jpdw.org

After several years of not seeing much in the way of new films except on Terestrial TV or on the back on airline seats, I am suddenly catching up on the missed years with a combination of a love film subscription and 6 months promotional Sky Movies.

With viewing options of the TV ( Sky broadcast, LoveFilm DVD & LoveFilm streaming ), iPad ( LoveFilm streaming, SkyGo ) and PC ( SkyGo ) there are Soooo many ways to watch! But not enough time!!!

This page is a collection of links to useful looking libraries for Nanodes (probably Aruino also)

https://github.com/njh/NanodeMQTT/zipball/0.1.0 (Nicholas Humfrey)
https://github.com/sde1000/NanodeUNIO - Driver for Microchip UNI/O devices on Nanode (eg. the MAC address chip) (Stephen Early)
https://github.com/sde1000/NanodeUIP - Port of uIP library to Nanode (Stephen Early)

I've barely added anything here for so so long.

Too much time work, following the extension progress, spending time with the family & trying to figure out a new micro-venture.

Really should find some more time here....

A few weeks on from getting the HP Microserver and it's working out even better than expected!

I mean, with the current long-lasting cashback this has a net cost of around £140. For that price you can get a reasonable (Netgear) NAS. For a little less, you get no actual drives in it. For a little more, you get 1Tb. Bang in the middle is the HP with 250Gb and 3 spare bays for more drives. Official bays. And more space for more drives....!

After running several different MiniITX servers over the last 7-8 years I've now upgraded to a new HP microserver. Attracted in part by the awesome price (£139 inc VAT after a £100 cashback from HP) this little server should finally allow us to run a number of different things from a single machine. And at a relatively low power consumption and cost.

For the last couple of years, the home server has been running Windows (for Cortex) with a virtual FreeBSD running DHCP/DNS etc (FreeBSD chosen mainly because it seemed to run better on this server than Ubuntu or Fedora).

We got planning permission !

Granted with Conditions - but the conditions are things we'd expected anyway. So effectively -- we got what we wanted !!!

Upgrading this site to the latest 6.x release of Drupal seemed to go fine, but I started to get emails warning of cron failures. The specific error being recorded was

Fatal error: Call to undefined function json_decode() in myhostingpath/sites/all/modules/twitter/twitter.lib.php on line 258

Now, although I'd forgotten I'd even got a twitter account or that I'd got a twitter module installed, I assumed that disabling the module in mentioned would just have thrown a similar error for another module. So best to fix the problem.

So in the interests of helping anyone else who's (googled for and) got this problem here's how I've fixed it:

Just processing the last of this year's tomato crop. In total this year, we've had 21.4kg of tomatoes - thats only counting the usable ones, so the 3.4kg of ones that started to rot on the plants during late September might have lifted the figure further if they'd ripened. But still that beats our previous record, from 2008, of just over 20kg ! The figure does include just over a kilo of toms from the allotment so the garden yield is only just over that of 2008.

One thing that is certain about continuity (and normally proved right) : Things change and move on. They evolve. Continuity ceases or breaks eventually. Sometimes this brings change that is better, sometimes it's just different (=code for "maybe worse but we don't want to put it that way").

Its been a while but for a strange set of reasons I'm off travelling this week.  Some random and useless statistics have occurred to me:

• This will be the first time I've been on a plane for almost a year (a while back, 11 days was a long time)
• This will be the furthest I've been away since the girls were born in June 2008 (yes, further away than I was when they were born
• ... and the longest trip too (4 days / 5 nights)

Sat here doing some work (and drinking a coffee) at one of my regular en-route stops and there's a fella just sat down at the next table with an iPad.  As he sat down, he nearly toppled his coffee over the thing.  I, jealous of course because I'm still using a device with an old-hat actual keyboard, was forced to suppress an amused smile :-)

A while back I stumbled upon Flock.  I looked at it and moved along (as you do).  Now for some reason I thought I'd actually try it and see what I thought of it.  I'm not really decided yet.  Is it a separate app or just some clever add-ins for Firefox?! Blogged with the Flock Browser

Two years ago we (with help of many friends) replaced the deck at the back of house. The old one was beginning to rot and even the patches of hardboard or ply over the more rotten bits were starting to break up. So over the weekend a new deck was built (see here http://www.jpdw.org/node/34). The design left a narrow unused strip down one side of the new deck.

Such a long time since I posted *anything* on here. It's currently nearing the end of day 10 of last week. Okay, a bit of weekend working is sort-of expected occasionally and not a real problem, but 20 hours on Saturday & Sunday (forgetting a late night on Friday) is on the excessive side. Just to make it work, a lot of that time was spent sitting in a dusty-building-dust-ridden basement or the more comfortable (but still lacking daylight) corridor of the hotel above the basement.