Under the Palm Tree

"Illegal Instruction" the desktop hardware upgrade that took almost a week

On my birthday list I added "new motherboard, CPU + RAM" for my computer, which was getting into the "struggling with running 3 browsers and 300 tabs" range (yes, I know...). I picked them out after discussions with various friends who pay more attention to this sort of thing than I

2022

My First Chromebook

.. is an Acer Spin 513 2021 (8Gb Ram, 128Gb Drive, Weight 1.2Kg), refurbished from Currys, £324 (bought early Jan 2022). It follows a long-lived (for me, I usually break them) Lenovo Yoga Book (android, 4Gb Ram, 64Gb Drive, Weight 690g), bought on release date, 2016. Ok, it actually follows

2021

Ghost mega update

Just spent a chunk of the weekend updating my Ghost [https://ghost.org] install, that was "fun". I started at version 2.something, updated to 2.83.3 (the last 2.x version), as instructed, then attempted to update to 4.x (latest version), which is supposed to "Just Work"

3dprinting

Window sill plant drip saucer

I needed a plant saucer for a new plant pot on my window sill, but couldn't find one in the house

3dprinting

Practical 3D Printing - Takeaway cup handle

Short backstory: I'm partial to a large cup of takeaway hot chocolate, but not to the heat of the cup, those cardboard sleeves, if even available, are not a lot of help either. After some searching I did eventually find a thermos-style mug [http://www.gooutdoors.co.uk/mega-trek-mug-p184912] that

3dprinting

Fun with logos - Cookie cutter

A company logo is there for identification, you can print it on letter heads, business cards, your website. It can also be used on giveaways, pens, brochures. For a bit more fun, why not create some useful objects to give away, that won't just get thrown in the bin? This

perl

Library loans and Goodreads

Goodreads has a yearly Reading Challenge [https://www.goodreads.com/challenges/3082-2015-reading-challenge], which compares books read within a year to your previously stated target. The hard part is not reading the book though, its updating the Goodreads data. Recently Goodreads added the ability to import books from your Amazon account,

3dprinting

Practical 3D Printing - Improving the shower

Short backstory: Earlier in the year we had our boiler replaced with a shiny new one. We used to have a conventional boiler, now we have a condensing one, and no hot water tank. At the last minute in the procedure, it was noticed that our existing shower was of

perl

SQLite -> Postgres = Much ranting

I'm on a "fun" journey of discovery here, having assumed (oops!) that developing some software using DBIx::Class [http://metacpan.org/module/DBIx::Class] using the SQLite [http://sqlite.org] database, and then switching the code to using Postgres [http://postgresql.org], everything would Just Work (TM) Here's what I've

Photography

February Photo Challenge 2015

Welcome to #febphoto2015! The "rules" as usual: * I will give out a daily photo challenge target (hopefully on the day before). * You/We leave the house on that day and take a new picture based on the target * Post the photo to Twitter, Instagram, as a comment on this post,

Budgeting

How To: Personal Finance Part 1

The trick with keeping track of your personal finances is to keep budgets. This may sound tedious (and sometimes it is), but it also gives you the freedom to spend without worrying (as much). You can probably do this with any number of tools, we wrote our own (being programmers)

2015

2015 - Three big things

Some plans for this year, three main goals, and some smaller ones around the edges.. 1. House The obvious one, this house needs the roof, render, insulation, boiler, fence and electrics fixing. Then there are the other bits we'd just like to do, dry-line the basement, workshop, kitchen expansion. Either

Devlin hardened keyboard

While I was recently at the lovely HACMan, I bought from them, for the tiny price of £10, a kiosk-style hardened keyboard/trackball combination, a Devlin with serial number D107922. (I say "a Devlin", because there's nothing on it approaching a model name.) So, naturally, one of the first things

3dprinting

How To: A 3D Camelia

This year I went to the London Perl Workshop [http://act.yapc.eu/lpw2014/] with a pile of 3D printed "LPW 2014 tokens" (key rings? One thing I need to do is find a name for them!) [https://www.flickr.com/photos/jessrobinson/15699186611/] LPW 2014 key ring token thingies

3dprinting

3D Printing day at the Museum of Computing

On November 22nd, 2014, the Swindon Hackspace held its first ever 3D Printing day at the Museum of Computing, Theatre Square, Swindon. We had several laptops available with an introduction to OpenSCAD [http://www.openscad.org], and three 3D printers for printing the students creations with. [https://www.flickr.com/

walking

Walking Solo

3 months since my last blog entry, argh! Anyway.. Recently, as it was Get Walking week (or is it month?) I went on a couple of group walks organised by the local Ramblers group NE Wilts [http://www.ramblers-wilts.org.uk] to see what this walking in groups thing is

Photography

Month of tidying/decluttering

The month of the February Photo Challenge [http://flickr.com/groups/february-photo-challenge] is over. I hope you enjoyed it! I didn't do too brilliantly, due to the lurgy and some general apathy. I must try harder! I will continue taking photos, I may even post some challenges based on the

tea

A good cup of tea

60 seconds on the subject of "A good cup of tea" without hesitation, deviation or repetition, starting now. A good cup of tea, I always find, is one that you make yourself. I have a little routine that I always follow when I am at home. First I empty the

swindon

Learning Ming Dynasty

Tonight at the Swindon Board Games group [http://boardgamegeek.com/guild/1060] we had some "fun" trying to figure out the rules for Ming Dynasty [http://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/31075/ming-dynasty]. After reading the rules several times and in various layers (they come in repeats with more or less detail)

swindon

What's on in Swindon?

Ok, I've given up trying to figure out how it is that other folks figure out what events are on locally. Bigger and hipper towns seem get better coverage (seem, because I'm not there so coverage may be missing smaller venues just like it does here). There are plenty of

smartduino

Smartduino fun/rant

This week I have spent my spare time mostly fiddling with the Smartduino and.. Wondering what good "Views of Swindon" would look like. I'll deal with them in separare blog posts as otherwise, well it would be quite a mess. The Smartduino (or smARtDUINO as they like to write it.

blogging

52 weeks of blogging

2013 in numbers: * Backed 6 kickstarter projects (received 5 including one from 2013) * Walked 231 miles in the last half of the year (fitbit's interface doesn't want to give me a sum for fitbit-logged data) * Visited pretty much all the pubs in Swindon (I need to get geowanderers to output