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We got the LED lighting installed a couple of weeks ago, and they've been happily glowing away since then!


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Nika showed me this cartoon on Youtube yesterday... it's bloody hilarious! Reminds me a bit of Pixel & Pele combined...

Click to view

I upgraded my Livejournal account to a 'paid' one today. The main reason was to get rid of the bloody advertising, though I was also planning on customizing the templates to make it look more like the rest of my site (which I'll be moving from Zimki real soon now) and add things like fancy photo arrays from flickr, maps and the like. ( Read more... )

Following on from my last post...

I've been having a hell of a time over the past few weeks trying to figure out how to build a low-voltage, low-power lighting system.

My constraints have been:

1. It's gotta consume as little power as possible
2. It has to be easy to use
3. It has to look good

That still leaves a lot of scope, so I decided to build under- ( Read more... )

I'm happy to say we've been able to run a 20W halogen lamp and charge mobile phones & other batteries off the renewable energy system I set up a few months ago. While it's nice to be able to use the system, I've also learned a few lessons about the practicality of our current setup, and have ran into a few limitations:

1. The battery bank can only ( Read more... )

A few weeks ago, I met up with some old work colleagues and got into talking about some of the changes I was trying to put into place a few years ago when I first joined. A lot of them were quite basic things like writing unit tests, running nightly smokes, object-oriented programming, modular development, some basic design patterns, refactoring, ( Read more... )

(for some reason, I forgot to post this when I landed a month ago... oops!)Well, OSCon is all wrapped up and I'm on a plane to Ottawa. Unfortunately for us (and fortunately for him? ;-) this was Nat Torkington's last time organizing an O'Reilly conference - he's done a great job! It was great to meet so many interesting & intelligent people... it ( Read more... )

Well, my luggage arrived last evening, all in one soggy piece. It smelled, well... great, as you can imagine! I'm still a bit puzzled how my belt ended up smelling like fish.

Could've been worse - I'm glad the plane didn't end up like this bus:

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I arrived in Portland yesterday for OSCon next week - I had originally arranged to travel early to help set up our booth, but as that's not happening now I've got the weekend to spend getting to know the place ( Read more... )