WTF?! There’s a mouse in the office. It just ran out one of our classrooms and is now hiding behind the filing cabinets.

Let’s hope it has the sense to keep away from the kids or there’ll be pandemonium.

What the hell! There I was, writing some prattle on the Internet when I heard a strange crunching sound from by my foot. At first I ignored it, then decided to investigate. A few shiny trails on the carpet caught my attention and then I had a major moment of disbelief.

Stuck to the top of the yoghurt carton is a slug. One of those brown ones that live in the garden and eat all your plants. Only it’s not in the garden eating plants, it’s in my house eating a yoghurt carton. It even made weird little chewing noises.

After staring at it in disbelief, having a little rant about it on the Internet I did what any self-respecting person does… whipped out my digital camera and took a picture. The slug is now outside again, I hope it finds plants nicer than plastic.

The weird thing is I can’t see where it came in. The slug trail stops at my settee, it doesn’t go underneath. Now if used car salesmen read this blog, maybe my landlord does too; in which case I also have a loose slate on the roof that needs repairing.

Here it is. A blue Fiat Panda 2005 edition. Like I mentioned in the previous post, I got it from my parents after my mum crashed it.

It’s been repaired since, and is now almost as shiny as when it came out the factory. I had a good look around it, and apart from some very new looking bits inside the engine bay you’d never know it’d been this badly mangled. If your car ever looks this bad, you’re looking at £2000 worth of repair btw.

It’s quite a difference to my old car. Power steering is possibly one of the best things invented. The ability to park with ease can’t be underestimated. The car has an even more powered “city” mode that means I can turn the wheel with a fingertip for even tighter parking spots. I had the radio out yesterday to try and fit my old one since it has an AUX input for my N800. Unfortunately the Fiat radio is non-standard, and contains a non-standard cage. The facia is a giant square thing so while I could connect my old radio up electronically and have it work, there would be no way to secure it into the car. It’s frustrating being defeated by a few bits of metal and plastic. Looks like I’m back on the RF transmitter again and the associated wiring mess.

I had a slightly surreal and amusing time at Carcraft though. We were all sat around a table after looking at my car and going “that’s an interesting noise it makes”, when they produced a piece of paper and gave it to me. Thinking it was some valuation I gave it a glance.

… then looked again slightly confused …

It wasn’t a valuation, it was a printout of my Livejournal entry for the other day. Somehow, presumably through my email address or a lucky Google search, they’d managed to find my LJ and printed it out for a good laugh. It did explain the odd comments they made while looking at my car

They made selling my car nice and easy. They looked at it, then I  just had to show various bits of paperwork to prove it was mine, and that I was who I claimed to be. That was all I had to do. They even allow dogs in the showroom which prevented Amy and Twinkle from having to wait outside in the cold and strong winds.

So, to the Carcraft / webuyanycar.com (go on, admit it, your name is a little daft) people - hello!

Spending the weekend at Amy’s. As usual I have my Macbook with me, and once again it’s being really rather useful. This time it isn’t remotely connecting me to a VPN, or anything special like that; this time it’s doing some video editing with iMovie.

Amy’s digital camera records video, but only in 1 minute segments. She’s recorded some video from a live music session in a local pub and wanted a way to stitch them back together to put onto YouTube. My first reaction was to use Windows Movie Maker since it comes free with XP and is fairly easy to use. However, after half an hour of faff we came to the conclusion it didn’t like her computer or camera’s video.

First we had to find the software which, unusually, wasn’t available by default on the machine. Then once it was installed, it happily complained that .mov files aren’t valid Windows Movie Maker files. Yeah nice one Microsoft!

iMovie, on the other hand allowed us to glue the videos together, add cheesy titles and render back to a video suitable for sending to YouTube.

My Mac seems to be developing a fault, or is just being strange. If I show a fairly complex image on the screen and twist the lid hinge (as though adjusting the screen so I can see it better) the display corrupts. It’s not major screen corruption, but the odd random pixel will display the ‘wrong’ colour. It’s as if the screen draws all pixels of one colour the inverse of what they should be. I have a feeling it’s a heat issue.

