very helpful assistant listened to my woes and then spent a considerable amount of time (around 40 minutes) on the phone trying to sort it all out. He genuinely seemed to do everything he could to help, but whether he will have any luck with the people on the other end of the phone is yet to be seen - I left again with a promise that it should all be sorted out in 24 hours.

Day 20 (Tuesday, 12th October 2010)

Almost 24 hours later, and nothing seems to have happened, so it's back to the Orange Shop at Clifton Down Shopping Centre. This time they said there were going "bypass Customer Services". Almost immediately I got an SMS through saying there were new settings for the phone, followed shortly by another with the password for the 12 months BT OpenZone access (that also comes "as standard" with the iPhone package). I was also told a request had been made to re-apply the missing credit.

Day 21 (Wednesday, 13th October 2010)

At first, nothing else seemed to have happened, but at 10:00am an SMS came through saying the 12 months data access (250MB/month) had been activated.

At 3:00pm there was another SMS saying the 250MB data allowance for this month had been activated. (I'm not really sure if that is different from the last message, but I'm just pleased that something seems to be happening).

Shortly afterwards the missing £10 of credit showed up on the phone, so the phone can finally be used with all the services it comes with "as standard" after only 3 weeks of hassling Orange. Phew!

I Predicted Right

2010-08-01T16:56:00.001+01:00

I was recently listening to Come Together by The Beatles, with a view to suggesting Macaroni Penguins give it a bash, and in listening to the dissection of the master tapes (well worth a listen BTW), it was eerily spooky to hear John Lennon singing "Shoot Me" in the intro, somewhat predicting the method of his death.

This comes after I was similarly spooked when listening to Free World by Kirsty MacColl, where she sings: "You've got to get in to the water / Like a lamb goes to the slaughter", (which I always thought was a bit of an odd lyric when she was alive) again presaging the events of her death.

Any other songs where the singer predicts their own demise? I don't recall Elvis, for instance, singing the lyric: "I'm gonna die in the toilet / Full of drugs and cheeseburgers".

Milton's Keen

2010-03-02T18:59:00.001Z

The ever bizarre Milton Jones is back on BBC Radio 4 for the fourth series of Another Case of Milton Jones. This series starts on Thursday 4th March 2010 at 6:30pm on Radio 4 and runs for six shows.

You can also catch up on earlier series of The Very World of Milton Jones on BBC Radio 7.

Move Any Mountain

2009-12-08T12:23:00.003Z

I recently found out that Sgurr nan Ceannaichean (which was added to Munro's Tables in 1981) has been resurveyed at 913.4m, which means it has moved from being a small Munro to being a big Corbett. This means it is now 0.35% easier to complete the Munros and also that I am 1 closer to completing the Corbetts.

I climbed this mountain on 10th May 1999 with 5 friends (Hi Dave, Dave, Mark, Conrad & Sam), and at the time it was my 200th Munro. I carried a flask of Whisky up to celebrate the summit. On this walk we also bagged Moruisg, which at 928m is still considered a Munro.

Nines In A Line

2009-09-09T09:09:00.000+01:00

It's 09:09:09 09/09/09 (nearly!), and to celebrate I'm going to try and take nine photos containing nine things each. I have set up a new group on Flickr called Nine Things - if you'd like to join in post your photos of nine things there. Extra credit if you manage to get a photo at 09:09:09 (in your local timezone).

Apologies for the short notice. I only thought of it when I got up this morning - but I've got a year a month a day an hour a minute and a second to get ready for Ten Things day.

Harrumble! "Bleak Expectations" Series 3

2009-08-13T19:30:00.005+01:00

I have recently been re-enjoying the first two series of the rather excellent Bleak Expectations, and was pleased to find that a third series was recorded by the BBC in June. The air date is yet to be announced.

Tony Head is apparently returning as the evil Mr. Gently Benevolent, despite being killed at the end of the first series. And again at the end of the second series.

In the new Series Three - coming soon to Radio 4 - all seems well in the life of Pip Bin. His evil guardian Mr Gently Benevolent has been killed again and he has found true love with his wife Ripely and true happiness with his beloved family and friends. Everything is properly splendid, and surely for the duration of series 3 it will continue that way, won't it? No! Because in a ghastly incident at a seance the spirit of the evil Mr Benevolent reappears to wreak more havoc on everything that is noble, Victorian and English!

I can't wait.

Scripting OS X

2009-07-31T11:14:00.014+01:00

One of the nice things about Mac OS X is that you can interact with many of the applications using external scripts. The main issue is what scripting language you use to write your scripts in. The obvious choice is, of course, AppleScript, but while it makes it easy to interact with the applications it isn't as functional at text or date manipulation as a traditional scripting language, such as Perl.

A few years ago I was pleased to find there was a Perl module available called Mac::Glue that would let you talk to applications in OS X without having to use AppleScript. I had downloaded the AppleScript guide from Apple and had tried to use it, honest. But having used Perl nearly every waking hour over the previous 7 years I had a fair amount of expertise locked up in Perl and in a short time, with the help of Mac::Glue, I was able to knock up a quick script to help me organise my iPhoto library, and later I added scripts that I used with other applications.

Perl, however, is not an officially supported scripting language for OS X, and in OS X 10.5 both Ruby and Python were supported by Apple for scripting OS X. I decided that Ruby was the cooler of the two languages to use as it's a bit like Perl rewritten by a Smalltalk geek (that and I have always had a reservation about Python's use of syntactic whitespace), so in 2008 I dabbled a bit by rewriting my iPhoto script in Ruby using RubyOSA and was pleasantly suprised to find that it ran quite a lot faster.

That was all fine and dandy, and I transitioned from OS X 10.4 on my PowerBook G4 to OS X 10.5 on my MacBook without a glitch. Until Apple released OS X 10.5.7, at which point my RubyOSA scripts stopped working, so I went back to using Perl and Mac::Glue.

