Category: Gibbering

State of the maple leaf

Posted on by alex

I think my tastebuds are maturing or something. Many things I once loved now no longer appeal to me. Like Quiznos Black Angus subs, Creamsicle Extremes, in fact I find I can’t abide by HFCS flavoured Coke.

All things being equal, this is probably for the best. But I find it curious. I used to love that stuff, now it tastes sickly.

In other news, I now have a Canadian Bank Account, Social Insurance Number and cellphone number. All we need now are jobs and somewhere to live :D We have this hostel room until July 3, and more than enough money, but I couldn’t blame a landlord for not wanting to rent to us since we don’t have jobs. Not that we’ve tried.

We’re looking at share-housing with one of Elizabeth’s friends, but that may not occur until after 3 July, so we’d need somewhere in the meantime. I’m thinking initially a short term rental from somewhere on craigslist (even at $700/pw, it’d be cheaper than here), then get the sharehouse happening.

All the while also looking for work.

arduino rgb ethernet light :D

Posted on by alex

Some time ago (October), I saw Philips Livingcolour lamps and thought they were awesome and I should make one. I did some thinking, and decided not to re-invent the wheel, and make some changes.

Arduino with Ethernet and MaxM

So I made one, that is ethernet connected and can be controlled by a webpage :) I used an Arduino, with an NKC Ethernet board (standard Arduino Ethernet compatible, don’t use this one), and a BlinkM MaxM.

RGB Ethernet Arduino, in use

I bought a couple of BlinkM’s and MaxM’s from sparkfun. And they are fun.

And the best thing, I didn’t have to write much code at all. Thanks to this guy. It needed some poking to run in the Arduino IDE, but eventually got there. Problem now is is that I have about 26 bytes of spare space on the Arduino. I just hope I’m not using the optimised Ethernet library yet.

State of play

Posted on by alex

Well, marathon effort, but everything got moved out on time, carpets, windows, bathrooms cleaned. New tenant happy. Also sat on 11 interviews at UWA and did a budget submission for a university unit. Talk about a week of burning the candle at both ends and then starting in the middle..

Now things are quieter. Staying at mum’s place in North Perth, and going to have a much more relaxing weekend than last week. Still have to sort out issues of storage for some items, and disposal of others, but at least we still have a month to do that.

Execute order 66

Posted on by alex

After a while being concerned with the state of theducks.org and how hard it was to update canada.theducks.org, I’ve migrated them both into a single install of WordPress on http://theducks.org, including a new site design, cross posting, twitter feed syndication, and eventually flickr and facebook integration.

Most of the old content from theducks.org is still there, or the links have been redirected.

Very very happy with WordPress so far. It’s so clean and easy to setup, use and customise. The only thing I haven’t been able to work out how to do is make pages that exist at specified URLs, are managed by WordPress, but which don’t appear in sidebars, indexes etc. I want a 410 page to deal with any content I don’t want migrated, but maybe a 404 will have to do.

So yeah, check it out – http://theducks.org