09 Feb 10 Podcasts in the car!

I’ve got quite a decent-sized music collection and I follow quite a few podcasts. Listening to CDs in the car is a bit frustrating because I’m not very good at getting round to switching the one in the player. Because my commute is only about 25 minutes if I listen to the radio I generally hear a few songs I didn’t want to and a few minutes of talking to whet my appetite before I have to dash from the car!

Getting a decent solution in our Ford Focus and Citroen Picasso was easy, but the Vauxhall Vectra has been harder. I’ve tried out a the Parrot MKi9000, MKi9200, and also the iO Play – this blog post contains some summary detail about the different options. I’ll post a follow-up blog post explaining how I found each unit. (more…)

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04 Feb 10 Arduino + Scalextric = lap counter

I bought an Arduino board last year and have been playing around with it on and off since. I’ve had a few ideas for projects but not really got around to completing anything except monitoring my gas meter.

For a few months I’ve been hankering after a scalextric (even before James May’s excellent Toy Stories programme about it) so when a friend invited me round to have a go on his, I jumped at the chance!

I took along my arduino, he dug out a pair of cycle computer sensors and we had a go at hacking together a lap counter. (more…)

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11 Nov 08 Caching

Refreshing the main blog page to see a new post appear, I notice that it’s blocked connecting to twitter.com. I think I need to investigate caching the twitter posts in this plugin or it might become quite a pain.

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11 Nov 08 Software plumbing.

After randomly surfing from twitter to blogs, I enjoyed reading one of Matt B’s posts about designing a system to deal with lots of text messages at the BBC. Linking different software components and sources together like he described is something that really interests me. I don’t think I’m hugely good at it, but there’s something about that kind of relatively large-scale software plumbing that draws me in.

I think the kind of work I do tends to involve more small-scale nitty gritty like UIs – that doesn’t interest me nearly as much. There are some quite prominent elements of generic plumbing in the product I’m working on at the moment which I find quite stimulating, but they’re rather ruined by the need to write horrible code to produce a GUI