Posts from 2014

29 Dec 2014

YMMV

From the instructions inside a Play-Doh packet: “Moulded results vary depending on child’s age and level of skill.” Who writes this stuff and what determines whether or not I need to be warned about such things? Buying a car for which mileage figures are widely reported, I understand why the small print has to say “your mileage may vary”. But Play-Doh? Perhaps next time I go to Anfield I need to be reminded “result may align imperfectly with expectations”.

29 Dec 2014

IT phone home

A very useful seeming, not-enabled-by-default little setting in iOS 8. If you use “Find my x” (where x is an iDevice like an iPhone or iPad) I don’t know why you wouldn’t want to turn this on. Settings > iCloud > Find my x > Send last location “Automatically send the location of this x to Apple when the battery is critically low”

14 Dec 2014

Scenic routes?

OK, Google - er, wait, no. I’m seven minutes from my destination. I think I’ll pass on your “9 min slower” alternative. While I like the “would you like a faster route” pop-ups, I’m confused. Why is a slower alternative route ever offered?

12 Dec 2014

Smell the pies

Warrington Town’s best-ever FA Cup run came to an end on Sunday. I started watching Town in the mid-nineties, and my brother and I built and wrote their website. I keep good backups and it wasn’t too hard to resurrect the old site. The whole thing is less than 3MB. It featured animated GIFs - the first time around! Not so keen on the marquee text, but hey, we won some awards…

01 Dec 2014

A threatening schedule

Having written code to generate user messages, I know how hard it can be. This email reminder came into my inbox recently and spooked me a bit! “Alert - Make a will” sounded just a little threatening. As it happens, it was a legitimate reminder - I could’ve picked a better title for my appointment, I suppose.

09 Nov 2014

Tyred of cycling

There are times when cycling is just not cool. Having had four punctures within a week, on the same wheel, I gave up crouching in my garage and took my front wheel to my local bike shop. For this story, it’s important to realise that I have more than one bike, and I used a working one to pedal over, carrying the rogue wheel in one hand and steering with the other.

08 Nov 2014

Charting relationships

If your aunt is my grandmother, what relation are you to me? Naming relations is a tricky business. Think about the offside rule in football for a moment. If you overlook the recently-introduced subjective elements about “interfering with play”, it’s actually pretty simple. “Explained” by several people gesturing and talking simultaneously, using peanuts and pint pots on a wobbly pub table, voices raised over the background noise, it becomes fiendishly difficult to transmit to a newbie.

08 Nov 2014

Adverbing, verbing, and adjectiving

Language log has a post about something I’ve written about before. Adverbing, verbing, and adjectiving Great XKCD comic on the same subject - Language Nerd

01 Nov 2014

A collection of clogs

This photo is a few weeks old, but I’m proud to say on the day it was taken I used every pair for their intended purpose: running; climbing (well, bouldering); er, walking; and cycling. I like to have the right shoes for the job.

09 Oct 2014

Avant-garde Apple Pie

Just been captivated by the radio for a couple of hours. A single programme spanning 16th century madrigals, The Beach Boys, Azerbaijani folk singing, a Christmas carol and Maxïmo Park? Crazy time signatures (a favourite of mine), non-western harmonies, unusual tuning systems, oh - and Elvis, too. Coherently and creatively presented with a theme developing and running throughout. I am a happy licence fee payer, indeed. Catch it on iPlayer before it’s too late:

01 Oct 2014

A load of gas

Why are ovo so bad at estimating my meter readings? This zig-zagging blue line shows my gas meter readings, estimated and actual (the red line joins the actual readings). I submit precise, steady readings once a month, a few days before my monthly statement. On their side, ovo are consistently estimating my gas consumption rate at nearly 20 times the true rate. They apply this during the intervening handful of days and draw up the statement.

15 Sep 2014

A utility for photo triage

You know when you’ve shot a grillion photos and you just want to keep the good ones? Here’s a small utility I’ve written to make this easy and quick. It’s for geeks, since it involves the dreaded command line to begin with. Change into a directory full of photos and run a single command triage. Open a web browser and point it to your computer (works nicely from iPad, allowing you to sit on the sofa flipping through photos.

