eggfriedrice.com

When I talk about an iron I usually mean a pointy thing made by Weller that looks a bit like this

Today however I’m talking about a Russell Hobbs SteamGlide. SteamGlide?? Crap name. A bit girly. “The Flatenator”. Now that would be a good iron.

Why is it that there’s some compulsion to make sure a shirt is ironed down to 10 microns at it’s thickest point? Why, given that compulsion, is it impossible to achieve super flatness with today’s shirts? I can only hope the shirt of the future is made of some magic electro-flat material. I envisage it having two buttons close together that are metallic and at just the right separation to attach a nine volt battery for auto-flattening. Mind you, I’ve seen Futurama and shirts still don’t look that flat. Some twit probably will probably attach his shirt to 240 volts whilst wearing it to make it flatten quicker and then they’d get banned on safety grounds.

I just have to hope I don’t end up with a job at HSBC or something.

Why was I ironing a shirt? At the risk of sounding like a cocky bastard… For one day a year I wear a shirt to an Awards ceremony (specifically the 2006 Advertising Awards (or Advertising Awards 2006, they can’t decide)) in a posh London hotel. It’s all quite swanky really, except that I’m there to help put up the exhibition the night before and I only get to go to the show the next day because my Mum runs the outfit behind it… Still, that aside, it sounds cool! And it involves about 24 hours of free food and drink, including breakfast that’s delivered on a trolley that turns into a table (genius!).

So I easyjetted down yesterday and in an hour or so I’ll be in a taxi to London (I’m doing a bit of time killing here). Tomorrow I should be watching a big name comedian present awards and eating food with “a la” in it’s name.
Just call me Mr Flash for the next 24 hours. After that I’m back to being a scruffy student. See you later!

(Thank Sarah for the title, apparently Linguists are allowed to remake well known phrases)

Yesterday I started assembling my mythical MythTV box.

MythTV? That’s a cool bit of software which takes a Linux install and does the job of a Tivo/Sky+ but better. It can do all the usual stuff like timer recording programmes (or whole series) to hard disk, playing DVDs and other nice things, like running the MAME emulator to play old console games.

Mythical? Because I’ve been talking about building it for about three years and haven’t got around to it. Yesterday I thought “screw it, just put bits together” (or words to that effect). So I now have a motherboard with processor and RAM which locks solid about a minute after booting. I’m working on the theory that I need more thermal compound under the heatsink.

But at least it’s a start. And the remaining bits that I need (tuner card, graphics card with a TV-out, wifi card) have been bought from eBay so hopefully I’ll have all the hardware together soon.

I like that it’s getting easier to choose hardware for Linux now, but it’s still not easy.  I’ve bought cheap stuff because I’m not sure if it’ll all work or if I’ll have some doorstops.  It’s really nice to Google a chipset and find “this has been supported since kernel 2.6.8″ but there’s also a lot of vagueness.  It’s this very vagueness that’s been putting me off completing the set and buying the things I need to make this work.  Trying to figure out if a DVB tuner card will work is tricky to say the least.  I’m resolving to blog the stuff I have and the process I go through so maybe it’ll help someone else.  If it all works…

At this point I’d like to thank the kind donor of a temporary case to build this in.  I say donor, I mean Greek person who left it by the bins on West Newington Place.  I say Greek because there was also a keyboard which seems to be in Greek.  Anyway, thanks!

I’ll let you know how it goes.  In other news, I still don’t like Higher Maths.  Compound Angle Formulae??  You’re kidding, right?

Welcome to the first in an occasional series of my reviews of a program, tool, widget, fish or whatever I think is cool.

First up SoundConverter. This little Gnome app converts audio files from one format to another. I’ve been using it to transcode my ripped Flac files to MP3s for my new Archos ipodtypething (it can’t handle Ogg). It’s neat and easy to use and it’s available in the package repositories for Ubuntu and Debian. It seems to be able to handle pretty much any common audio format, it uses Gnome’s Gstreamer so it can take Flac, WAV, Ogg, MP3, AAC etc as input and can write out WAV, FLAC, MP3, and Ogg files.

Some caveats I discovered trying to get it to work:

• You need to install an additional (non-default) package under Ubuntu and Debian for Lame encoding (to produce MP3s). Under Ubuntu you need the excellently named “gstreamer0.10-plugins-ugly” package and under Debian the “gstreamer0.10-lame” package sorts it (there are probably similar packages for other distros)
• SoundConverter silently fails when the output path contains a space. I’m trying to file a bug report about that but the Berlios site seems to be down at the moment

Other than the path bug SoundConverter seems to work perfectly, it converted 1242 Flacs (29.5GB) to 256 variable bit rate MP3s (6.9GB) in about seven and a half hours.

Not something I’ll use every day but very good at it’s job when it is needed.

Apparently having just one entry does not constitute blogging. Further more I’m expected to blog regularly at intervals of 24-72 hours. This is very hard going!

So, here’s some things I learned today:

• Integration (Anti-differentiation) is really boring and fiddly.
• I need to figure out how to use indices (yes, these two are related).
• Hills are not fun to walk up in high winds.
• The hard disk I brought back from England that contains the all the music I ripped seems to make clicky noises (it probably got “easyJetted”). Being a hardcore geek I know that clicky noises == bad.
• Brainiac is the best programme ever, and is a practical use for Big Brother losers.

That’s about it really, not a very learned day all together, here’s hoping for tomorrow!

The first of January always seems like a nice round numbered day to start things, diets, exercise plans, organising socks, that sort of thing.

So it’s time to start a blog. This can go one of two ways, either I’ll become a blog geek installing all the extensions to WordPress, spending hours fiddling with layouts or, more likely, turn into the subject of this User Friendly.

Of course it’s important to know what you’re doing when starting something new and luckily I’m greatly experienced with blogs. I’ve been regularly reading some for at least a month and I’m had a Google Reader account for about two weeks (I finally sold my soul to the evil machine and I still feel dirty).

I’m really having to start a blog to keep up with the Jones’s because Sarah’s had one for ages in one form or another. She’s currently faffing with Photoshop and pondering the colour of her button bar. One day this could be me…

So who am I and what might I waffle about here? I’m Al, I’m 23, I’ve lived in Edinburgh since August 2006, I like shiny things, lighty up things, PICs and LEDs, Linux and open source, making stuff, junk, food, music and other stuff.

Man, blog posts take a surprising amount of time to write. This one has sort of run it’s course, see you later Internet!