Chess Boards, Exponential Growth and the Ice Bucket Challenge
Yesterday I was finally nominated for the Ice Bucket Challenge, I had actually thought this inevitable for the reasons in this post, but then it all kind of passed by. As it happens, it was my Daughter Aimee's fault in the end. :-). So I thought I would use the opportunity to bore people about […]
Python script to randomise an m3u playlist
While I'm blogging scripts for playlist manipulation here is one I use in a nightly cron job to shuffle our playlists so that various devices playing from them have some daily variety. All disclaimers apply, it's rough and ready but WorksForMe (TM). I have an entry in my crontab like this 0 4 * * […]
Python script to add a file to a playlist
I have a number of playlists on Gondolin, which is a headless machine. I wanted to be able to easily add a given mp3 file to the playlists which are in m3u format. That means that each entry has both the filename and an extended line with some basic metadata, in particular the track length […]
Extending a wired doorbell with a wireless one
I moved into a new house in January 2013. Well, new to me, building seems to have started on these houses around 1888. There was, and still is, plenty of remedial work to do in the house, but by the end of 2013 I had renovated the main reception room that we "live" in. This […]
A review and response to "The First Jedi"
A few months ago, Allen Baird wrote to me courteously to tell me he had written a book about some experiences running a Jedi Course at Queen's University, that I was tangentially involved in. I discovered the book was available about a week ago, and obtained the Kindle copy and read it over a few […]
Aikido in Dead Straight Lines
There's been an elephant in the room on my blog for quite a while now, and it has prevented me completing a number of articles that I have had in draft for some time. A bit over a year ago, my friend and mentor, Alan Ruddock died. I've been trying to articulate what that meant […]
Migration from Savane to Redmine
I am admin for a server at work foss.ulster.ac.uk to host our open source development work. It used to run on GNU Savane, but despite several efforts, that project is clearly dead in the ditch. So having to change the underlying system, I decided to move to Redmine (you can see some previous discussion here). […]
Cinnamon; adding needed spice to Gnome 3
Ok, so I used Gnome Shell before it was officially released. I stopped using it because I thought it was intriguing, but awkward to use in its beta stages. Then Gnome 3 was released and gnome-shell was no longer an interesting option, it was the compulsory way to use the operating system; and I wrote […]
Life after the tomb: minidlna
Last Sunday morning I tried to access my mediatomb UPnP music server using the radio in my kitchen to be told it was offline. After messing around at the radio end a bit, I went to check on the actual machine, and found that mediatomb was not running. Attempting to restart it looked OK, but […]
Bacon and Egg cupcakes
This Sunday it's the birthday of both Bruce Wayne and my better half, Tamsin. I figure Bruce will have a birthday breakfast sorted, so I thought I might look at having a special breakfast for Tam. So it's French toast on order, and pancakes for Aimee etc.. Recently I had tripped over this image of […]