13 Sep 2014

Three 'meta's in a row

I really am going over the top with this. I’ve created a (small) website about websites: iwannawebsite This one serves a purpose, I hope, and it was doubly useful for me - an exercise in using Jekyll and Github pages. The interested reader can discover, re-use and contribute to all of its source code here.

18 Aug 2014

A metaqueue

A queue for a queue. Credit to my good friend Billy for spotting and sharing it.

18 Aug 2014

A metablog

A blog post about blogging. Not long ago I helped out a good friend by building a website for The Linacre Institute. It’s a great charity which aims to help talented and disadvantaged students at northern comprehensive schools reach the UK’s more competitive universities. I’m building them a blog at the moment, using Ghost. I’ve built a custom install script for ghost on Webfaction which should simplify backups and upgrades. Check it out if you’re a Webfaction customer like me.

12 Aug 2014

Patch updates in pinned Python packages

A post about Python programming with a tongue-twisting title… Most Python projects rely on libraries (packages) from elsewhere, in particular from PyPI. Although it means you have to manually check for new versions of this third-party code, it’s a good idea to explicitly “pin” the version of each dependency, and this is usually done in a file called requirements.txt. This way, you know that what you use in development is the same as what you deploy.

16 Jul 2014

Automatic testing FTW

When you’re building something made of software (!), it’s widely-accepted best practice to write tests for it. Nothing new there. Attending an excellent event in Cambridge last week, a superb presentation by Tim Perry from Softwire made me realise something else though. Writing tests makes your application more secure. This sounds trivial, but I mean tests like “does the widget do what it’s supposed to do” tests, not “does the app refuse log in if the password is wrong”.

14 Jul 2014

More inconsistent signage

I chose not to interpret this sign in line with the UK official Traffic Signs Manual, Chapter 3, which says: “Prohibitory signs … are circular and have a red border. The red ring indicates the prohibition; diagonal bars are used only on signs which prohibit a specific manoeuvre” Just sayin'… (see earlier rant) Photo from Churchill College, Cambridge.

17 Jun 2014

A metahat

A hat with its own hat. Seen in the Hermitage museum, St. Petersburg.

06 Jun 2014

Unwanted extras

Domain registration companies are, like economy airlines, renowned for adding things to your “basket” as you go through the checkout process. Buying a flight? We’ll assume you’d like travel insurance, unless you can find the “No insurance” option between Latvia and Lithuania in the dropdown. Renewing a domain? Click here to buy, or scroll to the bottom for the option without our email domain expiration protection renewal certification service. You come to expect these things, but this one from register.

04 Jun 2014

Cycling not prohibited

What does this sign mean? Look closely - and notice that it’s had a diagonal red/orange bar carefully and skillfully added to it. The intention is clear: no cycling, right? I admit to cycling past this sign regularly. I have my pedantic defence prepared (leaving aside the fact that a sign like this might have dubious legal status). “Yes, officer, I saw the sign. I interpreted it as ‘end of no cycling zone’.

01 Jun 2014

Weighing up

We returned home from a wonderful holiday with some wonderful friends and found our bathroom scales in the middle of the floor. They came in handy for checking airline luggage allowance on the way out, waited patiently while we gorged on meat, cheese, Campari and rosé wine, and then provided confirmation of exactly what we feared when we got home. Photo album from Villa Novia

11 May 2014

Digitising family albums

A collection of learnings and recommendations derived from helping my family to digitise old photo albums. In the end, our family albums amounted to about 2,500 photos across 15 or so albums (that’s not counting the photos in shoeboxes). I think my mum and dad had been pretty organised and disciplined about putting their favourites into albums. It was a bit of a wrench ripping the photos out, but I persuaded them to go for it because the prints were degenerating, fading and, well, they’ve been at the bottom of a drawer for quite a while.

11 May 2014

Caticorns

I recently bought a brain-shaped piggy bank. (I do like brains). I thought that was a pretty “niche” thing to buy and sell on the internet. Until I saw this. At the time of writing, four people have reviewed it!

