bikes and things » Geek

What the fuck QR codes!

Andy — Sun, 04 Mar 2012 23:09:19 +0000

Looks like I’m not the only one that thinks QR codes are complete and utter shite. It also seems that some people have no idea how they work and are going the way of buzz words like ‘cloud’ which automatically make your product cool and down with the kids.

http://wtfqrcodes.com/

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How much does a gnome weigh?

Andy — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 23:04:35 +0000

Well it turns out that if you’re a German manufacturer of hyper accurate scales that the same gnome weighs differently depending on which part of the world you’re in! How to demonstrate this? Pack it up in a protective case with scales calibrated for their HQ in Germany and send it round the world. Get different scientists to weigh it and pass it on. Hint – it’s due to the earth not being perfectly round.

These scales are so sensitive that the object (or gnome in this case) has to be handled with rubber gloves to avoid adding grease or contaminants that would spoil the reading which is kind of bonkers really.

I’m sure it’s no accident that it’s reminiscent of the gnome that gets packed around the world in Amelie. Polaroid pictures are then taken with the gnome in far off destinations (thanks to a friendly air hostess) and posted back to cheer up the miserable, yet confused, next door neighbour.

And the best thing about all of this? I heard all about this idea from a friend at the weekend who dreamt up this whole thing!

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New look for 2012

Andy — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 00:10:41 +0000

After Emma forwarded me a link to some free WordPress themes I’ve decided to give this place a bit of a facelift for 2012. I’ve had this domain since 2004 and I started out with a PHPwebsite install which was fairly basic, I then moved to WordPress in 2007 with the blue looking theme which was here until a few days ago. I can’t for the life of me find a screenshot to illustrate what the old one looked like which is annoying. For now I’m settling with this new theme which also supports a number of the new functions that WordPress have developed since 2007. A few bit were wonky earlier with the layout but fortunately I was able to call on some help at lunch today.

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New Mac & Backup strategy

Andy — Fri, 30 Dec 2011 21:23:26 +0000

As a warning this is a potentially boring nerdy post – but someone will find it interesting I’m sure, so I’m writing it. I decided to write this down after getting an enormous amount of @ replies on Twitter the other day when asking about backup options. Not many pretty pics I’m afraid.

Just before Christmas Emma’s old MacBook Pro died. Not entirely unexpected as it was one of the original 2005 ones where they first made the transition to Intel from PowerPC. The logic board has gone I think and not really worth replacing due to the age of the Machine. I’ve been after a new Mac for a while now so ordered the best machine I could afford so that I could retire my MacBook Pro 13″ and give it to Emma as her machine. Fortunately the HD was all fine and I grabbed it out and made multiple copies of it before using migration assistant to merge it onto her new machine. That Universal Drive Adaptor I bought is a useful bit of kit to have around for times like this.

Whilst I’d love a Mac Pro I simply couldn’t afford one at upwards of £2k for the base model. Even if I had the money I’m not sure I’d bother as they haven’t been updated in over a year so fairly old tech in there at a very high premium. So instead I went for a MacMini with the Dual 2.7ghz Core i7 processors (4 cores effectively) as well as the 256GB SSD boot drive and a 7200rpm 750GB drive in the other internal bay. I also got a rather expensive RAM upgrade from OWC in the US which fills it with 16GB RAM for a little more future proofing. The SSD is worth the money alone and is incredibly fast to boot and load programs.

Each time I’ve got a new machine I’ve moved my old user profile over and apps from the last one. I think I’ve done this about 3 or 4 times now which obviously brings all sorts of crap each time in the ~/Library folder from old programs I no longer use. So it’s given me a chance to start a fresh and re-organise all my content and also re-consider my back up strategy. I’ve been installing programs and widgets I need as I remember them and I’ve been surprised at how many add-ons there are that I use to customise the Mac experience – this’ll be the subject of another blog post I think. Having the App Store has actually helped this as I can just go and install from there without worrying about serials etc. Other’s have been re-downloaded and then the individual preferences folders moved over as needed. Also having two drives in the machine helps as it also free up some of my other external disks for other duties.

