Frustrated by the ugliness of plugging a USB bluetooth adaptor into my Eee PC, I decided that the best thing I could do was gut a bluetooth adapter and install it internally.
Here are my accounts of the process.
I’ve been playing around over the weekend with speeding up this website a little. It runs on a virtual server with not much RAM, so it’s important that I keep the number of Apache processes as low as possible.
I’ve installed lighttpd another IP to serve static content such as images and stylesheets. This means that I won’t have the overhead of Apache to serve up all the little bits of content that don’t require PHP.
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Since it was pretty bad weather this afternoon, we decided to make some flapjack. It’s also Oliver’s birthday party tomorrow so it’ll be nice to have some to put out then (if there’s any left, of course!).
We put some melted chocolate on top because it didn’t appear to have quite enough sugar or calories in the standard recipe.
Microcosmos.co.uk was an SGI fan site I used to run a couple of years back. Unfortunately, I let the domain expire because I was too damn busy to renew it.
This weekend, Ian Mapleson mentioned that people had asked him about it, so I thought I’d have a look at getting it up and running again.
Sadly, some no good squatter has registered the domain, but I’ve temporarily got it up and running on my new server at microcosmos.jamesholden.net. So, it’s back from the void - enjoy!
While hacking our problem tool at work, I thought it might be cool to set up an RSS feed for each problem so that you can be notified when comments are added onto it.
The major problem I hit was that the system uses cookie-based logins, so it would be a security hole to leave it open. Then I realised that, because RSS is just XML over HTTP, standard HTTP authentication over SSL would be possible, and it turns out that some RSS readers do indeed support this.
Outside the intranet world, authenticated RSS could be used to provide customised content or alerting services.
Some IT recruitment agencies are soooo dumb. I got an email from Jamie at PS Recruitment yesterday pushing a job with absolutely no relevance to me whatsoever. I doubt he’s in posession of anything beyond my email address, which makes him a spammer. When I sent back a polite enough, semi-humorous email pointing out that he might do his research a little better, I got a load of abuse back! Now, that’s a bit beyond what I’d expect. I think I’ll ring them up for an apology.
On another note, I finally got round to making some progress on the LUG talk suggestion system. The idea is for people to be able to request and offer talks, and to allow the LUG organisers to judge how popular a talk topic might be. More details to follow.
There was just a thunderstorm here this evening, so the air’s nice and clear now after a few days of humid, oppressive air. It got me thinking though, about an old ioniser we used to have when I lived at home. I think I’ll build one this week. All you need is a Cockroft-Walton multipler driver straight off the mains. 25 stages should give about 17kV which will produce a nice effect. I’ll pick the bits up from Maplin tomorrow and build it this week.
They’re dead simple to make. All the capacitors are 100nF polys and the diodes are 1N4007 rectifer types. It’ll cost about a fiver to make, plus a box to put it in. Not all the stages are shown below. An extra 10M resistor across the input might be an idea, to prevent getting a zap from the mains plug.
This weekend I’ll finally get around to doing some more work on the Freevo PVR I’m building. I started before Christmas with an LR6550 DVB-T card from eBay, and a Mini-ITX motherboard in a nice little slimline case, smaller than an average satellite receiver. I’ll report back on the progress later on.
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