Cleaning the house made easier

I came across a rather tempting device today.
I have been thinking about getting a vax, for cleaning the carpets a little more thoroughly than just suction will, and instead found something that may clean them slightly less thoroughly but will do so without my total attention.

Roomba robotic vacuum cleaner


Sounds like fun.
I did find someones comment that it worked well but needed an extra bit of prgramming to tell it to run and hide when children were around.

Battle chess

I was talking to my in-laws today, it's my Father-in-law's birthday.
Not sure what sparked it off but I was reminded of battle chess.
A little internet searching and I found
http://www.download-game.com/Battle_Chess.htm

Not tried it yet but I am already feeling nostalgic about watching the pieces beat each other up.
Hmm - must curb those violent tendencies,

AV cables - 3 RCA to 4 pole 3.5mm

I have been tasked with trying to get a device working with a television.
The device is an IUBI blue which was bought second hand and did not come with manual or the right cables. The manual is no problem, I found a link from the forums on www.advancedmp3players.com that worked brilliantly.

The cables are another issue. I thought I had found one on ebay but it turned out not to work as I had hoped. The left speaker appeared to be fine, the right speaker sound was coming through the video connector and very, very fuzzy video with insufficient synch signal was coming through on all three. My guess was that the pinouts were slightly wrong and that the video signal was coming through on the shield of all 3 RCA connectors.

I then return to that popular research tool, the internet search engine and do some further digging. I find a few possibilities, including a note on the page for the cable I bought saying it would not work with the ipod. The device is not an ipod so had not considered this relevant at the time. I rethink this... I then find a page about the AV cable for a Zune (never heard of it? neither had I until this search) listing the compatibilites of several devices and the comparitive pinouts. The site is www.anythingbutipod.com, the link is to the "about" page which is an interesting read.

Anyway - it seems there are at least 4 different pinout combinations in use by different product manufacturers. I need to beep test my cable, see which one it ties in with and then see if one of the other variants will work. Alternatively I could try making a conversion gadget to remap the RCA connections. I think it will depend on how much time I end up spending on it.

Model railway info

I was recently asked if I knew anything about a model railway society in Bromley that was holding an exhibition in June, specifically the weekend of the 23rd-24th.

This is what I came up with

Culled from http://www.brmodelling.co.uk/diary/default.asp
23 June 2007 to 24 June 2007
Orpington and District MRS - Bromley Model Railway Show 2007
Crofton Junior School, Towncourt Lane, Petts Wood, Bromley, Kent., BR5 1EL
Saturday: 10.00 am - 5.00 pm
Sunday: 10.00 am - 5.00 pm
Prices: Adult £3.50, OAP £3.00, Child £1.50
Telephone: 0208 402 7093



From http://www.semg.org.uk/model/clubs.html

Orpington & District Model Railway Society	Opening Nights are Wednesdays and Fridays from 20:00 'til 23:00.	John Arkell (Chairman) john.arkell@meadowrd.demon.co.uk
Founded in 1951 the Club has layouts in the following scales/gauges: O, O16.5, EM, OO, HO, and N. One member has two foot gauge in his paddock with a Simplex (working) and a Barclay steam engine (being rebuilt). The Club usually has an open day there each year. There is a permanent Clubhouse, built ny the Club, with layout room and library / tea-room (most important). Southern Interest. The EM layout is Admiralty Exchange Sidings most recently exhibited at the Fairfield Halls autumn 2001. Many of the members actively model Southern or its constituents/sucessors and several of the Society members are active at the Bluebell and KESR. Usually holds an exhibition in late June or early July

USA scared of canadian money?

I came across this by accident. I have recently rebuilt my work laptop and was manually adding teh firefox extensions. On one of them the default RSS feeds includes the Register and I have not yet deleted it.



I could not resist the headline. he article does not disappoint.





US warns on spooky Canadian coins | The Register



Enjoy :)



Peter

powered by performancing firefox

Door to door routes in Canada.

Further update....

I have just been trying to reproduce the problem I had so I could provide as much information as possible. I was unable to reproduce the problem unless I left off the postcode.
Whoops!

I am pretty sure I used the postcode as I remember checking to see if it was case sensitive. The other possibility is that the address and postcode I originally put in was wrong. I used a different source for the addresses this time.
I shall be checking my data sources.

In the mean time - the multimap wbe page for "door to
door directions" in Canada seems to work very well. As far as I can tell from memory the journey times it comes up with are about right as well.

A useful site.

originial post and updates below

One of the many things that I subscribe to, and rarely get around to
reading, is an email newsletter from the Canadian tourist board called
Spirit of Canada
One interesting bit in this months is a link to multimap for "door to
door directions" in Canada. I have not tried it yet but at some point
I will try it with the address of my parents-in-law. They live on a
road that has a number rather than a name and I am not sure I recall
how the house is identified. Should be interesting to see how it copes
with destinations like that.

