carldr.com >> where procrastination lives

Timelapses from the ISS

Watch here, with the volume turned down!

The Switch Point Desk

This thing is gorgeous, I seriously want one. See here for more photos, and other rail-related items that Rail Yard Studios have produced.

They have a Kickstarter project, the Rails to iPad Platform, which sadly looks like it will fail to raise the required funding. The company is (in my experience) terrible at replying to queries on Kickstarter and regular email, so they’re not really helping themselves.

Pebble Smartphone Watch

Backed!

Shropshire's Sky At Night

For the last three months, I’ve been writing an monthly astronomy column for the Shropshire Star’s website.

The aim is to explain what you can see in the night sky without the need for prior knowledge of astronomy or any equipment (although I do mention things which would be better seen through binoculars or a telescope.)

Here are links to the articles :

There are a few columns written by another astronomer from back in 2011 too, which clearly show the difference in approach I’m trying to take.

For future reference, the articles are archived here.

Just do it ...

Select 45 items in Finder, cmd-I, swear at Finder. This fixes that.

It Couldn't Be Easier

sudo gem install dancroak-twitter-search -s http://gems.github.com

require "rubygems" 
require "twitter_search" 
TwitterSearch::Client.new( "twittb0t" ).query( :q => "carldr" ).each do |t|
  puts t.text
end

Read all about it.

You're The Shit And I'm Knee-De...

Today, I revived Justwatchthesky from the internet graveyard/landfill of “coming soon” pages. The scope is narrow: An exercise in documenting words in the music I listen to with color and type. The constraints are simple: (1) Only use Georgia (serif) or Helvetica (sans) and (2) try to post as often as possible.

Ryan Sims, justwatchthesky.com

Another idea I wish I had come up with, although I doubt I would have executed it half as well.

Also, I know a good number of the songs he’s quoted so far, so they have been particularly interesting – I hope it remains that way.

My kinda town!

Drinkwater, Saskatchewan, Canada! The photo was taken by Greg, one of the employees of 29degrees, on a recent trip across Canada.

Sadly though, I know it’s nothing to do with my family – Apparently, it doesn’t have a pub …

News Stories in Photographs

Small fishing boats tied to the banks of the Chaohu lake, where a pollution-linked algae bloom has reappeared.

From The Big Picture. Read through all the stories, there are many, many fantastic pictures.

It’s brilliant to see such high quality pictures of news events. The only improvement I’d make is to allow linking to specific pictures within a story, so I don’t have to hotlink like I have done in the ‘fantastic’ picture above.

Big Ideas : Don't Get Any

Radiohead held an online contest to remix “Nude” from their album – “In Rainbows” ... I decided to take the piss a bit, as the contest seemed to be in that spirit.

James Houston

Awesome for two reasons : 1) Radiohead, and 2) Old hardware. Watch and listen.

Biggest Drawing In The World

With the help of a GPS device and DHL, I have drawn a self-portrait on our planet. My pen was a briefcase containing the GPS device, being sent around the world. The paths the briefcase took around the globe became the strokes of the drawing.

Visit the Biggest Drawing In The World site.

Update: Meh, it’s a hoax..

Drink and Drive

See the larger image to get a better idea of how the optical illusion in this advert works.

Jyväskylä

Watch this fantastic timelapse video shot in and around Jyväskylä, Finland.

PermaStore

class PermaStore < Hash
  def self.load
    if File.exists?( "data.dump" )
      File.open( "data.dump", "r" ) do |f|
        return Marshal.load( f )
      end
    end
    return PermaStore.new
  end
  def []=( key, value )
    super
    save
  end
  def delete( value )
    super
    save
  end
  protected
  def save
    File.open( "data.dump", "w" ) do |f|
      Marshal.dump( self, f )
    end
  end
end

Do whatever you will with it. It’s not thread safe, but that’s easily fixable if you’re so inclined.

Music Of The Week, Part 3

So the salesman said he got one for himself / A charmed life with some kids and some stainless steel knives / Paid in full as of 2029, I’ll need to scrape all my change and give up all my toys but / Really, who needs more than this thing?

“Zero To Love” by Say Hi, off “The Wishes And The Glitch”

Perhaps Zero To Love isn’t the stand-out track of the album, but definitely the most infectious.

The Wishes And The Glitch is definitely more experimental in its sound than Konk and Lucky – The vocals on the first track aren’t a million miles away from Sigur RÃ³s, although the music is undisputedly more guitary.

The album’s other highlights include the chunky electronic sound of Toil and Trouble, the poppy and happy Magic Beans And The Truth Machine, and the building last track We Lost The Albatross. Bluetime strongly reminds me of another song, but I can’t recall which. Either way, you can’t knock a song about Pac-Man.