Recently I have wanted to export playlists from iTunes to the memory stick from my phone (or sometimes to a USB stick or just to a directory), something that iTunes doesn't seem that keen on (unless optical media is involved). And I have also been looking for a suitable programming language for my 10 year old nephew (who has just got a netbook for his birthday - Hi, Matthew!) to learn. So, bolstered by a comment on Slashdot that had mentioned it only takes a couple of hours to learn, I put away my irrational dislike of Python and decided to give it a go. And sure enough I was able to knock up a script, very straightforwardly, that did exactly what I wanted.

If you're a UNIX command line geek and you'd like to give it a go you can download from the link below. Obviously you'll need the Python appscript library for it to work.

Download itunes.py

The script currently supports the following actions:

list-playlists [<pattern>]
This lists the playlists in iTunes (that optionally match the specified pattern). The playlists listed include the names of the enclosing folders, and are prefixed by an integer index for easy reference (especially useful if you have multiple playlists with the same name). Also displayed is a track count, the duration of the playlist and the cumulative size of the files in the playlist.

export-playlist <playlist> [<dir>]
This exports media from the specified playlist to specified directory (or the current directory if none is specified). You can specify the playlist either as the playlist name (along with enclosing folders) as, or the playlist index, both of which are printed out by list-playlists. The directory will be created, if it doesn't exist. The filenames for the exported media are generated from the track numbers in the playlist, along with the track name, and have punctuation and spaces removed or translated to make them more friendly.

export-current-playlist [<dir>]
If you are currently listening to something in iTunes this will export the current playlist to the specified directory (or the current directory if none is specified).

help
List the available actions, along with brief descriptions.

So you can use it like this:

% itunes list-playlists never
[282] CDs > Nirvana > Nevermind (12trk 42m31s 61.4MB)
[547] Compilations > 16. Never Give In (2008) (28trk 1h33m15s 127.4MB)
% itunes export-playlist 547 /Volumes/JIM\'S\ W380I/music/compilations/never_give_in
Exporting: "Compilations > 16. Never Give In (2008)" -> /Volumes/JIM'S W380I/music/compilations/never_give_in
Creating directory: /Volumes/JIM'S W380I/music/compilations/never_give_in
[ 1] "Changed Daily" -> 01-changed_daily.mp3
[ 2] "It's A Fine Day" -> 02-its_a_fine_day.mp3
[ 3] "Road To Nowhere" -> 03-road_to_nowhere.mp3
[ 4] "To Get Down" -> 04-to_get_down.mp3
[ 5] "Teenage Dirtbag" -> 05-teenage_dirtbag.mp3
[ 6] "Gay Bar" -> 06-gay_bar.mp3
[ 7] "Voodoo Child" -> 07-voodoo_child.mp3
[ 8] "Games Without Frontiers" -> 08-games_without_frontiers.mp3
[ 9] "Overload (Original Edit)" -> 09-overload.mp3
[10] "Best Of You" -> 10-best_of_you.mp3
[11] "19-2000 (Soulchild Remix)" -> 11-19-2000.mp3
[12] "Come On Home" -> 12-come_on_home.mp3
[13] "National Express" -> 13-national_express.mp3
[14] "Some Girls" -> 14-some_girls.mp3
[15] "Turning Japanese" -> 15-turning_japanese.mp3
[16] "All The Small Things" -> 16-all_the_small_things.mp3
[17] "Flagpole Sitta" -> 17-flagpole_sitta.mp3
[18] "Sk8er Boi" -> 18-sk8er_boi.mp3
[19] "Get Over It" -> 19-get_over_it.mp3
[20] "Thrillseeker" -> 20-thrillseeker.mp3
[21] "Single Girl" -> 21-single_girl.mp3
[22] "Sale Of The Century" -> 22-sale_of_the_century.mp3
[23] "P.V.C." -> 23-pvc.mp3
[24] "Take Me Out" -> 24-take_me_out.mp3
[25] "Scream" -> 25-scream.mp3
[26] "Underwater Love" -> 26-underwater_love.mp3
[27] "Green Bird" -> 27-green_bird.mp3
[28] "Changed Pandimensionally" -> 28-changed_pandimensionally.mp3

Note that I have a symlink to itunes from itunes.py, so I can point the itunes command to whichever implementation of the script is currently in favour.

If you don't like the " > " separator used to indicate playlist folders you can change the SEP variable in the script to whatever you prefer.

One day I may learn to do GUI scripting in OS X and put an interface on to it.

The only problem I did have was with Unicode characters. Although my terminal is set to use UTF-8 and the $LANG variable is set accordingly, Python kept blowing up when it encountered playlists or folders with non-ASCII characters in. So I did a bit of jiggery-pokery in the script that seemed to sort it out for me. When I am more familiar with Python I may come up with a better solution.

Feel free to use this script, and also to pass any comments on to me, although it works for me as I intended so I'm unlikely to put a great deal of effort into maintenance. Bear in mind it is my first Python script (and I happen to like 2 space indents). I'm hoping that it will continue to work when OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) is released in September (and even OS X 10.5.8 which is likely to come even sooner).

Using a Garmin Foretrex 101 with an Apple MacBook

2009-06-30T19:12:00.012+01:00

In my previous post I wrote about the process that led to my purchase of a Garmin Foretrex 101 handheld GPS unit (or wearable personal navigator as it says on the box). This post provides some more detail of how I am using it with an Apple MacBook.