I’ve gone for the SSD as the main boot volume with my user profile and the 750GB internal drive is used as a large file store. Unfortunately my Lightroom file store is too big to store on the SSD. The actual library files do sit on the SSD though which has sped things up a treat. Having the large disk internally on a SATA connection has also sped things up. Before I had all of my images on an external Firewire 800 disk which was far slower. So having moved all of this onto the built in disks I had two external drives to use both G-Tech but one of 1TB and another of the 2TB variety. This is where I re-worked my backup strategy. The 2TB drive is now a Time Machine drive which has plenty of room to back up and keep plenty of incremental copies of the internal drives. The other 1TB drive has now been partitioned into two drives one of 250GB and one of 750GB (you get where this is going right?). So each of these drives then clones the main drives in the machine overnight via SuperDuper (only what’s changed) which means I could take this drive, boot from it on another Mac and start working exactly as I was when the machine stopped working. Having the Time Machine drive also means I can keep an incremental store if I stupidly delete something which is very useful. I used to rely on just this and it saved me a few times.

In addition to the on site backup I started using Jungle Disk to backup all my data to Amazon S3 last year but this was starting to cost a lot – for around 300GB it was about $30 a month. The guide I followed to set it up is available to buy from x-equals.com. The file sharing was also very unreliable (I’ve replaced this with DropBox). For the actual backup I’ve decided to switch to BackBlaze and I’m now in the process of re-uploading all my content – so far about 270GB done. What swung it for me was the low cost of only $5 a month. For a real geek fest then check out their blog post showing how they offer so much storage for such a low price – an interesting read if you’re in any way techy.

So overall I think that’s pretty safe for my photos and documents for now – this only covers the process when I’m back at home and there’s another process for making multiple backups whilst shooting. I guess that if I wanted to be double sure I would have another offsite drive copy of the boot and store which I could take to the office each week. I think that’s over the top for now though but I’ll consider it in the future.

So, that’s how I do it but here’s a few blog posts from others on how they do it.

Mirrored? Single? Manouvre – Leon Neal

Bulletproof backups – Shawn Blanc

My Backing Up Workflow aka ‘My Battle with Paranoia’ – Gyn Dewis

Anything I’ve missed?

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Goodbye Harrier

Andy — Sat, 11 Dec 2010 17:32:00 +0000

I went to a family dinner with my Mum last night and met some distant second cousins twice removed or something (we couldn’t actually work out the relationship fully). Anyway one of them was a Harrier pilot in the RAF. Amazing talking to him about the aircraft and also the three tours of Afghanistan he’s completed with the aircraft. Seems like it’s completely nuts to be getting rid of them.

I remember going to airshows as a kid seeing them and was always super impressed with them, that and the tornado. I also remember reading all about them in my Grandad’s RAF books as well as seeing all the previous prototypes before they nailed it with the Harrier. A really truly special piece of engineering indeed.

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Over to the dark side

Andy — Wed, 03 Nov 2010 22:31:14 +0000

I’ve finally succumbed to the dark side. The fact that Microstation isn’t available for the Mac is a real bummer. SO I now have it, via Windows 7 on OS X. Also got Outlook and the office database, which unfortunately relies heavily on internet explorer. Should make things a bit easier.

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Adobe Photoshop CS5

Andy — Wed, 24 Mar 2010 17:59:34 +0000

This is mindblowingly incredible! The good stuff starts at 2mins 50 secs.

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CSS hell

Andy — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 09:55:48 +0000

I usually think I’m fairly clued up when it comes to web/IT stuff but sorting out the look of my portfolio site really wasn’t as easy as I thought. However after a lot of googling and a fair few trips to the support forums it’s finally how I want it! Unfortunately I started editing it at around 10pm… at 3am I went to bed. I just couldn’t let it rest!

Edit: Updated the image to on the top left and done a bit more house keeping.

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Open Mac surgery.

Andy — Sat, 06 Mar 2010 21:54:58 +0000

Had to replace the hard drive in Emma’s laptop today. A rather involved process to be honest and kind of unsettling seeing all of the guts lying on the coffee table. Anyway, it seems to work when I screwed it all back together. Need to get a RAM upgrade to install 10.6 though which is annoying.

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Mapumental

Andy — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 14:01:05 +0000

Recently the UK Government has opened up a number of the datasets they hold which is great. These are free to use and available at data.gov.uk/. I love this kind of stuff and looking forward to seeing them used in a variety of ways.

Here’s a great example

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