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

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.

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 can now use my own domain to authenticate myself, without having to rely on third parties to keep my password safe. Just need to find somewhere to login to…

I am sure it is not, as some people seem to think, a source of free books to view online.

However, it is rather a nice example of what you can do if you take a bit of a risk and open up your content.

Now imagine the lookybook interface as the interface to your junior library catalogue!

“I borrowed a book three months ago.  I can’t remember who wrote it or what it was called, but it was blue.”

So we got to thinking about how you could construct a search in a modern online catalogue to help with this query.  And that is how www.colourphon.co.uk was born.

We are building what will become a service, to take an image and return the most frequent colours in both a human readable and machine readable form.  If you have a look at the example links below, you will see results of our weighted ’scan’.  This analysis attempts to add weight to colours that it finds most frequently toward the centre of the image.

Need an example?  These examples will take a moment or two to calculate…

Try this one: Test number one. An ISBN lookup.
This one: Test number two. A Weigted URL
Or this one: Test number three. Another URL

Thought provoking? We’d welcome your comments over on the colourphon blog.