27 Apr 10 Car handsfree/audio kits – my experiences
In a previous post, I gave an overview of a few different types of car handsfree kits that can also put MP3 players through your car speakers. To recap, because I have a Vectra with a CD30 head unit without an aux input, I needed a completely self-contained unit that wouldn’t rely on making use of the amp in the head unit.
Unfortunately I tried a couple of different units before I found one I could live with – this was quite annoying and took a few months. On the plus side, it means I’ve had hands-on experience with a few different units and can note it down here! 
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26 Apr 10 UK election manifesto comparisons
I’m turned off by politics because I generally feel like the parties just tend to put each other down in the media. The 2010 election seems to be an important one, though, so I’m keen to make my vote count.
Because I’m not a big follower of politics, I need some help with this. Googling for manifesto comparisons mainly found me 2005 manifestos so I thought I’d blog the comparisons I’ve found so far.
While not exactly a comparison, I found this tool interesting to make me think about policies and who I might vote for:
As you might notice from my less than impressive archive, I’m not a big blogger, but this seems like the easiest way to help other people looking for similar information!
I’ll edit the blog if I find any more, feel free to add any in the comments (which are moderated to cut out spam).
Tags: 2010 election manifesto comparison uk
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…)
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…)
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.
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
09 Nov 08 New site!
So – a remodel is due! Here’s my new site, based on wordpress.
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