I don’t think the album will appeal to everyone, but if you like indie rock, I don’t think you could go too far wrong by giving The Wishes And The Glitch a listen.

Music Of The Week, Part 2

Be whoever you have to be / I won’t judge you / And sing whenever you have to sing / To get it out and not become / a recluse about your house, come out

“Sway” by The Kooks, off “Konk”

I love the guitar at the end of the verses, and the chorus and the bridge are brilliant. It’s probably my favourite track of the moment, I kept repeating it in the car on the way home last night. Which means in about 3 weeks I’m going to be bored of it, and not want to hear it any more.

Pretty much the whole of Konk is excellent, so much so I’ve pre-ordered it – Something I very rarely do. I read a review last week sometime saying that the first track, See The Sun, is the best first track to an album they’d heard for a while. I’m not sure I agree with that (See These Bones), but there is no doubting it hooks you into the album immediately.

Fans of The Fratellis will like Mr. Maker (And probably the whole album, now I mention it), and Gap, Stormy Weather, Sway (of course) and Down To The Market keep the middle of the album sounding strong. I’m not too keen on Do You Wanna though.

I absolutely love the opening lyrics of the melancholic One Last Time :

Can I hold you one last time / To fight the fear that’s growing in my mind / I know I did us both all so wrong / I know I’m not always all that strong

“One Last Time” by The Kooks, off “Konk”

Listening to it again now, when I get bored of Sway this will probably be the next track I overplay.

Overall, it’s a more mature sound than Inside In/Inside Out, but still unmistakably The Kooks – Which is just fine, in my book.

Music Of The Week, Part 1

I feel rain in the movies and the talk before the screen lights / I hear strings in the park / I don’t like to call her right / Except when its too late at night / I mostly just think in the dark

“See These Bones” by Nada Surf, off “Lucky”

The song slowly builds from a pretty indifferent first verse, but by the time you hit the first chorus you’re beginning to be sucked in, and upon reaching “Do you remember …” before the final chorus you’re completely sold on how great the song is.

I wasn’t a massive fan of Let Go, the only other album I’ve heard by Nada Surf, so listening to Lucky was a surprise – It’s a very, very good album. If you like Teenage Fanclub or Death Cab For Cutie and you’ve never heard Nada Surf, you’ll love this album.

Whose Authority and I Like What You Say are probably the two other immediate attention grabbers, you can’t help but start toe-tapping and singing along to the chorus of the latter, while the former, probably because the guitar at the beginning of the song reminds me of the Lightning Seeds, makes me want to go and dig out all the great Britpop music I’ve got and forgotten about.

Thinking about it, the whole album puts me in that mood – It takes me back to a time where the biggest problem I had was working out which black t-shirt to wear and which indie club to go to.

Who knew?

In bash :

[13:48:04 carl@mummra ~]% echo Hello
Hello
[13:48:06 carl@mummra ~]% ^Hello^Bye^
echo Bye
Bye

SSH port forwarding with OSX

If you’re doing remote port forwarding on Leopard, you might encounter the as problem as we have done this morning. I don’t remember this happening with Tiger, so I think it’s a Leopard specific thing.

We wanted a client to see a in-development feature hosted on one of our machines in the office, which is protected by a firewall. For various reasons, we can’t punch a hole in that firewall and configure the router to direct requests for a given port to a specific machine.

You can normally do this by running something like :

ssh -R 6000:localhost:5000 blog.carldr.com

We’re wanting to tunnel HTTP here, so in this example, it means that requests to ‘http://blog.carldr.com:6000/’ are forwarded (transparently to the user) to port 5000 on the machine where the ‘ssh’ was ran from.

However, this didn’t work. The connection which SSH was trying to make to port 5000 on our local machine was being refused. With use of ‘ssh -v’, ‘lsof’, ‘netstat’ et al., we found out what the problem was.

On Leopard, ‘localhost’ resolves as IPv6 ’::1’, so ssh is trying to connect to that port. The web server we were running locally was binding to 0.0.0.0, which is all interfaces, but just IPv4. The solution is one of these :

ssh -4 -R 6000:localhost:5000 blog.carldr.com

ssh -R 6000:127.0.0.1:5000 blog.carldr.com

Or binding the web server to ’::1’.

The view from Mars

This is an image of Earth and the Moon, acquired at 5:20 a.m. MST on 3 October 2007, at a range of 142 million kilometres. More details are available on the HiRISE site.

Funnily enough, I was watching Race To Mars at the weekend, and was wondering what the Earth and Moon would look like from Mars.