nüsite
Welcome to the new aeracode.org, now with a bit more blue, and added Unantistalker™ technology.
Category: General
New Phones, Solving Old Problems
I've always not been one for phones; for years, I had a (relatively) old Nokia 6100. It does the job of phone calls and SMS messaging very well, and lasts absolutely ages on a single charge.
At the beginning of the year, though, I wanted 3G connectivity for my PDA and laptop (yes, I have a whole range of portable devices, and every one has its use, although not necessarily simultaneously), and so liberated a Nokia 6280 from eBay. The 6280 was pretty good - long battery life, a WAP browser, and that all-important connectivity. However, when its screen broke last week, and replacement LCDs were not too cheap, I went back to eBay with two rules: it had to be under £60, and should fit the two 6280 batteries and umpteen small Nokia chargers I have (the Internet Tablets use them too).
I’m Blue, Da-Ba-De…
People who know me, at all, will know I love two things: cheese, and the colour blue. Oddly enough, I don't like blue cheese, but that must be some kind of cancellation effect.
OpenTTD, for Maemo
Anybody lucky enough to own an OS2008 internet tablet can be smug and happy knowing that OpenTTD is now available for OS2008.
Lightning Talk Slides
I've put the slides up from my Lightning Talk about LastGraph I did last week for Oxford CompSoc. They're almost the same as the ones from Barcamp Brighton, but with a few small changes, since I, er, kinda rewrote it since then.
All Change
After comments mysteriously stopped working on my old site, I've migrated www.aeracode.org to the Aeracode Network™ from my old host. Hopefully things should be nicer now.
The Problems With Online Environments
Now, it's not very often that I write long posts on random internet topics, but this is today's exception, because there's something that's really been annoying me lately.
LastGraph Madness
LastGraph is still undergoing rewriting after the beta showed up some lovely bugs (including inverted labels and labels everywhere they shouldn't be). I'm working on it over the weekend, after my week was overtaken by the sheer mass of activity involved with university and Fresher's Week (I find it strangely ironic that it's actually more timeconsuming this year, when I'm <u>not</u> a fresher).
Nearly there!
Update: A beta version is now up at aegis.aeracode.org - it has BUGS, like bad label placement (and inverted labels on some Acrobat installs), as well as rendering VERY SLOWLY while I try new optimisations. Bear with me, please.
Fun with Linux and A2DP
My headphones broke last Tuesday, and so I naturally went to buy some more. However, my eye caught this post, and since I actually had some spare cash just begging to be used, I decided to go ahead and buy some Jabra BT620s headphones.
Brighton Barcamp Slides
The slides from my talk at Barcamp Brighton 2007 are at aeracode.org/files/lastgraph.pdf; for some reason slide 4's PDF weighed in at 9MB, so I apologise for the large download size (I am suspicious that Inkscape rendered the raster image in that slide to a pdf pixel-by-pixel).
Using Inkscape for presentations
As good as OpenOffice is getting these days, I have a personal issue with Impress (and, indeed, presentation software in general, such as the ever-popular Powerpoint).
BarCamp Brighton
In the vain hope of making this slightly more blog-like, you people get a dose of my daily life for a change.
Meticulously Multitasked Occasional Games
Over the years, many project ideas have sprung into (and out of) my head, but some persist for a worryingly long time. The latest contender in this category is the MMOG, or Massively Multiplayer Online Game.
LastAftermath
Well, it's been a few weeks since I released LastGraph upon the world, and around a week and a half since I posted it to the Stats group on last.fm in an attempt to get some users.
LastGraph version two is on the way…
Yes, upgrades are continuing, and somewhat sporadic thanks to exams and a visit back home, but going nonetheless. Colouring now actually works quite well, and more as it does in Lee Byron's original idea, and the backend system is getting upgrades to support custom colour schemes and proper distributed rendering where nodes can specialise in tasks (because PDF conversion is very specialised, for example).
LastGraph Upgrades
I'll be upgrading the LastGraph renderer today, which will involve some render node downtime (I'll attempt to keep the main site up, however).
Now showing: lastgraph
After a day's work, I have an experimental web interface for lastgraph (my last.fm graph creator; see the previous post) up at lastgraph.aeracode.org.
The Last Graph
<img id="image41" src="http://aeracode.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/05/lastgraph_3.png" alt="Ooooh, pretty." title="Ooooh, pretty." />
(Re)*design, Pyrex and C++
I've given aeracode another makeover, this time to an interesting shade of blue and white. Comments are, of course, welcome, although please bear in mind that this is more an attempt to have my sites have themes that are at least slightly different from each other.
Bluetooth and Computer Locking
Occasionally, I'll think of something so good I have to rush and implement it on the spot. Last week I had one of those moments; Martin had mentioned to me that he'd bought a Wireless PC Lock, which is a little thing you plug into the USB port, and which locks your computer when you walk away with its 'key' transmitter.
Change & Synchronicity
I'm terrible with focusing on one project, since I'll get bored after a few weeks of one, and so I need to change. Luckily, I'm overcoming this 'probem', but in the meantime, I have a good menagerie of projects to work on. I like to keep a few around since each is really a learning experience; ByteHoard is web programming, Aevolution is singleplayer games.
Welcome, nobody. Oh, and you.
This, as you should know by now, is a blog. I've refrained from writing one before; after all, who wants to read about my rather boring life? However, in my lack of interest for the greater good, I now present to you the unimagintavely titled "Aeracode: The Blog".