The Raspberry Pi is a truly marvellous computer, and the most exciting gizmo that I’ve owned since I got my Mac SE/30 back in 1992. Seriously, the little Pi is way more interesting than even my iPad. Continue reading “Tasty Raspberry Pi”

Don’t get me wrong, I like Linux. My server at home runs DSM, the Synology version of Linux. My routers run Linux. And I’ve got Ubuntu installed as the only OS on my Thinkpad and as one of the three OSs on my Mac Pro. I have high hopes that one day, and hopefully soon, Linux will present a viable alternative to Mac OS X for general purpose use – because Microsoft certainly doesn’t seem to be making any effort to with Windows.

That day is not now though, and the main problem isn’t actually with Linux itself. It’s with the support available. Linux itself is part of the problem, of course – it requires a little too much fiddling around and customisation for it to be recommendable to granny, even with good support. With good support though, it should be a viable OS for the average family, and not just those with tech savvy dads like me.

Continue reading “How do you solve a problem like Linux?”

Sometimes it would be nice to embed a binary in a shell script, if only to provide a neat deployment for a command line tool.  There’s a right way to do this, so that the shell script remains editable even after the binary has been attached to it, and a wrong way – where the shell script is no longer editable at the end.  I’ll show you the right way here, and you can work out the wrong way yourself.

Continue reading “Snippet of Code # 4 – Embedding binary in a shell script”

I’ve been in the strange position of being offered commiserations on the death of Steve Jobs, which is weird because I am neither related to him nor particularly caught up in any cult of celebrity.

Genius is an overused word but, in the case of Steve Jobs, I think it applies. In the fields of technology and art, he made a difference.  He changed the world.  And, despite trying very hard, I can’t find any products that better his vision yet.  That isn’t to say that Apple is perfect, of course, but they’re a lot closer to nirvana than any other product from any competing organisation.  On the whole, people who disagree with this statement haven’t tried to live with an Apple product for a month and, in doing so, give it a fair trial.

Would I want to have had Steve Jobs’ life?  No.  Do I want to be the next Steve Jobs?  Also no.  One of the saddest things that anyone has ever said to me was that they ‘wished they could have my life’.  I wouldn’t wish that on anyone.  Don’t get me wrong – I like my life.  I love my life.  Most of the time it seems to come up aces, and that suits me very well.  But it only suits me.  It’s made to measure.  Steve Jobs’ life was made to measure for Steve Jobs and the only person who could live it was him.

It is tragic that Steve Jobs died young and at the peak of his powers, but I feel that we should celebrate his life and his achievements and remember that his influence will be with us for a long time, and possibly for centuries.  I am also happy for him, that he has now been put out of his pain.  I can’t, and don’t want to, imagine what it must be like to live with cancer for eight years.  I feel desperately sorry for his family and for his friends.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful though – I am genuinely happy to hear from you all, but a simple hello is sufficient.  And telling me your news of course – especially telling me your news.  Please offer me your commiserations if you hear that any of my family or friends have died – then I will be in need of them, and very likely in an extremely untogether place.

Sometimes it’s useful to save a little memory by storing data as bits rather than bytes.  After all, if you’re storing a boolean then using a whole byte is rather wasteful.  In any event, sometime you might want to inspect individual bits when working on your program.  If you’ve ever needed to do this then this code will help. Continue reading “Snippet of Code #3 – Dumping Bits”

A little while ago my sister approached me with an idea which requires a Facebook app. I’ve never written a Facebook app before, so I stocked up on books, read a little, and got stuck in.

What a complete waste of time.  It seems that the Facebook development system is a little fluid.  Nothing I learned worked, and the books would have been more useful if I had used them as substitute loo roll.   Continue reading “Snippet of code #2 – Developing Facebook Apps”

One of the people I work with (an excellent fellow, I might add) was grumbling about how he could gather information about the mounted disks on a computer.  He was mucking around with ‘df’ in the command line, and giving serious thought to the business of parsing the result into his program.