01 May 2014

A simple pavement hack

I bet I’m not the only one whose life would be improved by this simple pavement upgrade. Authorities in London could implement this with the only investment required being a few tins of paint and a magnetic compass. It wouldn’t get in anyone’s way if it was crowded, and it’d mean people leaving the Tube and wanting to follow Google Maps/similar could start walking in the right direction while they wait for their phone to catch the satellites.

27 Apr 2014

Iris Sula Morrison meets, er, Morus Bassanus

Iris encountered the bird with which she shares a name this Easter and was generally unimpressed. A great, sunny-if-cold few days camping near the Morrison Yorkshire “hood”!

14 Apr 2014

Feathery phenology

Three bird-related happenings in Cambridge today. saw my first, solitary swallow of the year, seven months and seven days since they were gathering to head south heard my first willow warblers of the year, near Girton it seems that peregrine falcons are nesting on the University Library building Spring is springing…

01 Mar 2014

A new metaword

My entry for “word of the year 2014” is a metaword, in the sense that it describes itself. I humbly propose “participling”. The word describes the irksome and increasingly common process of taking a well known noun, artificially turning it into a verb, and then going one step further, adding “-ing” to get to a present participle. My friend Jo provided the inspiration for “participling” when she spontaneously and slightly ironically used the word “counterexampling”.

06 Feb 2014

"Find my friends" to the rescue!

Without another phone and “find my friends”, this photo wouldn’t exist. And my phone would be languishing in the middle of a very wet field in Girton.

01 Feb 2014

This is what the internet was invented for

I’m going climbing in Scotland later this month. There’s not much you can do to prepare for Scottish winter if you live in Cambridge, but I did dig out and give my mountaineering boots some much-needed attention. A half-serious search for “how to repair ends of shoelaces” brought me to the wonderful Ian’s Shoelace Site. I will now be the envy of my companions because my boots will be laced thusly.

01 Feb 2014

DisembArqing

A long post summarising why I’ve fallen out of love with Arq backup, and some noodlings on the longevity of bits. Being currently engaged in the digitisation of all my Mum and Dad’s precious photo albums, and relatively recently having become a father myself, I’ve been thinking about backups. A dull topic, admittedly, but my personal photos and videos aren’t like my music collection or, if I’m honest, my work files.

26 Jan 2014

Grim Trail

Girton’s “trim trail” is where I go a couple of times a week to do exercises that normal people probably don’t do, or do in a gym. This evening it looked particularly unappealing: the pull-up bars were at the centre of a pond. I am proud to say this didn’t prevent me using them; I estimate the extra weight of water that filled my trainers at only around 1kg.

23 Jan 2014

North Norfolk Digital

A great day out today with Norfolk Birding. Standing by the marshes, listening to the geese flying overhead and admiring the colossal skies, you can forget the fact that your feet feel like blocks of ice. Having Chris Mills on hand to help you realise that you’ve seen exactly five different types of geese, fulmars, red-throated divers, scoters, five or six hen harriers and countless other birds from a multitude of species made it even better.

08 Jan 2014

Undigitisability

Over Christmas, I leaned on my parents to let me dig out their photo albums, so that the photos could be removed and sent off for scanning (before being put back, of course). I plan to write up some thoughts and experiences from that process soon. Sending off precious photos just to get them back with a CD isn’t too expensive, especially if you value your own time and the expertise of others; yes, there will be hassle and fiddliness, but it’s worth it, because non-digital photos are irreplaceable.

06 Jan 2014

Work like a cicada...

…or how to do all the things, but not all at once. With it being the beginning of a new year, I’ve spent a fair bit of time this past week doing routine things - backups, checks, tests and so on. I’m an organised type, so I do things like this periodically: some of them monthly or yearly, some of them every quarter, some of them every couple of months.

03 Jan 2014

Blinking technology!

It used to be possible to tell that a household had nobody under the age of thirty in it by examining the VCR. If it had “12:00” flashing on the screen, it was a dead giveaway - nobody tech savvy lives here. I can’t claim this as my own insight, but I’ve forgotten who told it to me. My memory, again. Anyway, today I have had to resort to writing the channel numbers of non-crap channels on a piece of paper and sellotaping it to the back of the remote control.