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Posts Tagged “Tech”

Eventum Extension for MediaWiki

Posted on April 14th, 2009 by Rich

I couldn’t find a MediaWiki extension for Eventum when I needed one, so this evening I knocked one up.
It’s fairly basic, very unoptimised, and probably far from perfect, but it works for me, and someone might use it as the basis for something better. It uses PHPs MySQL library to open a connection to [...]

On Apple and the Quest for the Perfect Gadget

Posted on April 28th, 2008 by Rich

Imagine a scene in the not-too distant future… after a frenzied period of leaks, rumours, claims and counter-claims, interspersed with no-comments, denials, and increasingly reliable and suggestive evidence emerging from component and sub-assembly manufacturers, Apple Inc announce the imminent release of The Perfect Gadget.
The mainstream press attend press conferences and briefings where Apple proclaim that [...]

Greasing the Beeb

Posted on April 19th, 2008 by Rich

The new BBC News website is a bit too tall. The Beeb have introduced an additional banner at the top of the page which is of very little use (other than cementing the BBC Brand across its sites) so I wrote a little greasemonkey script to remove both the banner and a few other [...]

b0rked

Posted on April 2nd, 2008 by Rich

Something’s broken on the database that runs this site, specifically there’s b0rkage in the comment table, and the ssh daemon is not reachable. Perhaps it’s to do with the larger than normal amount of spam that’s been arriving today (for “larger than normal” read: one metric truckload). More info later after I’ve had [...]

Worst Offenders for Wordpress 2.5 – Pre-Alpha

Posted on March 13th, 2008 by Rich

I’m in the process of rewriting the Worst Offenders plugin for the soon-to-be-released WordPress 2.5. Before I make a tested and polished version of the code globally available, I’d be interested to hear from anyone who’d like to alpha test it.
As before Worst Offenders works cooperatively with other anti-spam plugins: its primary purpose [...]

Geo-Tagged Photos

Posted on March 1st, 2008 by Rich

For the last few weeks I’ve been testing out some geo-tagging software on my camera. The concept is fairly simple, whenever I take a photo, the built-in GPS works out where I am and records this metadata within the photo.

RFID Café

Posted on January 22nd, 2008 by Rich

I couldn’t help but marvel at the efficiency of our local station café recently, as I watched the staff pipeline their customer orders. The busy morning rush was so great that they’d streamlined the operations; one person greeted customers, took orders from several of us at once, and processed the payments. This freed [...]

Commuter Alarm Clock

Posted on January 22nd, 2008 by Rich

On a recent train journey I overheard a conversation about someone who’d enjoyed the first class wine so much on a recent intercity journey that they had difficulty staying awake so as not to miss their destination. Staying awake is a problem for many commuters and for those whose destination is not the terminating [...]

Media Player Guitar Tab Plugin

Posted on June 14th, 2007 by Rich

This is one of those “maybe it exists but I can’t find it” ideas. Something that I’d find very useful would be media player plugin that could use the ID tag from mp3’s (etc) to nip off to the WWW and find the relevant guitar tab so playing along is thus a very easy [...]

Viva Voce

Posted on June 1st, 2007 by Rich

In Britain, the process of finishing a PhD involves the submission of a written thesis, followed by an oral examination called a viva voce (the literal Latin translation is “live voice”). The “viva”, as it’s commonly known, is an in-depth discussion into all aspects of the thesis which typically lasts between 90 and 180 [...]