www.gisvold.co.uk blogs

Interesting tip for iPhone Internet tethering

tor — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 06:17:20 +0000

Just so set the scene :

- I have a iPhone 4 (Vodafone UK)

- And I have a Boingo mobile phone subscription on it (around £4/month)

I am currently sitting outside Starbucks - on my MacBook - connected to the Internet using tethering from the MacBook to the iPhone.

It looks remarkably like I can use the Boingo subscription on my iPhone to connect my MacBook to the Internet through the iPhones wireless (ie Starbucks) wifi netowrk.

On my way to work today

tor — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 05:30:14 +0000

the sky over London.

Technorati Tags: Array

Ruby Mail gem updated to delete emails

tor — Sun, 11 Jul 2010 07:04:45 +0000

The Ruby Mail gem has now been updated to include a "delete" method - even if it is for all emails on the server - there is no way of individually deleting emails so far.

Except for this - a excellent gem.

Mail is an internet library for Ruby that is designed to handle emails generation, parsing and sending in a simple, rubyesque manner.

The purpose of this library is to provide a single point of access to handle all email functions, including sending and receiving emails. All network type actions are done through proxy methods to Net::SMTP, Net::POP3 etc.
Read more

Technorati Tags: Array Ruby

How to destroy scouting

tor — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 20:26:04 +0000

In the new "InTouch" system - a reasonably sensible system for providing home contact for all scouting activities, I found that any Home Contact (sitting at the end of a phone) needs a CRB (Criminal Records Bureau check)!

And the FAQ's explain why :

So in other words this should make it a lot harder to get anyone to help out - this is IMHO incredibly short sighted.

And surely this breaks the CRb rules which state (all references from this document) :
Read more

Technorati Tags: Array scouts

And the answer is : None

tor — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 20:09:20 +0000

Incredibly stupid ad :

Technorati Tags: Array Web

Seriously flawed legal system

tor — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 19:17:43 +0000

If this story is even remotely true - then it is about taking a company to court over a product that noone has had for more than week - so in other words you will not have given the manufacturers any chance to remedy any such problems.

Seriously wrong regardless of who the company is.

Law firm Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff has already targeted the iPhone 4 in a potential class-action lawsuit against Apple. The firm is currently seeking out iPhone owners who have experienced poor reception quality, dropped calls, and weak signals.
Read more

Technorati Tags: Apple Array

Driving RGB LED tape

tor — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 10:23:33 +0000

I just bought a 5 metre roll of RGB LED's - after reading this Jeelabs article. I even bought the necessary MOSfet transistors to build the driver board.

But then I came across this story - and I happen to have a BlinkM MaxM laying around

Using MaxM with flexible RGB tape
A single BlinkM MaxM can easily drive a 5 meter (16 ft) roll of the flexible RGB SMD LED tape that’s used for architectural lighting. Each roll contains 150 RGB LEDs.

Each LED in the tape is a SMD RGB "5050" LED, capable of putting out about 6000mcd. The spacing between LEDs is 3.3cm (~1.25").
Read more

Technorati Tags: Arduino Array electronics Jeenode

A centralised store for house automation data

tor — Sun, 27 Jun 2010 09:26:32 +0000

In my hobby work on house information/house automation for our house I needed somewhere to store all the most recent data collected from various sensors and systems, in such a way that it would be accessible from any computer on our extended network. And I chose to use Memcached - as it is running purely in memory, and by its very nature is fast and accessible over the network.

It's data is not persistent after a crash - but I had no need for this, as I collect data very frequently, and persistence was not needed.

Here is a recent output from a dump of data stored in memcached :

Read more

Technorati Tags: Arduino Array Jeenode Ruby Weather

One more home control component

tor — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 18:59:09 +0000

Today I got my act together to do the next part of our home control system.

So far we have a number of sensors dotted around the house

- Temperature and humidity outside

- Temperature and humidity in the Library

- Temperature in the living room

- Whole house electricity usage

- Boiler 1 on flame sensor

- Boiler 2 on flame sensor

- Temperature in boiler cabinet

But on the output side it is rather sparse - so far we only have

- 4 lines of 20 characters LCD display controlled from server
Read more

Technorati Tags: Arduino Array electronics Jeenode

Wildlife in our garden

tor — Sat, 19 Jun 2010 16:36:59 +0000

Technorati Tags: Array

on my way to work

tor — Mon, 14 Jun 2010 06:11:11 +0000

the homeless camp has been bulldozed.