The first problem is how to connect the GPS to the MacBook. It would be nice if the GPS unit had Bluetooth capability so that you could wirelessly transfer data direct to the MacBook. But it doesn't. Instead it has a serial connection - which is absent from every computer I've bought this decade. After some poking around on the Internet I found that there were several serial/USB converter cables available. Garmin list one as an accessory for the Foretrex 101, but it gives a list price of £33.99. Instead I plumped for a cable from Amazon, supplied by iBox Ltd, with postage it came to the grand total of £4.70.

The converter cable arrived after a couple of days - well ahead of the main Amazon order which included the GPS unit itself. The cable itself was slightly different from the one in the photo on the Amazon page, in that although the actual 9-pin serial connector itself was male, it had screws to secure the connection instead of hexagonal sockets. Fortunately I was able to liberate a pair of hexagonal nuts from an old serial extension cable to make sure it stayed firmly connected to the serial plug.

A driver is needed to get the converter cable to work with Mac OS X (I'm running OS X 10.5.7 on my MacBook), and a mini-CD was provided with the cable, although you can't use it in a slot loading drive like the MacBook has. The driver needed for OS X is in /Prolific/PL2303X/MacOS-X/PL2303_1.2.1.dmg. Although I went to the Prolific web site and downloaded the slightly newer 1.2.1r2 driver.

You can check that the converter cable uses the Prolific PL2303X chipset by plugging it in and going to System Profiler and checking Hardware > USB section for a device called USB-Serial Controller. It should have a Vendor ID of 0x067b (Prolific Technology, Inc) and a Product ID of 0x2303. Once the driver is installed and the cable is connected there is a new serial device called usbserial, which shows up as /dev/cu.usbserial and /dev/tty.usbserial.

As I was still waiting for the GPS to arrive I tested that the cable was working by plugging in a serial trackball that I had and running od /dev/tty.usbserial in a Terminal. Output appeared when I moved the trackball or clicked a button, so it was looking promising.

The actual GPS unit itself arrived a couple of days later, along with the serial cable. Although the cable is listed on the Amazon site as "Garmin PC Cable (Forerunner 201 & Foretrex 201)" it works fine with the Foretrex 101 too.

At first I didn't much care for the idea of it being wrist mounted. Some of the reviews I had read online claimed the Foretrex 101 was no bigger than a watch. It is a lot bigger than any watch I've ever had, but it is surprisingly light. With batteries installed it weighs in at just under 100g, whereas my watch weighs 80g. And it does seem to function well on your wrist, and if you really want to know the time (and date) it's there in a tiny font on top of the Main Menu page. Or you can select it as one of the readouts on the useful Trip Computer page. After a couple of experiments of putting it in my pocket I attached the wrist strap and now I always use it on my wrist.

Loading data from the GPS to the MacBook is quite straightforward using a GPS utility such as LoadMyTracks. First you need to plug the 2.5mm plug of the serial cable into the GPS. The port is hidden behind a little weatherproof rubber flap. Make sure the plug is pushed in all the way. Then plug the USB cable into the MacBook, turn the GPS unit on and fire up LoadMyTracks. You should select "Garmin Serial" from the dropdown and "usbserial" as the serial port to use, then make sure the GPS unit is turned on and click "Acquire". The application will prompt you for a location to save the data in and will show a progress bar as it transfers the data. The GPS unit will beep and display "Transfer Complete" once the process is done. The data can be saved as a KML file to use with Google Earth, or a GPX file for a variety of uses. I am currently loading GPX files into TrailRunner to keep a log of my GPS tracks.

The GPX data can also be used for geotagging photos using a utility such as GPSPhotoLinker. The best way I have found to geotag photos for use with Apple iPhoto '08 is do this is as follows:

Synchronise the clock of your digital camera with the GPS before you start.

Take your GPS with you when you take photos.

When you get back - before you load them into iPhoto - first make sure the clock on the camera is still synchronised to the GPS. If it isn't just take a photo of the clock on the GPS screen, and then you can use the time difference when tagging the photos.

Plug the memory card with the photos on into the Mac, and quit iPhoto (if it starts automatically).

Use GPSPhotoLinker to geotag the photos on the memory card. You can use the application to timeshift the photos (if you forgot to sync the camera in the first place), and to check the location you are tagging with before you actually tag the photo.

Unmount the card from Finder to make sure the tags are written out to the media.

Re-insert the card to the Mac and then import the photos into iPhoto.

Note that with iPhoto '08 you need to geotag the photos before importing them, but once they are imported you should be able to see the location data by bringing up the "Photo Info" window (the GPS data is in the "Exposure" section). You can also select "Show File" to bring up the image file in Finder, open the file with Preview, and then use "Tools > Inspector" to display the GPS data (and then you can click on the "Locate" button to view the location in Google Maps).

For general use the Foretrex should be set to "Garmin" on the Settings > Set Interface > I/O Format page, although you can get it to stream GPS data direct to a Mac utility such as GPSUtility by setting it to "NMEA". (Although I have yet to find a use for this).

(Now) I Know (Where I'm Going) Our Kid

2009-06-19T22:42:00.021+01:00

Every few years over the last decade or so I have considered getting a GPS and/or SatNav unit, but after spending a while investigating the options my interest has always petered out. Part of me thinks that a GPS is unnecessary and if you know what you're doing a decent map should suffice. Indeed, I have managed to complete my round of the Munros without recourse to such electronic gadgets.

But that was before Google Earth. Having spent some time trying to remember the exact routes of all my Munro walks and recreate them in Google Earth as KML files I have come round to thinking, not what a useful aid to navigation a GPS would be, but what a lot of time it would save me if I could just dump a GPS track log and generate KML files from that. It would also be a positive boon in geotagging photos. In theory you can simply synchronise your digital camera's clock to the GPS before you set out on a walk (or take a photo of the GPS clock screen and sort out any time differential later) and then use the GPS track log to determine where you were when any particular photo was taken. Certainly beats messing around trying to place photos on your Flickr map after the event.

