I went to the dentist and ended up buying a pianola. A pianola (player piano) is an automatic piano that plays music from rolls of paper with holes cut in it, like a computer punch card. Most dentists do not sell pianolas and focus almost exclusively on dental health and plastic surgery but we found [ ]
So I went to the Open Mic night at the Northern Quarter bar in Huddersfield last week for the first time and saw an act that was quite upsetting. Turned out to be just a guy doing his act but at the time I was actually kind of terrified. A unique experience. Meet Ethan. Ethan [ ]
I run the Bruce Schneier Facts website (inspired by my Bruce Schneier Facts comic strip from way back in 2008) and because of this I get some interesting emails. Sometimes it s corrections to the often incomprehensibly complicated jokes. Sometimes it s people angry at Bruce Schneier. More often than not, people just think I am Bruce [ ]
Lily was our dog. She moved in at nine years old in March 2010 and died 12 February 2016. She had separation anxiety, which meant she was at our feet twenty-four hours a day (literally she slept on the end of our bed). Luckily, it wasn t too difficult for us to accommodate her [ ]
Google Poetics is a project to record the beautiful poetry that Google s autocomplete feature sometimes writes. Inspired by this recent example, I recorded a song the lyrics of which are entirely Google autocomplete suggestions.
For my own privacy, I avoid using free mail services like Gmail and instead run my own mail server (hosted at Brightbox, a very trustworthy cloud server provider here in the UK ;). I do use one or two other Google services which means I have a Google account which means I do actually have [ ]
I sometimes hear conference speakers admit they only finished their slides minutes before their talk started. Or I see them the day before admitting that they still have to write the whole thing. Whether you re presenting at a huge national conference or a smaller local group, this is simply disrespectful to the people who take [ ]
I bought a Behringer B5 condenser microphone a couple of years ago to record my acoustic guitar. Add in a second dynamic mic I already owned and a little two channel USB preamp with phantom power and it sounded really nice. Then after a few months the condenser mic started picking up some interference. It [ ]
Another quadcopter crash today. I was just hovering in my garden and it randomly flew into a fence. All four (carbon fiber reinforced) propellers broken, two motor mounts bent and a leg snapped. Looking at the telemetry logs (which I happen to have as I had my laptop connected at the time) it seems the [ ]
I have a Lenovo Thinkpad T431s running Ubuntu. For those of us not running Windows, Lenovo provide a bootable CD image for their firmware updates. The Thinkpad T431s does not have a CD drive and the ISOs Lenovo provide will not boot from a USB key. It s trivial to provide images that can boot from [ ]
I crashed my quadcopter last week due to flying out of range of my transmitter, causing my quadcopter to drop out of the sky. This happened because I hadn t calibrated my throttle failsafe properly. This is for my Spektrum DX8 transmitter and AR8000 receiver, but it ll be the same for most Spektrum devices (and the [ ]
I was listening to a Philosophy Bites interview with Gary Francione about animal abolitionism. Animal abolitionists argue that animal welfare reform is nonsense and animals should not be regarded as things to be owned and used. He s very compelling and his apparently clear reasoning is quite convincing. During the podcast Francione explained the philosophy of [ ]
I had a major quadcopter crash a few weeks ago and it wasn t due to my dodgy flying skills. One of my propellers broke in mid-air; one blade snapped off from a prop at the hub. The prop was one of two new bright orange coloured ones I d bought to help keep track of [ ]
The Linux kernel exposes lots of interesting information via the /proc filesystem. For example, /proc/net/tcp and /proc/net/udp expose information about all tcp and udp sessions on the server. In the usual Linux kernel style, these files are freely readable by all users on the Linux system. This becomes a bit of a problem on a [ ]
It turns out that whilst I have the ability to build a quadcopter (it s actually not that hard) I don t quite have the ability to fly the thing around without risking crashing it into nearby fleshy things, or trees. And whilst there is a little glee involved in a crash (it gives you things to [ ]
I ve been doing a few test flights of my Arducopter-based quadcopter over the last couple of weeks, when it wasn t snowing. The first flight test wasn t so successful. Whilst it flew, I couldn t get it much above about 1-2 metres off the ground even at full throttle. This turned out to be due to miscalibrated [ ]
I decided very early on that I wanted to build my own frame rather than buy a kit or anything. I wanted to learn some new skills, but I also expected to be crashing this thing quite a lot and didn t want to have to keep waiting for new parts to be shipped out (or [ ]
This is my pork and beef mince pasta sauce recipe, heavily inspired by my Grandma s recipe. I cook it in a casserole dish with a lid in the oven for about 4 hours. This is not quick food, but it s well worth the wait and this recipe makes about 6-7 big portions, suitable for freezing. [ ]
After weeks of research, and then days of cultivating a Farnell shopping basket, I finally handed over some cash for the first parts for my quadcopter. Lots of nuts and bolts, cable ties, spacers and other misc. Plus Amazon and Ebay purchases too: heat shrink stuff, connectors, various tools and nice new variable power soldering [ ]