Technorati Tags: Array

Subutai Corporation

tor — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 20:57:14 +0000

Neal Stephenson is up to something interesting - again :

We are developing our first project, The Mongoliad.

The Mongoliad is a new kind of serialized novel, created by Neal Stephenson, and written by Neal, Greg Bear, Nicole Galland, Mark Teppo, and a number of other great authors. It will be told via custom apps on iPad, iPhone, Kindle, and Android, and will be something of an experiment in post-book publishing and storytelling.

Read more

Technorati Tags: Array Books Web

How to acheive negative SEO

tor — Sun, 13 Jun 2010 17:51:38 +0000

Oh how good is this :
Read more

Technorati Tags: Array Web

Jeenode v4 problem

tor — Sun, 30 May 2010 11:21:51 +0000

Problem with Jeenode V4

(Just to start with a bit of background - I've got 8 Jeenodes so far - 4 of these hand soldered without any real problems except for turning the radio the wrong way round for the first one)

I received my first 2 Jeenode V4's a couple of days ago - and soldered them together, and started them up.

Both displayed the same behaviour - where the prompt for the Demo sketch cam up as one line, with no further activity.

I have spent a bit of time trying to find out why - including using a magnifying glass to check my soldering etc.

In the end I had to start software debugging - and it all ended up with these lines in RF12.cpp

" // wait until RFM12B is out of power-up reset, this takes several *seconds*
Read more

Technorati Tags: Array Jeenode Open source

SoftRaid 4.0 releases

tor — Thu, 27 May 2010 13:47:28 +0000

After a (very long) wait SoftRaid 4.0 has been released into the wild :

Technorati Tags: Apple Array OsX

Apple worth more than Microsoft. Wow.

tor — Wed, 26 May 2010 19:31:05 +0000

This is incredible to anyone that has followed Apple since the beginning :

Apple passes Microsoft's stock market cap ...
Apple passed a symbolic milestone today as its market cap passed Microsoft's for the first time. Beginning in the morning, the total value of Apple's shares was higher, reaching $225.7 billion at 3PM Wednesday afternoon where Microsoft had dropped to $223.4 billion. The two companies' share prices have headed in opposite directions since the year began, with Apple growing more than 17 percent while Microsoft's has dropped by an almost identical ratio

[From MacNN | Apple, iPod, Mac news @ The Macintosh News Network]

Technorati Tags: Apple Array

Reahilitation using a computer

tor — Mon, 17 May 2010 00:25:14 +0000

My reaction to this story was initially dismissing the whole story as "stupidity" - but then on reading more and thinking about it I changed my views on it. Maybe it is not such a ridiculous idea after all? It may also be more effective and cheaper than other options in the long run?
Read more

Technorati Tags: Array ramblings

Gas usage measurements

tor — Sat, 08 May 2010 18:07:59 +0000

The software measure our gas usage in the house is coming along slowly - I have attached a LDR to one of the Jeenodes and found out the light level when just the pilot light is on, and the light level when the burner is on.

so I can now detect the transitions when the boiler turns on and when it turns off, and from there calculate how long it was turned on for.

This all looks a bit strange at the moment :

Measuring gas usage

tor — Sat, 08 May 2010 10:22:57 +0000

For our home monitoring system I have long had a problem -

- We do measure the amount of electricity we use, and plot/graph this quite accurately

- We do use gas for heating (2 boilers) plus a hob in the kitchen.

Measuring usage of gas seems to be difficult with any easily accessible technology, and the very oldfashioned meter we have for the house will not work with any of the methods I have seen so far - as we do not have either a flashing led nor a rotating disc.

So while trying to think through this I came to the following conclusion :

- The gas usage for the hob is probably little compared to the boilers, and there is very little we can do to reduce it, therefore I will concentrate on the usage by the boilers.
Read more

Technorati Tags: Arduino Array electronics green Jeenode

monitter : real time, live twitter monitor

tor — Fri, 07 May 2010 20:15:20 +0000

Found this javascript based Twitter monitor that can be easily embedded in your own pages - and keeps on updating your Twitters.

I quickly changed a copy to fetch messages from a status.net based site

monitter? what is it?
Simple. It's a twitter monitor, it lets you "monitter" the twitter world for a set of keywords and watch what people are saying. Cool huh?

[From monitter : real time, live twitter monitor | free live twitter embed widget]

Technorati Tags: Array Open source Web