Information Takes Over

Interesting news from LibraryThing:

LibraryThing: A million free covers from LibraryThing
A few days ago, just before hitting thirty million books, we hit one million user-uploaded covers. So, we’ve decided to give them away—to libraries, to bookstores, to everyone.

Excellent stuff. We’ll have to see if we can get a key

We had a recent office discussion on the best ways to recycle old no longer required CDs, which raised from “employ a company to come and take them away”, to “stick them back to back and use them as coasters” (my preferred and often used method!).

Well, how about this. A Tesla CD Turbine, using… well… CDs.

After doing a puppet show on Saturday, I felt it was time to give my traffic lights a bit of a revamp.  The original traffic light pole was a paper tube round a wooden batten.  however this was looking rather tatty.  Also the original configuration did not have a base, so had to be clamped to the bottom of the theatre, not ideal, as it meant having a couple of beefy clamps on hand.

So, the new version uses a piece of white pvc tube for the upright, it also has a nifty box (converted from a wine caddy that came free with my wife’s last car purchase) which not only has fold out legs for stability, but can house the power brick (a 12 volt transformer) and the rather swish looking controller.

The controller has buttons big enough to operate with your feet - obviously while doing a show, it’d be rather tricky when both hands are occupied. It also has a secondary power input depending on where the power is relative to the traffic light.

It’s been a little quiet on the blogging front for a while. Stuff happening out there in the real word. Though a lot of that stuff is geeking. Hmmm. Real world? anyway what’s been happening?

1. Decided that after about 7 years, it was time for a new desktop. the old one wasn’t bad, 1 gig processor, which for it’s time was reasonable, but the thing holding me back was the motherboard only supporting a maximum of 512MB !! Back then this was a fair old whack. Now?

   so, rollout the new Quad core 2.5ghz with 4gig of Ram, and a switch to sata drives. The motherboard supports raid, so I had thought I might have a play with that… but at the mo I am sticking with feeling like I have muchos space (over half a terabyte!! in fact there is over 1TB of storage available in the house at the moment. who’d a thought it in 2001?)

2. So naturally most of the geeking centres around the new toy in it’s shiny black case, especially as I built it from scratch.
3. Installed Ubuntu
4. Played with compiz
5. got the network printer up and running (cups makes it so easy)
6. Set up Samba to allow file sharing on my old PC, and to provide some backup capabilities. (lost a bit of data over the summer due to an admittedly careless windows reinstall )
7. In terms of Colourphon development, this has mostly centred around a refactoring exersize. I have been working out the best model to use to integrate the store into the colouphon workflow - and indeed that lead to thinking about the workflow generally. Not much code written as yet…

Things to do in next few months?

1. Get around to getting a proper PCI-E graphics card to replace the extra PCI card borrowed from the old PC.
2. Concentrate on the data model for Colourphon and submitting stuff to the store.
3. Not to forget the real world either… there’s camping trips to plan too.

I was thinking of writing a follow-up to my last openID post, but now I don’t need to, as Sam Ruby has already done a far better job! he presents a simple-to-follow set of steps that you can use to set up your openID in whatever way you need. He also pointed me to a way of testing the openID server.