The path to actually getting a GPS started when I was casually leafing through a flier from Maplin there was a product on it called a GPS Travel Tracker. It was £40 and promised to "record and trace your journey using GPS technology". Caroline suggested I could get one for my upcoming birthday. It was interesting, but didn't appear to have any sort of display. What use is a GPS if it can't actually tell you where you are? I found Maplin were selling a similar model with a display for £70 (Holux GPSport 245), but it looked like it would only give your location as latitude/longitude - which might be quite useful if I was an 18th century mariner, but not so handy for using with my collection of OS maps.

For only £10 more I could get a Garmin eTrex H - the same model that I'd used in Norway to verify our location on our snowshoeing trek. Admittedly it was somewhat larger, but it can report positions on OS and WGS-84 maps, it can also do waypoints and routes, and I can vouch for it's operability whilst wearing gloves in a blizzard.

My further investigations on Garmin handheld GPS units revealed that the units I had been looking at 6 years ago (such as the Geko 201) were still available, but now slightly cheaper. The development of the handheld GPS appeared to have followed two distinct paths. Firstly the handheld form factor has been retained, but screens have got bigger, become colour (and touch sensitive in some cases), maps from internal memory or SD cards can be displayed, allowing turn-by-turn navigation functionality like SatNavs. Some of them have even got cameras in. And they can cost several hundred pounds.

Meanwhile the smaller form factor, which stared with the Foretrex wrist mounted series, has turned into the Forerunner series, which have finally shrunk down to watch size, and contain all sorts of functionality aimed at avid runners. But after having downloaded and read some of the manuals it wasn't clear that you could actually get a useful map grid reference out of them. So, in spite of their small form factor, they may not be that useful to me after all.

I decided I should get all an all-singing all-dancing handheld that could do everything I might possibly ask of it. I'd be able to use it for navigation on the hill, and as a SatNav in the car.

The next morning I awoke realising that everything I had decided the previous day was rubbish. What I needed was a small, light device that wouldn't be too much hassle to take with me anywhere (so I can use it's data for geotagging photos). It should be waterproof and have a display that can tell me where I am on a map, and I should be able get the data off it and on to my MacBook. That was about it. I decided if I wanted any more I could buy a separate SatNav system, which would have the added advantage that Caroline would be able to use the SatNav to meet me with the car at the end of a walk, while I had the GPS with me.

So, I settled on the Foretrex series, which I first looked at in 2005 and are still available. They are a wrist mounted version of the larger Garmin handheld GPS's and weigh 78g and are waterproof. The choice is between the 101 model (which takes 2 AAA batteries) and the 201 model (which has an internal Li-ion battery and comes with a integrated charger/serial data cable cradle, is a slightly different colour). The 201 is £20 more, but by the time you've added in the cost of a data cable and some batteries to the 101 they are almost the same price.

The major drawback with both units is that they come with a serial interface, which even when it was introduced was clearly a technology that had got a bit long in the tooth. But a bit of Googling led me to believe I could get a serial/USB converter cable for a few quid (or £34 if you buy it direct from Garmin), that would let me connect the device to my MacBook over USB. (This post has got quite long enough, so the serial/USB story will be a different post).

So, I plumped for the 101 as it has replaceable batteries. Although the 201 is a completely sealed unit - and so is probably more waterproof - I have a few qualms about how well the internal Li-ion will cope in a few years as they do deteriorate over time with use. With the 101 I can just bung in new batteries as I need, and if I end up going on a multi-day trek I can carry enough spare batteries to last for the entire time.

I ordered the unit from Amazon (£89), along with a data cable (£11) and a serial/USB converter cable (£5). I shall write up my experiences of using it with my MacBook for logging routes and geotagging photos in a separate post.

Interestingly, as I write this, Garmin seem to have updated the Foretrex line with some new models. The 301 and 401, which seem much the same as the 101/201, except the package is slightly narrower, the units have a more up-to-date GPS receiver, have slightly longer running times on a pair of AAA batteries and sport a USB connection. The 401 model has an electronic compass and a barometric altimeter. They are due to be available in Q3 2009, pricing is to be announced.

Update 2009-07-16: Amazon now has the Foretrex 301 and 401 units available for pre-order (due on the 20th July 2009), priced at £170 and £200 respectively.

Oh, for the uninitiated, the title of the post refers to The Shirehorses spoof of The Seahorses "Love Is The Law". For those that have been missing Mark & Lard since their last Radio 1 show five years ago, there is plenty of their material on YouTube.

Thumping Good Stuff

2009-06-07T15:54:00.005+01:00

Macaroni Penguins have become the proud owners of a new PA system. We have just purchased a pair of Tapco Thump TH-15A powered speakers. This means that the rather excellent Mackie SRM350 speakers that we have been using for the past few years can now be repurposed as stage monitors, so that when we play we can now hear what the rest of the band is doing. (For better or for worse).

We took delivery of them on Friday and on Saturday we tried them out when we played the 2009 Dursley Rugby Club Beer Festival, and judging by the audience reaction they could certainly hear what was going on OK. And so could we, so everyone is happy.

One minor drawback though - according to this promotional video, cat owners might want to refrain from bringing their pets to our future gigs.

Mactini

2009-03-16T16:54:00.002Z

Am I the only one who finds it alarming how much of the feel of Peter Serafinowicz's Mactini spoof the new iPod Shuffle has?

Hamish And Dougal Entendres

2009-03-12T23:22:00.001Z

Fans of Graeme Garden and Barry Cryer's ISIHAC spin off - Hamish and Dougal: You'll Have Had Your Tea - will be pleased to hear that the first series is currently being repeated on BBC Radio 7 on Thursday evenings.

The first episode is currently available on the BBC's iPlayer.

