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| By Nathan Chantrell, on August 10th, 2004 Ofcom proposes to allow local religious and community organisations to operate within the UK Citizen Band allocation, to begin with, by licensing a number of such organisations to transmit services in a limited number of pilot areas. Can see trouble when mic keyers and worse key over the vicar though! and how about this, they said it wasn’t possible – a GSM mobile phone interceptor – a scanner for GSM phones, a snip at £228,000 Law enforcement agencies only so looks like I’ll have to give it a miss :p By Nathan Chantrell, on July 7th, 2004 Just been over to Homebase and bought myself an air conditioner for home. £149 for a 9000 BTU unit (1000 more than the one I have in my office), not bad at all. Had enough of hot and looks like there’s gonna be quite a bit of it!! By Nathan Chantrell, on May 17th, 2004 Online UPS (Uninterruptable Power Supply) interface. There is something wrong with the graphs page when you click on UPS1 though… the values are bollocks and change each time you load the page although if you hover your mouse over each column the tool tip shows the correct value… strange! I feel a graph of input/output voltage coming on next… want to see how often the power is dropping. Also finally did something with my barcode reader and made up a database for keeping an inventory of things, don’t know what yet though, automated shopping list or something like that I think. Definately need to get the outside temperature sensor moved so it doesn’t get direct sunlight. I know it’s warm today but I don’t think it reached 100F!! By Nathan Chantrell, on August 15th, 2003 I just get the best things to play with…. This is WORK you know! 
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By Nathan Chantrell, on October 16th, 2002 This afternoon the X10 home automation gear I ordered yesterday from letsautomate.com arrived. Home automation is something I’ve been wanting to do for years and finally the day is here. So far I’ve got the CM12U computer interface which came in a kit with a lamp module and an appliance module plus three bayonet fitting ‘socket rockets’ and a Mini Controller.
Software wise I’ve installed the HEYU command line util and the BlueLava web based front end and I’m just about to make some nice scripts and set up some crontab schedules  Very cool indeed.
The plan is to add more modules and some wireless controllers over the next few months. There is no shortage of ideas out there. By Nathan Chantrell, on June 22nd, 2002 New toys! I got myself an 802.11b access point and a wireless nic for my laptop a couple of weeks back so I’ve been spending a lot of time surfing from bed recently! Highly recommended. I could sit in the back garden as well I suppose, at least I could if it didn’t look like this! I might have to try a bit of this War Driving sometime though. It has been a bit hotter here over the last few weeks and I’ve been suffering from some overheating problems with my main Athlon machine. Between dead CPU and Northbridge fans and DIMMS making a bid for freedom it has been driving me mad! I should probably turn one or two of these machines off to reduce the ambient room temperature, it does get pretty toasty in here at times! By Nathan Chantrell, on March 23rd, 2002 I bought myself a Digital Dream Co L’espion digital camera earlier this week. It’s a tiny little thing, about the size of a matchbox and only costs £40 but takes surprisingly good pictures. I have put some info about using it with Linux here. By Nathan Chantrell, on December 13th, 2001 Wow! An update! It has been a while, so whats been happening since October? Well, I finally upgraded my main machine to a 1.4GHz Athlon with 512Mb DDR RAM so there has been much installation and testing of new software going on. It’s running Redhat 7.1 with an upgraded KDE 2.2.1, KDE really is impressive these days, much more so than Gnome in my opinion and the faster hardware makes such a difference. Also, with the extra power I have now switched to Mozilla as my main browser and have found 0.9.5 and 0.9.6 to be extremely stable. In the past I have mentioned IBM’s Linux watch project, it seems that Citizen have now joined up with them on this and it looks like it is really coming on. I still don’t think we’ll be seeing these in the shops anytime soon though.
Another thing I have mentioned before is the forthcoming Douglas Adams book, well some more info surfaced on this last month. It sounds really interesting and I can’t wait to read it. In November Alexa launched the Way back machine which is an archive of the web from 1996 to present day, not everything is there of course but it kept me entertained for hours reliving some of the pages I used to visit. On a similar note this week Google expanded its Usenet archive to cover the last 20 years and there are some fascinating posts linked to from their timeline. Is this what history will be like in the future? By Nathan Chantrell, on October 6th, 2001 Used to buying a music CD, taking it home, playing it on your stereo, playing it in the CD player on your PC, copying to it MP3 and playing it on your portable MP3 player or the MP3 jukebox in your car? Not for much longer, if the record industry gets its way. “Copy controlled” CDs are already on sale in the UK that can’t be played at all on CDROM or DVD drives in PCs, and can’t be converted to MP3 or other electronic formats. In fact, they will only play on ordinary audio CD players. Furthermore, some of these CDs have deliberate errors introduced into the audio data itself to make them harder to copy; these errors also make them more prone to skip or click when scratched in ordinary use. Check out the Campaign for Digital Rights for more info. | |
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