I have a laptop! A venerable IBM T23 with 512MB RAM clocked at a mighty 1133Mhz. I got it off ebay, something which lots of people have since said is usually a really, really bad idea. Apart from a crack on the back it does the job and is built like a tank. It came with an apparently legal install of Windows XP but I’ve installed ubuntu linux alongside it. So far I haven’t needed to boot into Windows for anything, all my hardware is supported in ubuntu. The install process was also incredibly smooth. You boot from a live CD and then the installer runs from inside the live CD version of linux. You can then muck around with the gnome default games (blackjack etc) whilst the installer is completing! I did have some strange issue with lilo not installing the first time, but I ran it again and it worked fine.

The PCMCIA wi-fi card that came with my laptop was pretty crappy and didn’t seem to be supported in linux. I shelled out a whole £10 for a new one that I knew was supported and it has been working fine. I also had to replace the battery as the charge only held for 20 mins, the seller freely admitted the battery wasn’t tested (ebay speak for broken) so it was to be expected. Ubuntu is the most user friendly linux distribution I’ve every installed. They obviously have actual people thinking about usability and being friendly to less experienced users. I’ve since ubuntu-orised my server box at home as well. It makes sense to just run one distribution.

I’ve ditched my oh-so-2006 binary feed reader and switched to Google Reader. It’s pretty slick to use and has clever stats and features that just aren’t present in desktop application readers. I can also catch up on all my feeds in my lunch break at work or just generally when I’m not at my home PC.

I was talking with my Mum last night and realised that we share one (among many) particular trait: not finishing things. In my free time I’m great at starting projects but not so good at actually finishing them. So, with that in mind I’m listing all of my half finished projects here in a hope of shaming myself into maybe finishing them off some day.

Lothian buses routes on Google Maps

Take the route (list of street names) from the Lothian Buses timetable and dump them into the Google Maps route finder. Inelegantly scape the results to extract the GPolygon munge. Then stick all the paths together to get the final route.

Shown left is the (rough) route of the number 22. The bus I used to have to take to work when I lived out in the “boonies”.

Wordpress Amazon plugin

I’ve started a Wordpress plugin to allow easy access to the Amazon e-commerce API. Mainly to facilitate extracting product information. So you can say stuff like “I’m currently reading –AMAZONASIN–” and my plugin will fetch all the necessary information like title, author, image etc. The API isn’t super-fast so I’m currently at the stage of working out a schema to cache all the necessary information. The different types of products all have a different subset of attribute fields, so I’m trying to work out a flexible solution. I’ve also worked on some image processing trickery to allow for the oh so trendy apple-style “book at angle with reflection” image (as seen left). It’s a bit jaggy at the minute, I need to find out how to do blurring with GD in PHP. I’ve even got a Google Code page for this project which handily has SVN access.

I know there are a few plugins out there that do this already but they either aren’t flexible enough or just look too amateurish for my liking.

Edinburgh Urban Art

I started doing an interface to the Flickr group I set up. The basics are there but it could do with some more pizazz.

Book Blog

Over at /books/ I like to keep track of what I’ve been reading. I’ve managed to keep this up for almost two years but should really get around to doing something more exciting with the design. Actual book data is what inspired my Wordpress plugin above. So, when that is finished the page should be awash with tags, photos, reviews etc.

In my mission to get fitter I went for a run this morning. I had my (gleaming bright white) trainers on, trackies and a fleece. Plus my rookie style woolly hat. It started totally chucking it down when I was half way across the meadows and so I was battling along through the elements. Man, did that shower feel good when I got back in out of the wind and rain.

This week I received a useful cold call. It started with the usual mobile phone stuff and I was about to hang-up when the dude mentioned that my contract was about to run out, whoah, could actually be a legit call. It was, my contract had run out (I had no idea) and was apparently in “rolling” mode. So they tempted me to stay on with a free upgrade and an attempt at selling me a vastly over-priced plan and some phone insurance. I took the free K800, thank you very much. It’s a very shiny phone with an awesome screen, plus it was in Casino Royale. Check out the evolution with my last three phones:

Left to right: T610, K750 & K800.