Dog Park

2009-03-06T19:36:00.006Z

To celebrate the launch of Teasel's Dog Blog I've dusted off GarageBand and recorded a version of the song Dog Park, which has been going through my head when taking Teasel out for a walk.

Current version: 2009-03-06 12:31 mix.

I may update this to newer versions if I redo some of the parts and/or remix it.

It's A Dog's Life

2009-03-02T21:04:00.002Z

Before we collected Teasel I got her allocated a blog address. Now I have finally found time to post to her blog. I have retroactively added posts from Teasel's time with us.

The blog is accessible at teaseldog.blogspot.com, if you like you can start from the first post, and follow the Newer Post links to step through the posts chronologically.

Freebeard

2009-02-11T21:13:00.008Z

To celebrate Darwin's 200th birthday, Bristol Zoo is allowing anyone with a beard (real or not) into the Zoo for free on the morning of 12th February 2009.

Fortunately Macaroni Penguins rendition of ZZ Top's Sharp Dressed Man gives me all the necessary equipment required for a free visit to the zoo to see if our namesakes have been enjoying the recent snow. (Photo: Macaroni Penguins Gig 36, December 2003 - our first ever performance of Sharp Dressed Man).

More details of the offer on the Bristol Zoo site.

"Every gull's crazy 'bout a shark dressed man"

New Things Come To Those That Wait...

2009-01-22T09:54:00.005Z

... and wait and wait.

It seems my white MacBook is not destined to be the last of it's kind. Apple have quietly refreshed the white MacBook by giving it a slightly slower CPU (2.0GHz vs. 2.1GHz), an extra 1GB of RAM (2GB vs. 1GB), a faster bus (1066MHz vs. 800MHz) and posher GPU (NVIDIA GeForce 9400M vs. Intel GMA X3100). FireWire 400 is still there.

They've bumped up the price from £704 to £719, but it's still £210 cheaper than the cheapest aluminium MacBook. Which seems like quite a premium to pay for glass trackpad, a metal box and a funky new video port (and the removal of FireWire, of course). Oh, and the LED backlight (which means better battery life). But maybe the aluminium MacBooks will be seeing their own update to justify the price difference before too long.

The MacBook page on the UK Apple Store currently has the new specs (and price), but they don't seem to have made it to the main MacBook page (on the UK site) yet.

Slightly miffed that after waiting a year, if I'd waited a few more months I could have had almost the same machine with a newer GPU (which will presumably cope better with future OS X upgrades) and a copy of iLife '09 (I'd quite like to see the geo-tagging in iPhoto), but I guess I'll have to be happy with my faster CPU (2.4GHz) and ability to output composite video (although having bought a TV with DVI input, this is now less of an issue for me).

But it's good to see that Apple still think there is a market for reasonably priced laptops.

To buy, or not to buy...

2008-10-18T12:23:00.004+01:00

For about the last year I've been thinking about a replacement for my 2005 model 12" PowerBook G4, so I was eagerly awaiting Apple's notebook announcement on 14th October. Hoping an irresistible new Apple laptop would come along that was a worthy successor to my 12" PowerBook, the hard drive of which is rapidly filling with photos and video, and the battery now only lasts a few minutes.

Unfortunately Apple put the cat among the pigeons with the new Aluminium 13" MacBook. While it is undoubtedly a sexy looking piece of kit (although I have yet to see it in the flesh - or more accurately, in the aluminium and glass), I have a number of concerns that make me a bit apprehensive over the potential purchase.

First the good things...

Apple are touting the video chipset in the new MacBook as being 5x faster than that in the plastic MacBooks. Mac OS X always has been, and no doubt will continue to be, taxing of graphics hardware. The more juice there is there the better. (And if there's any chance of hardware assisted video decoding, that would be nice too).

Replacing the hard drive in the new MacBook looks like it will be supremely easy. Having read the disassembly instructions required to replace the HDD in the PowerBook I've been put off replacing it myself.

The unit certainly looks nicely built. Machining the entire case out of a single piece of aluminium is supposed to give the case more rigidity. And as a side-effect makes the machine look like it's just beamed down from an alien space station.

The weight of the new MacBook (2.04kg) is almost the same as the 12" PowerBook (2.07kg), and is 10% lighter than the previous MacBook (2.27kg).

Now the not so good things...

The most obvious drawback is the omission of the FireWire port that was present on previous MacBooks. I have FireWire on my PowerBook, and I do use it on occasion. Mostly to do DVD burning - the PowerBook only has a combo drive, so I have a external disk enclosure with a DVD-Everything writer in that I use when I need to burn a DVD. The new MacBook comes with a internal SuperDrive, so DVD burning shouldn't be a problem. Even so, the enclosure I bought has both USB and FireWire interfaces, so I should be able to continue to use it anyway. We also have a 500GB external drive - mostly connected to Caroline's iMac by FireWire - but that also has a USB connection, so that should work OK. (Although I always liked the idea of having a separate bus for an external drive that was receiving serious use). The only peripheral I have that is FireWire or nothing is my DV camcorder. Although I don't use it much, I have knocked up the odd video in iMovie, and being able to do the whole thing on the PowerBook was very neat. In the future I'm more likely to make the odd little film assembled from clips captured on my digital camera. I am very unlikely to follow Steve Jobs (reported) compassionate advice and just buy a new camcorder.

The loss of the FireWire port does make me feel uneasy though. One of the pleasant things about the PowerBook has been the connectivity it has. Most things (with the notable exception of a couple of SCSI devices I have) just plug in and work. And when I have done audio recording on it with an external drive both the USB ports and the FireWire port have been in use, and the captured audio (on the USB bus) has no impact on the disk activity (on the FireWire bus). I wonder if an entirely USB solution will work as well. (There may be separate USB busses, but I would have to put a hub onto one of the USB ports to be able to connect everything - overall the new model has fewer ports).