Update: I tried a route from my parents-in-law to my sister-in-law.

I got this error message
"We could not find any matching names or places for your start address"
Obviously it cannot quite cope with "any address in Canada" as it states on the original link.

Update: I have received an email from the people at multimap askign for details so they can work out why things don't work. Seeing as how this is not a mainstream blog (infrequent posts et cetera) it strikes me that they are very interested in customer service to be keeping an eye out for comments about their service. I shall have to dig out the addresses again and reply to their email.

Considerations for projectors

I have been aksed to look into data projectors for church.
Amongst my initial research I have found this astralian page with a useful run down on contrast ratio and what is more useful in situations with higher ambient light (such as we are likely to experience).

Still looking....

St Ives B&B et cetera]

http://www.tenoceanview.co.uk

Calculating subenets and IP ranges

I was asked recently if I had or knew of some stuff to make IP
subnetting relatively understandable.
I have done a quick trawl and a brief mental rejection process and
selected these links as starting points.

http://www.pkostov.com/ip_workshop2.html

Cisco exams
http://www.2000trainers.com/section.aspx?sectionID=5&tab=exams

The clue is in the URL
http://www.learntosubnet.com/

I found this one confusing
http://www.petri.co.il/subnetting_table.htm

I disagree with the comments about hexadecimal but otherwise this one looks helpful
http://www.punkwalrus.com/howto/subnetting.html

A graphical approach
http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-1035_11-6089187.html

An encouragement towards DIY table creation
http://www.faqshop.com/misc/default.htm?http://www.faqshop.com/misc/miscarts/sn%20made%20easy.htm

VLANs is another matter and may or may not be helpful.

Have fun

ShivasEye

Cryptography course notes

A link followed from slashdot with course notes on a cryptographt course form the U of Washington.
Lecture Slides and Video Archives
Lecture Slides and Video Archives

BBC NEWS | Technology | Fuel cells in laptops edge closer

BBC NEWS | Technology | Fuel cells in laptops edge closer

An interesting development. I have been keeping an eye out for things like this, not for the bleeding edge but for things that are usable and affordable by the less experimental person in the street.
10 hours of use off the prototype. Hmmm....think of the uses for that....LAN party in the park - all day!
What with GPRS and WiFi technology being so prevalent now added to this it looks like I am heading towards the idea I mooted in an IRC channel 7 or 8 years ago about being able to IRC for the long hours I did whilst enjoying the fresh air outside.

Afterthought: I really need to tidy up and rejig that website.

Skype offers free calling to phones in U.S., Canada

Okay - this is probably not news to most people by now. I got it via slashdot. It is something I use to communicate with family members on a transatlantic basis and this may be useful.
Now if only they would do skypeIn for free?

[print version] Skype offers free calling to phones in U.S., Canada | CNET News.com

A demonstration of adding an entry

Entries can be added by sending an email

Action for blind people

A friend of mine recently got a short term contract with these people. The following is from their home page.

- Home Page: "Action for Blind People is a national charity that provides practical support to blind and partially sighted people through work, housing, leisure and support.

Our vision is quite simple. We believe in a world where people who are blind or partially sighted are enabled to actively participate in society and have equal access to the choices and opportunities that so many take for granted.

Action for Blind People is more than just a name; it is what we do."

a sideways glance

Something my wife found. (deep breath) This is a blog by the pastor of the church that my wife's manager goes to. It is interesting reading. I also found it interesting to see that he enjoyed some of the same films and books as I do, to whit "Neuoromancer" by William Gibson on the book side with "Donny Darko" and "Fargo" in the cinematic category.

I also enjoyed that his synopsis of himself is so short and nicely structured. I cannot quite put my finger on why I like it but here it is...

a sideways glance: "I'm a passionate follower of Jesus. I'm a husband and a dad. I pastor a church in a London suburb. I'm the author of Why Bother with Church?"

What about time stamps?

I have been looking at the included feeds on my main blog, one of them includes a list from this one.
There seems to be a uniformity to the time stamps for the posts. I suspect this may be an issue with the php used to generate it.

On another issue - feeds from blogger appear to be load the results of the link in the iframe and elsewhere (although only one is currently present) it will use the whole page for the link. There is no obvious targetting that I can see - unless there is something hidden in the XML feed. It may be related to one being atom and the other being something else.

Something to be pondered.

AN interesting thought - hot chillis help with prostate cancer?

An article I came across this morning.

http://www.alertnet.org/

I was alerted to to by a slasdot article http://science.slashdot.org/

Experiments in blogging

An interesting idea is one in which you can send an email and have the contents added to the blog automagically.
This might be an idea for those "on the fly" annoucnement moments.

Something to start with

I have been experimenting with blogs and helping someone "debug" theirs.
One of the problems I had with the debug procedure was unfamiliarity with the blogger way of doing things.
Hopefully this will give me a chance to work out any subtleties and enable me to assist people better.