Continue reading “Snippet of code #1 – Gathering Disk Information in C”

I discovered NetNewsWire soon after I started using Mac OS X, and it changed the way that I use the internet.  Before NetNewsWire I didn’t really know much more about RSS than what it stood for.  Before NetNewsWire I aimlessly clicked around the dozens of websites that interested me, mostly just checking to see if they had anything new to offer.  What a waste of time. RSS changes all that.  With RSS the updates come to you – there’s no need to check for updates because they’ll all be delivered to you, in one location, when they happen.  And NetNewsWire on the Mac was the best, so when it came out for the iPhone I was delighted – and paid up immediately.

Bad move.  It is easily the buggiest piece of software that I’ve used on the iPhone – an application which tarnishes the NetNewsWire brand.  It frequently fails to update the status of its feeds correctly, so that I can’t see which stories I’ve read and which ones I haven’t.  The refresh button doesn’t fix the situation – so the only solution is a restart of the app. Despite this, I stayed loyal to NetNewsWire. But now, and just after NetNewsWire was sold to Black Pixel, I’ve decided that enough is enough.  I’ve decided to try Reeder.

At first glance, Reeder does the same thing that NetNewsWire does – it syncs RSS feeds with Google Reader, and makes them available for reading on your iOS device.  At second glance, Reeder does a whole lot more.  It’s more configurable.  It has an Instapaper like reading view although, unlike Instapaper, you do need an internet connection to use it.  If you want the whole page, Safari style, you can have that too – the downside being that you need to be prepared to wait for the whole page to load, images and all. The muted theme, black on grey, is very restful; far easier on the eyes than the stark black on white (with the occasional bright blue highlight) of NetNewsWire. The icing on the cake is that it seems to be faster and it hasn’t crashed either, well – not yet anyway.

I haven’t had Reeder for long.  These are first impressions.  But so far I like it alot, and I consider it to be money very well spent.  When my iPad arrives I’ll doubtless be buying a copy of the iPad version.

As for my Mac, that still has NetNewsWire on it – but I notice that Reeder is available for Mac OS too.  I suspect that I might abandon NetNewsWire altogether soon, but I will keep an eye on its development and I hope that Black Pixel can turn it around.

For the first time in twenty years, I decided to build a PC.  This project isn’t born of an idle whim – it’s born of my dislike for the Virgin+ box.  Seldom have I seen a more ill-conceived piece of hardware.  I’ve certainly never seen a system which glows more brightly on standby than it does when it’s ‘on’.

The requirements started simply.  Any box that I build will be able to record freeview television programmes, convert them to a format that I can play on my Mac or my iPhone, and make them available on my home network so that they can be copied off easily.  I don’t have time to watch much TV at home, so I’d really like to be able to watch my recordings on the train to and from work.  The box will also need to be able to play DVDs and I’d really like it to be able to play my MP3 files too.  If it can connect to Boxee then so much the better.

As for the hardware requirements, it will need to be exceedingly parsimonious.  A box that records will need to be on standby much of the time, and I don’t want it to chug though the juice like an alcoholic in a brewery.  I’d like it to be remote controlled from the sofa just like all my other kit. An LCD front panel would be nice too – if only to make it look more like a hifi separate and less like a computer.  While we’re on the subject, it’ll need to be quiet as well.

I decided not to skimp on the quality.  The kit I bought is all good, albeit at rather less than the manufacturers RRP.  I decided what I wanted and then went looking for it at the lowest possible price.  My shopping list, and my rationale, went as follows:

• Antec Micro Fusion 350.  The Antec Micro Fusion 350 is a nicely compact PC case, a good match for my hifi.  On paper at least, it’s quiet and it boasts an efficient power supply.  It comes with a remote control and it has an LCD front panel, so it disguises the computer quite well.
• Asus E35M1-M PRO.  ASUS are a good brand, a big PC name that I trust.  Their website isn’t bad (by PC manufacturer standards) and I was able to find their support pages fairly easily.  On the whole, I don’t buy products if the provider doesn’t offer solid and usable support.  I chose this board for its AMD Zacate CPU which uses very little power whilst still offering reasonable performance. I’m impressed.
• Western Digital Caviar Green Power.  I’ve used these hard drives before, for archive on my Mac.  The Green Power range isn’t fast, but it is power efficient and it does seem to be reliable.  This is the first time I’ve used one as a startup disk – but power efficiency is more important than speed for my media player.
• Memory.  I get mine from Crucial, and I’ve installed 4GB.  The board will take up to 8GB so I may upgrade again before too long.  I don’t want page faulting to occur at all if I can help it, and especially not with a slow hard drive.