As I have said, the connectivity of the PowerBook has been very useful. When I got the PowerBook it came with VGA and DVI adapters (both of which I have used), but I had to buy a separate composite video adapter (which was another story). The new MacBook comes with none of these. The VGA and DVI adapters are £20 each, and there doesn't seem to be a composite video adapter, so I fear that it may not be possible to connect this machine to an analog TV (or video mixer), which would mean I wouldn't be able to use it as a PVR in the way I use the PowerBook. Unless I buy a new TV of course (which I have been meaning to do for some years, but never quite get around to doing).

I always thought the white acrylic iBook G4 was a rather fetching machine, and I even owned one very briefly (the 14" model) before trading up to a 12" PowerBook G4 (which always seemed to fit better at the top of the iBook line than the bottom of the PowerBook line). The new MacBook is machined out of a single block of aluminium, with a glossy glass display. It certainly looks sexy in the pictures, but I wonder if the WiFi reception is as good as the plastic MacBooks, and how viewable the glossy screen is. (Certainly I would like a wider viewing angle for the display than my current PowerBook can manage).

Another big disappointment is the price. Before the announcement I had specced out one of the white MacBooks (2.4GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD) for £829, plus £100 to upgrade the RAM to 4GB from Crucial. The closest equivalent for the new MacBook (2.0GHz, 2GB RAM, 160GB HDD) is £949, again you can upgrade the RAM to 4GB for £100 from Crucial. That's £120 more for a computer with 20% slower CPU, no FireWire and no composite video out. If you add in the cost of extra video connectors the price is almost the same as I paid for the PowerBook more than 3 years ago. (And this is without the additional cost of buying a new (non-FireWire) camcorder, and a new (HDMI) TV that Apple seem to think you need to do).

So as yet I am undecided. It might just be that Apple has got the balance between form and functionality a little too much in favour of the former for my liking.

Also Coming Soon

2008-09-16T09:11:00.005+01:00

Caroline has chosen this Miniature Schnauzer puppy. She should be joining us in a couple of weeks. Currently she is going to be called Teasel.

Now to make the house more puppy friendly...

Coming Soon?

2008-09-15T11:12:00.004+01:00

A brochure for the new Cabot Circus Shopping Centre dropped through the door this morning. It's due to open a week on Thursday (25th September 2008).

The most interesting thing for me is Quakers Friars Unit 133, labelled "Electrical & Computers: Apple".

Just when I'm waiting for the MacBook line to be refreshed so I can replace my PowerBook.

I couldn't find any mention of it on the Apple website though.

Update: There is now an official Apple announcement.

Walk On The Wild (River) Side

2008-08-21T11:50:00.004+01:00

On Sunday I did the Sea Mills Circular Walk. Unfortunately the web-site for it only tells you that the leaflet for it is currently out of print.

So I checked out possible routes on the Ordnance Survey site and I've made the following Google Earth path of the route we followed, which is surprisingly rural, despite the fact it is in the middle of a city.

Route: Google Earth | Google Maps

My Perl script that measures the length of Google Earth paths says this route is 4.13 miles long (6.64 km).

We parked at the Combe Dingle car park of Blaise Castle, and the route through the Blaise Castle estate can be varied if you want to do a bit more, or visit the café, toilets, playground or museum.

Bicycle Race

2008-08-20T19:21:00.003+01:00

I've been watching The Man Who Cycled The World (10:45pm, BBC1, Monday - Thursday this week), a 4 part documentary about Mark Beaumont and his attempt to break the world record for cycling around the world.

In it, Mark Beaumont, sets out to cycle 18,000 miles around the world, averaging 100 miles a day. He appears to have little outside support, carrying a tent and often sleeping by the side of the road. He is also carrying video, audio and photographic equipment to keep a record of his trip and a laptop and GPS equipment. Every so often a camera crew is able to meet up with him to check he is still alive.

So far (after the first two parts) he had made 6,000 miles, is on schedule, and has travelled through various countries (starting in France, through Europe to Turkey and then through Iran and Pakistan to India), and has had to cope with equipment failure, illness and trying to stick to a vegetarian diet - particularly difficult during Ramadan, when it's hard to get food of any description during daylight hours.

I am utterly in awe of his achievement. Not only does he appear to be amazingly fit and able to keep going whatever fate throws at him, he seems to be amazingly cheerful all the time.

If you've missed it it's on the BBC's iPlayer for a week.

Smoke on the Water

2008-07-28T22:53:00.003+01:00

Last Monday we went to Weston-super-Mare to see the sand sculptures. We also walked out along the Grand Pier and had a look at the Pavilion (which I was intrigued to find, housed a climbing wall somewhere amongst all the other amusements).

Today, a week later, the pier was seriously damaged by fire and the pavilion was destroyed, which is a bit sad, because - despite what John Cleese says - I rather enjoyed my visit to Weston last week.

This photo was taken when I cycled to Weston on a bike ride in February. It seems odd that I would end up with two trips there (so far) in one year, when I've been in Bristol to 20 years and never been there before.

I hope the pier - which was only recently refurbished by it's new owners - will be restored to it's former glory.

On The Road Again

2008-07-14T22:49:00.003+01:00

The other day I was driving along what I always thought was Filton Road - but looking on Streetmap I find that it is actually called Station Road - by the railway bridge just before Abbey Wood Station, at the lights by the oddly named Emma-Chris Way (which I always thought must have been named as a consequence of a disagreement between Emma and Chris, but is apparently named in commemoration of two children killed on the busy road). Anyway, I pulled up alongside a beaten up old Escort (or Cortina or something - I'm not exactly a petrolhead), which was stopped with it's rear wheels positioned on the stop line.