Screens are getting bigger (and higher resolution) and keypads are getting more cluttered. The ’start’ and ‘end’ call buttons on the K800 are pretty tiny, squeezed in at the side like that. The K800 seems a bit more ‘bling’ than the others and more nokia-ish. Other nice improvements are more tactile keys, a better camera, a real flash, autofocus, image stabilisation, an RSS reader and a blogging tool! The latter seems to only support blogger, which is a shame. We’ll see how this new phone lasts.

The ioquake3 project aims to build on id software’s release of the Quake 3 source code. Tremulous uses ioquake as it’s engine and the project will hopefully allow for many more games that are stand-alone and use a decent engine.

My parents were in Alnwick for the weekend seeing Jools Holland at Alnwick Castle. I got the train down to see them yesterday, Alnmouth station is only an hour on the train from Edinburgh. You can’t go to Alnwick without going to the awesome Barter Books, one of the largest second hand bookshops in Britain. The place is huge! It’s based in Alnwick’s very grand Victorian railway station and has gazillions of second hand books on a myriad of subjects. All pretty reasonably priced, unlike some places in Edinburgh where you can often get the same book new on amazon for a quid more. They’ve also got cases of old first editions and antique stuff, all very nicely presented. Plus a large reading room with newspapers, seats everywhere and very cheap coffee and cakes that you pay for on an honesty basis. It’s a book geeks dream. We could easily have spent the whole day there but we managed to drag ourselves away after an hour and a bit. We had lunch in the courtyard at The Art House which did nice food but the service was a little slow. After lunch we wandered into the town square where the Alnwick International Music Festival was happening and wandered among the trinket stalls listening to Mexican dancing and Lithuanian harp playing. A good day out with some cracking weather.

The book haul:

• The Bourne Identity
• Cross of Iron
• Straw Men
• Idlewild
• The Godfather

Kerry and I had a Random Day Off on Wednesday this week. It was ace, we totally slept in and then went out into the gorgeous weather for lunch at Howies on Victoria street. I had brocolli and pea soup and then chilli chicken escalope on foccacia, or something. Whatever it was, it was damn tasty. Kerry had corn cakes to start and then some kind of squid thing, which I refused to try in my stuberness.

After lunch we went to see the Anatomy Acts exhibition at the City Art Centre. It was pretty cool, rather gruesome, but very interesting. Lots of models and paintings of the insides and outsides of bodies, medical instruments and very old, very elaborate anatomical texts. They even had some doctor chaps wooden operating trolley from eighteen-oh-something that must have seen a fair bit of blood spilt on it, as the wood was a good browny-red shade on top. It goes over three floors of the gallery and was a lot larger than I was expecting, especially for a free exhibition. They even have some modern medical imagery stuff from MIR and CAT scanners on a big screen which reminded me of the Visualisation course I did at uni.

A great day off, and it made the week seem really short!

Wow, I’m getting worse and worse at this blogging thing. I was doing really well for a while and now its like “one crappy link post a week”. Sorry about that.

In my defence I have been attempting to post more to Google Sightseeing but still can’t keep up with Alex & Jame’s posting rate. On the upside I think I’ve learnt more general knowledge when composing posts for GGSS than doing anything else for a while now.

In other news Kerry and I took a big step last weekend by purchasing a Dyson DC08 vacuum between us and merging our CD collections. I also got a very shiny new alarm clock form Habitat which is something I’ve been wanting for a while. I’m not going to link to their website as it’s flash and obscenely slow to use, load, and non comprehensive.

Whilst getting software for work we realised that you can go out and buy a really old version of photoshop and then get the much cheaper upgrade option to a super new version like CS2. Saving you about £300 in the process. I managed to get an apparently “brand new sealed” version of photoshop 5.5 for a tenner off ebay. We’ll see how legit it is once it arrives. Of course, I now have to shell out £100+ to get the upgrade to CS2. I think I’ll wait for a good month before I get that.

We won the pub quiz again last night by a hairs-breadth. We were tied right at the end with one other team, then we tied again on the “jackpot round” so we went to a tie-breaker:

“In what year was Alexander Graham Bell awarded the patent for his telephone?”

…and Kerry got it right on the nose: 1876.