Here you go…

We Share Our Mother’s Health - The Knife

OK, for some reason I can’t embed videos in here without the page layout going totally bananas.

No, really! Earlier there was some small creature wandering about on my screen. I tried to wipe it away just now and realised it’s somehow got between the plastic on the front of my screen and the LCD behind it!

Here, see the YouTube video I made…

Weird, isn’t it. I hope it crawls off and dies somewhere out the way and not right in the middle of my screen.

When not writing eye-melting games for popular home consoles those crazy Llamasoft people like to try and out-geek the rest of us. To quote from the forum:

.. and finally, after LOT of work and a lot of week ends spent ..

The Llamasoft weather station is up.

As you may remember or not more than 1 year ago we got “caught” in
all this thing about weather satellite images, it all started because our
instructor at the Ham Club told us “once I managed to pick up a satellite
with my hand held scanner close to the window”.

Whereas most people are content to watch the weather reports on radio or TV, Giles and Jeff took it upon themselves to grab the images directly from the satellites orbiting the earth. And no, they didn’t just stick a mast on their roof, this setup is much more interesting, involving bringing ethernet to a tree and installing a webserver in a field. Maybe it’s some sort of rural broadband initiative to bring the Internet to farmyard animals, who knows.

Follow this link to read about how it was done, and then click here to see the images that they’ve pulled down. Beats the usual things involving webservers and kitchen appliances, anyway

Memes are funny things. One minute you’re a sensible, thinking being writing a post on the Internet, next minute you’re on teh interwebs spouting all sorts of nonsensical junk. It’s really weird, nobody sits down and says “OK, this is a new meme, you can reply to anything with all your base… and if you feel like it, the form I iz in ur <noun> <verb>ing ur <other noun>“. We just sort of vacuum them up from each other. Wouldn’t it be great if actual, real information was transmitted in the same way?
Seems even the real world of printed text isn’t immune, as this story from the Houston Chronical of all places shows.  It’s amusing watching someone attempt to report on Internet culture, unless you visit several hundred message boards a day it just doesn’t make sense It’s like trying to explain a Monty Python film to someone who’s never heard of them - it just doesn’t work.

I’m off to pay a deposit on my new house now. Or is that I is in ur shopz payin’ my depositz, can I has keys pleez? Damn you Internet

Look at what the Stupids have come up with as a logo for the 2012 Olympics…

Here’s a link to the BBC story about it. You can comment on it too

Please click the link below, mostly out of curiosity to see if it makes any difference, but also because that logo is so bad; kids in my classes have made better things!

Online petition - Change The London 2012 Logo

Today I came across a rather frustrating problem with Processing. I had the idea to start writing a little platform game to test some ideas out that I have. After Googling around for a bit I couldn’t find any sprite libraries, so decided I’d probably have to write my own.

Wanting to get something working with minimal fuss I knocked up a simple class that tracked the location of a circle on the screen. There was a “move” function and a “draw” function. A bit of test code was created and I told the circle to follow my mouse pointer. This is where the frustration began. When I moved the mouse there was a noticeable lag and jerky movement as the circle moved around. Thinking it was probably my code I removed it all and had a simple piece of code that drew a circle where the mouse was - that’s all it did. One line.

And the jerkyness persisted. Now, I had arbitrarily decided that a screen of 800×480 would be good and it seems this is the problem. If I make the screen 200×200 things work well, but that’s a completely useless screen size for anything. Also, it seems the Processing IDE randomly decides it doesn’t want to run my code, but wants to show a 200×200 grey application instead.

No idea what’s going on, I find it hard to believe Java is so bad that it can’t draw a circle on the screen at my current mouse position. Something else has to be getting in the way. I might boot Windows tomorrow and have a play in the Windows version. I want to make this work, it’ll be much better releasing little test pieces of code that run in a browser, rather than hoping people can be bothered to compile my source up. It spits out ready made applets and webpages that just need uploading to a webserver.

It’s going to work, it has no choice. Maybe the circle drawing routine isn’t very quick, and maybe I should try with a real image.