For this posting, I’d like to leave aside the issue of OS (I chose Mythbuntu, but I may yet decide to use Windows Media Centre).  The Mac vs. Windows vs. Linux is a meme as old as the hills, and not as interesting.  I know which is best for me, and I know which is most likely to crash with a virus and a blue screen.  I’d like to pick a different fight today…

…Hardware.  Good lord, common PC hardware is crappy.  The stuff I bought isn’t bargain basement – but it doesn’t even come close to the quality that I’ve come to expect from a computer.  And even if I’d spent thousands on the most expensive kit possible, it’d still lag behind Apple because of the need to maintain compatibility with the woeful generic PC standard.  I beleive in elegance.  I don’t want to see a rat nest of cable inside my computer.  In fact, I don’t want to see any cable – I want all the wires to be hidden neatly away so that they don’t bugger up the airflow inside my machine.  It isn’t just a matter of aesthetics, it’s a matter of longevity.

This home build isn’t my only experience of generic PCs. As well as my Macs, I do have a bog standard generic PC.  It’s a Dell XPS tower (not the latest generation – and I certainly won’t be buying another).  It’s crap.  It’s a professionally built machine, the top of Dell’s line, and it still looks like it was assembled by a crazed magpie. To use the car analogy, this isn’t Mercedes engineering.  This is Trabant.  On a bad day.

Sadly, it isn’t possible to do what I’m attempting to do with Apple hardware.  Apple doesn’t make a machine with the form factor that I’d like.  So I’m making the best of a bad job.  Software-wise though, I’m very much open to conversion. Suggestions for alternative software stacks and improvements that I might make to my system will be gratefully received.

If, on the other hand, you don’t need a custom computer, if all you want is a machine that you can work on and, perhaps, use to play the odd game, if you don’t want shoddy build quality and worries about reliability then I’m afraid that you don’t have a great deal of choice.  Only one manufacturer offers the machine you want. Guess who?

There is no dispute that coal is a dirty fuel and also that coal generates radioactive byproducts too – radioactive byproducts which are largely vented into the atmosphere. But here’s the thing – you can’t actually make a bomb, dirty or ‘clean’ from coal ash. What’s more, if you wanted to dispose of the ash you could just stuff it back down the mine or quarry that it came from – we have enough abandoned workings after all. We just don’t have the political willpower to do so. Ash is largely safe – yes, I know about the heavy metals and other pollutants in the ash – but generations of Welsh communities have demonstrated that it’s quite possible to live your life and raise your family in the shadow of the ash pile. Perhaps not nice and yes, fatal if it slips onto your head, but ultimately fairly safe. Besides, after years of plant growth (yes, plants can grow on an ash pile – some even like it), the ash pile stabilises – and many of the nastier waste products get locked up.

Good luck doing that with current, and even next generation, Nuclear reactors. I’d rather live in Aberfan than Pripyat. Even the most vocal adherent of Nuclear has to admit that ash is easier to deal with than nuclear waste.

I don’t actually have a problem with building Nuclear – provided we know what we’ll do with the waste. And we don’t. We keep lobbing ideas around, none of which work so far, and the piles of toxic and radioactive waste continue to build. And the two Nuclear solutions which seem to be cleanest (Hybrid reactors – which would reduce the overall amount of high level waste – theoretically, they could ‘burn’ waste from other reactors, and burn old nuclear warheads, and Fusion) are either too expensive or too impossible with current technology or lack the political will to implement. So yes. Fuck new Nuclear until we do the job cleanly and properly.

But (whinge, whine, moan) we won’t have enough power if we don’t have nuclear! Boo Hoo. Turn your computer off at night. Buy less gadgets. Get rid of your energy hungry plasma TV. Recycle. Reuse. Use public transport. Problem solved. Sure, you’ll have less toys – but you’ll also have a cleaner world. You’ll thank me for it one day.