Posts from 2019

30 Oct 2019

I got an e-scooter for my birthday...

…aaaand I’ve broken my ankle. The scooter is great fun, and I whirred to work along the guided busway. I learned quickly that if you’re travelling at over 20 kph without making any effort, October days in Cambridgeshire start to feel cold very quickly. Dug out the big gloves a bit early this year! Iris and Finn keep asking if they can have a go, and are counting down the days until they are old enough (about 2,500 in Iris’s case, if we go by manufacturer’s recommendations).

27 Sep 2019

Woodland Ways

One of my hobbies is outdoor sleeping so I particularly enjoyed two nights of woodland camping in Leicestershire last weekend, on a Woodland Ways bushcraft course. The first night under a cosy tarpaulin, slung between two beech trees, and the second in a self-made shelter (pictured). I realise that I am a privileged outdoor sleeper: I’m doing this for fun, well equipped, safe in the knowledge that I’m returning to a nice warm, dry home at the end of the weekend.

11 Jul 2019

What type of typist are you?

Sharing a desk-photo of a diagram I’d drawn for work recently, I noticed the lamentable state of my keyboard in the margin. I can make out the places where my fingers rest when I’m using the keyboard, and the tops of the keys are all shiny and, well, grimy. A forensic investigator could probably glean all sorts of information from the wear patterns (not to mention the crumbs, dust and other detritus).

05 Jul 2019

Video time travel

In my previous post about spherical photography I mentioned how pleasing I find it that recording in all directions captures things you wouldn’t otherwise capture. And how you could shoot action, and then frame it later. (by rendering a spherical video into a normal video that tracks the desired subject) So I have to share this thing, shared from the internet recently by my friend Dan. A couple of tourists are recording a spherical stroll round a Mallorcan town.

29 Jun 2019

Polar co-ordinates rule OK

After a recent save-up I found myself in a position to buy a new gadget, and excitedly ran (I actually did run, as I was training for a 10k) to the Apple Store. It wasn’t an Apple product I was collecting, though: an Insta 360 One X was mine, and I couldn’t wait to get using it. Having been given a VR headset as a very generous leaving gift from Owlstone, I had already begun to explore taking 360º (technically, spherical) photos, using Google Street Map app on my phone.

05 Jun 2019

From Warrington to Wennington

A blog post about finding myself. I recently calculated my geographic mean, so Sarah and I undertook a mini-adventure to visit the actual spot, which at the time of writing is somewhere near Wennington, Lancashire. Taking advantage of a very welcome short break from being parents, we made a little detour off the route between a wonderful restaurant and me Mum and Dad’s house, and stumbled, climbed and squelched our way to the middle of Mozz.

10 Apr 2019

Think twice before you soft delete

This is a code-heavy blog post about a specific pattern/third party library. I wanted to document the behaviours that other Django developers need to expect if they are not super careful when introducing a concept called soft deletion. Soft deletion, on the face of it, is a neat thing to be able to do. Say you have to write an application to track books in a library. You might create a Book model in your database and have a Loan object that refers to it.

29 Mar 2019

Stick to the spaghetti trees

A plea to media outlets. Monday is April Fools' Day, we all know that. I’m hanging on the news at the moment as the House of Commons lurches from one indicative vote to another non-binding directive and we are plunged into fresh uncharted territory more than once a day. So please, just keep the silly stories to spaghetti trees and other harmless frippery on Monday. Just sayin'. Also, if you like countdowns and count,er,“ups”, feel free to use mine (hover mouse top right to edit the dates and words):

07 Mar 2019

Tohora - instant web page control for balenaDash

A post introducing a recent hobby project of mine. Last year I changed jobs and stopped working with digital signage. What do you know, though: the office I now sit in, at the super-nice Bradfield Centre, has a display on the wall, so I felt sort of obligated to get something running behind it. Not literally behind it - although a Raspberry Pi is pretty small, it’s proved rather difficult to wedge behind the monitor.

03 Mar 2019

Sleep under the sky

Last weekend I had some time to myself, and I made a trip to Norfolk/Suffolk and added a couple of bird species to my life list (goshawk, woodlark). I also took advantage of the crazy-warm February weather to do one of my favourite things: fall asleep outdoors. I’m a huge believer in the power nap. Sometimes, I genuinely think it’s the single most efficient use for 20 minutes, such is the restorative power of a brain reboot.

20 Feb 2019

Sports mode

Had a great time playing with my friend Aadi’s relatively-new drone in Girton this weekend. Another gadget goes on my wishlist. I was amazed by the amount of tech crammed into such a small package, and in particular at how much angry-sounding power comes out. On a gently breezy day, it hovered with no perceptible movement and was easy to control. We tried out “follow target”, “dronies” (a new one on me) and checked out its maximum speed.

20 Feb 2019

Roger that, basecamp

If you have children that are old enough to scoot or cycle off on their own, my tip: get some walkie-talkies. Our house has a fairly quiet road out the back, but pavement-next-to-busy-road is the only way to get to either the Rec or the local car park (best place to learn to ride in Girton is the one at the top of Wellbrook Way). I’ve got a couple of Motorola T82s and two Cobra AM245s.

18 Feb 2019

FaceTime → EarTime

In our house we’ve spent countless hours on video calls to distant family members. Being able to see the other side of a call is amazing: we actually live in the future, right? You can wave at someone hundreds of miles away, show them your new favourite toy, ask them how their garden grows, or - if you’re under six - show them the inside of your mouth. It’s very engaging, but Iris and Finn are completely accustomed to it - so much so, they have come to see a roughly-weekly FaceTime session more like a routine form of telepresence than a call.

18 Feb 2019

A watched kettle never boils...

…so I’m not sure whether this see-through kettle in a shared workplace really did take forever to reach 100ºC. I was watching, and it took ages. I used the state-change staring time to remember a physics supervision from university, and how much I enjoyed learning about the sound of a kettle. I listened to the transition from a scratchy, higher pitched “cavitational crackle” to a mellifluous, quieter bubbling as the process advanced.

16 Feb 2019

Ptilonorhynchus violaceus

A few of my favourite things came together last weekend. I was out for a chilly morning run, listening to one of my top podcasts (via bone conduction - my favourite way to listen while exercising), and the episode featured one of my favourite birds. In 2008 Sarah and I spent time volunteering in Eastern Australia, helping the Borgia research group to catch and study satin bowerbirds. These birds are awesome - I use the word deliberately.

20 Jan 2019

Saucy chat

I visited a burger restaurant in Islington with workmates recently, and a very wide-ranging conversation included quite some discussion of sauces. We compared favourites and tried to remember the differences between them all. It occurred to me that being able to compare one sauce’s recipe with another’s might be a fun geek project in git. So, here is the result of a hour’s wikipedia research and some tapping at a command line on a train ride:

16 Jan 2019

First foray into fintech

Challenger banks are quite the thing these days. I am a big fan of both Monzo and Starling. I wrote a python script (publicly available on github) to help me save some of my day-to-day cash into one of Starling’s “spaces” (their word for savings goals). I’ve punched in how much I want to start each month with, and how much I’d like to leave at the end, as a buffer.