"Hmmm...", I thought, "I'd better keep an eye on him. He'll be haring off as soon as the lights change". But when they did change it pootled along to the next set of lights, which were on red, over the line and came to a halt, once again, with the rear wheels positioned on the stop line.

"The problem with that bloke", I said, "is he just doesn't know when to stop". Unfortunately I was alone in the car at the time, so there was no-one to share my insightful aphorism, so I thought I would make it available for the Internet as a whole to appreciate.

Do The Jukebox Jive

2008-07-08T15:21:00.002+01:00

I spent this morning finding out how to put an embedded MP3 player on your website. I wanted to do this for the Macaroni Penguins Demo Page.

The bad news is you have to use Flash, but the good news is someone has already done all the nasty bits for you, so I was able to pick up a configurable solution by downloading the JW FLV Player, cobble together a few playlists, a bit of HTML and get it working nicely.

You can try the results by going to the demo page and clicking on one of the "Click Here To Listen..." links. Enjoy.

All we need to do now is record some new demo tracks. Now that Tim has got his super posh electronic kit and I don't have to spend all hours of the day working for The Man the time could be ripe...

Consecutive Chronological Numerals

2008-07-06T16:16:00.003+01:00

I realised today, while looking at a shop receipt, that the date today is:

06/07/08

Which means, if I'd been up early enough (or late enough) I could have witnessed the time:

03:04:05 06/07/08

(Although I never know with these things whether I should be observing UTC or local time, and, yes, I am aware that people in the US write their dates as mm/dd/yy, so they can miss opportunities like this almost a month earlier than me. I also tend to use four digit years after all the millennium buggery that went on nearly a decade ago, but none of this works if you do that).

I'm still trying to think of something appropriate to do on:

08:08:08 08/08/08

which will be in the middle of the 30th Anniversary Bristol Balloon Fiesta, so maybe I will be able to get a photo of 8 balloons or something.

I totally forgot about 07:07:07 07/07/07 last year (I was asleep at the time (local time)), and also 06:06:06 06/06/06 (when I was in Scotland polishing off some Munros, but I didn't get up until 6:30am), but at least such patterns are occurring later and later in the day, so I stand more chance of actually being up when they happen.

R2D2 BBQ...

2008-06-28T16:46:00.005+01:00

... or I lost my head to a Starship Trooper.

Last Sunday I did the Family Fiesta route of Bristol's Biggest Bike Ride with a friend and his daughter. A nice little jaunt, although a bit windy (but after the rain at Slimbridge Beer Festival the previous night I'm not complaining).

On the way home as I was cycling through the inside of the M32 J3 roundabout I saw this work of graffiti.

Captured with my new phone - I think the camera works fine.

The News Quiz in Bristol

2008-05-30T15:31:00.006+01:00

Last night I went to a recording of BBC Radio 4 stalwart The News Quiz at the Redgrave Theatre in Clifton, Bristol. An experience I can thoroughly recommend if you get the chance.

Tickets are free, but they allocate more tickets than there are seats in the theatre, to ensure that there is enough of an audience for the recording. I applied for my tickets as soon as I heard the announcement after the Friday broadcast of the show two weeks ago. I was listening via a Freeview box and a PVR, so it was slightly delayed (but I was able to rewind and listen to it again to check I'd heard what I thought I'd heard). But I immediately opened my PowerBook went to the ticket site and filled out the form, and was finished about 10 minutes after the initial broadcast. The tickets arrived in the post a few days later - we had 217 and 218.

The venue seats 343 (according to it's website), and I heard one of the theatre staff say that over 600 tickets had been sent out. The theatre was completely packed for the recording, and there were lots of people milling around outside trying to get in. Some of them had tickets, but you had to turn up before the doors opened and get a numbered sticker on your ticket to ensure a seat. We arrived about 30 minutes before the doors were due to open and we got stickers 165 and 166.

They also recorded around 90 minutes of material for a 28 minute broadcast. So it will be interesting to hear what makes it in (and also explains why the scoring on the broadcast show rarely makes any sense).

The show will be broadcast tonight (30th May 2008, BBC R4, 6:30pm) and tomorrow (31st May 2008, BBC R4, 12:30pm) or you should be able to download it from the website for a week after the Friday broadcast.

See if you can spot me laughing amongst all the other people laughing.

And, by the way, it was so funny I broke my glasses.

Munroist #3806 - One Year On

2008-05-19T12:15:00.006+01:00

Exactly a year ago today I finished my round of the Munros. A Munro is a mountain over 3000ft in Scotland, and there are 284 of them. I did my first Munro in 1987 and I managed to polish the lot off (along with the 3000ft peaks of England, Wales and Ireland - bringing the grand total up to 313) in a little under 20 years.

There are more details on my web site, and recently I've been making Google Earth/Google Maps .kmz files for many of the walks.

Since completing the Munros I've been travelling further afield (snowshoeing in Norway) and nearer afield (walking in the Black Mountains and Brecon Beacons), and I'm thinking about doing some walks on Dartmoor in the not too distant future.

Griffin AirClick

2008-05-18T22:04:00.009+01:00

While I was out buying the Saturday paper yesterday I saw that my local technology shop - CAV - was having a closing down sale. Which of course meant that it was closing down. A bit sad as it was always a handy place for me to buy the odd computer or audio cable, optical media, RJ45 crimp tool, DVD player, etc.

So I popped in and found they were selling off a Griffin AirClick USB for £4. It advertises itself as an RF remote control for iTunes, but as I found out later it's actually a bit more generic than that.

As Macaroni Penguins are entering the 2008 gigging season I figured it might be useful to help me rehearse - I usually have the set list set up in iTunes when I run through songs and play along. Which means lots of running over to the PowerBook to skip backwards to go over some part of (or all of) a song again. I thought I could clip this to my guitar strap and I'd be sorted, so I bought one.

It was slightly disappointing when I got home to find that unlike most stuff I plug into the PowerBook it didn't just work straight away when I plugged it in. Or even when I installed the software from the CD that came with it. It turned out that you need to download version 1.1.1 of the AirClick software from the Griffin website if you want it to work on Tiger or Leopard, so I did that and it started working.

And then I found that not only can it control iTunes, but also a bunch of other useful applications (like iPhoto, DVD Player and Keynote (if I ever need to make a big flashy presentation for some reason)).

It actually turns out that it is easy to tweak a few of the installed files to make the AirClick interact with any application that uses AppleScript [link]. So this morning I hacked up the necessary code to make it work with EyeTV (I might make the files available for download soon, but if you want to encourage me to make them available sooner just leave a comment).

Previously I've done a similar kind of thing using Bluetooth, a mobile phone (thanks cms!) and Romeo but it's nice to have a tiny dedicated remote to make things simple. I guess that's why Apple started bundling them with their computers (although that's IR rather than RF), but until I get a MacBook I'll stick with the AirClick. In fact for £4 I'm rather regretting not getting more than one (although they are listed on Amazon.co.uk for only £12.50).

The only problem I've found with it so far is that the USB receiver dongle is a bit wide and makes it a bit of a squeeze to fit another USB plug in the adjacent socket when it's plugged in. But it comes with a 1m long USB extension cable you can use if you want to plug extra things in, so it's only a minor niggle.

Tiny USB Stick

2008-04-25T14:25:00.007+01:00

I recently bought this tiny 2GB USB stick. It's an Advent Slider (I think), and it cost £12 from PC World, which seemed like a reasonable price, even though I was in PC World.

It comes with a little cord to attach to your keyring, and as it only weighs 2-3g (according to my kitchen scales) it's light enough to actually carry around on your keyring without you actually noticing you've got it with you.

As the name Slider suggests the bottom of the device slides out to make a USB connector, slightly narrower than the overall width of a USB port. Which is nice because, as well as being 8 times smaller capacity than this one, my current USB stick blocks the adjacent USB port on my laptop when it is plugged in.

The only niggle is the normal one when you buy mass storage devices. Which is that mass storage manufacturers insist on specifying capacities of their devices as if 1GB was 1,000,000,000 bytes, whereas computers are programmed to think 1GB is 1,073,741,824 bytes (= 1024 × 1024 × 1024). So when you select 2GB of photos and drag them to the stick, they don't actually fit. The actual capacity of this stick is 2,021,654,016 bytes (raw) and 2,021,621,760 (FAT32 formatted as packaged), which is technically 1.88GB.

I have to say that for the layman [1], I think that it does make more sense for 1GB = 1e9 bytes (and likewise, 1MB = 1e6 bytes and even 1KB = 1000 bytes), and it makes it easy to look at the byte count of a chunk of data and translate it easily into the appropriate units by just taking the correct prefix of the base 10 amount. The only drawback is that it flies in the face of many years of computer science teaching.

Of course the situation we are in at the moment, where computers report base 2 units and mass storage manufacturers artificially inflate the capacity of their products by quoting unformatted base 10 units, is the worst of both worlds. But I don't expect it to improve any time soon. Even worse is the idea of introducing a parallel series of units (kibibytes, mebibytes, gibibytes) to compound the confusion.

Anyway, I've been carrying it around on my keyring since I got it. I've not used it for anything interesting yet, but when I need it it will be there.

[1] layman/lame-man is an example of an eggcorn. As in "to put it in lame-man's terms". Read more about eggcorns at The Eggcorn Database.

Enigma 1491: Tile trials

2008-04-24T21:35:00.013+01:00

I've recently found myself with more time on my hands, so I renewed my subscription to New Scientist and have been using the weekly Enigma puzzles to provide me with a weekly pragmatic programming exercise.

Normally these are amenable to short Perl program to analyse the problem space to come up with the solution in a few seconds. However this week's was a bit trickier:

Tile trials

DICK has a box of rectangular tiles. Each is a different size, the dimensions being 1 × 3, 2 × 4, 3 × 5, 4 × 6 and so on.

He takes some tiles out of the box, first the 1 × 3, then the 2 × 4, then the 3 × 5, and so on, with the aim of fitting together all those that he has taken into a rectangle that has no gaps and no overlaps.

Assuming he takes more than one tile out of the box, how many tiles must he take out to create (a) the smallest possible rectangle, and (b) the next smallest possible rectangle?

New Scientist Enigma 1491, Richard England

The Perl program I wrote ran and found the first solution in a few seconds, but took 50m26s to find both the necessary solutions. So while it was running I wrote an equivalent program in C. It's been a few years since I did any serious C coding, but once I remembered what the equivalent C constructs to Perl's next and last were (continue and break), I got it compiled and it ran and found the solutions in 11.3s.

First Post!

2008-04-17T18:03:00.002+01:00

Shortly after I set up my first web site in 1994 I added a section to it called Jim's Web Of Consciousness, which described itself thusly:

"This page is a random collection of things that may or may not prove interesting. It grows from the bottom up."

It perhaps says something about the high regard that I held this page that it resided under a path of /junk on my site.

Of course it was only available to people with access to the HP Intranet (i.e. people that worked at HP), but at the time that included the vast majority of people who knew me who had access to the internet, so it didn't seem like much of a problem.

Fourteen years later I've decided the time has come for me to add a random collection of things that may or may not prove interesting to my current web site, and that's exactly what we call a blog nowadays.

So here it is. At some point I will link it in more closely to my site, but for now I shall just add things to it as I see fit.

If you know me and you've managed to find this blog feel free to leave a comment.