My lovely friends at IBM bought me a lovely leaving present: a copy of Rock Band for the Xbox 360. I’ve been enjoying it greatly, and have been working my way through a solo guitar career as well as in band mode with my wife (our band is called Good Girl OK after the praise/release […]
Category Archives: home
Maximum Fun
I’m proudly wearing my brand new ‘Sound of Young America’ t-shirt today. It looks a bit like this. Since I’m probably Southampton’s biggest fan of Jesse Thorn (you may remember that I’ve raved about the amazing ‘Jordan Jesse, GO!’ podcast before) I was really pleased, having started donating, to get some parcels this week. There […]
Current Cost presentation at Open Tech 2008
Here’s the presentation Nick and I gave at Open Tech 2008 yesterday. | View with comments at SlideShare I really enjoyed the whole event and will try to put up some notes up about it tomorrow.
Welcome to the New Sincerity
For the past few decades, western culture has been marked by a postmodern ironic appreciation of the kitsch and the corny. I’m beginning to wondering what comes next. Bear with me. In this essay from 2006 the British philosopher Alan Kirby identifies the successor to postmodernism as being pseudo-modernism, which includes “all television or radio […]
Jordan, Jesse, GO!
Jordan, Jesse, GO! is probably the best entertainment podcast going. I’m a few weeks behind (I’ve clearly neither been flying recently nor mowing my lawn enough) but here’s the episode I’m listening to tonight. Join me. Any show which has a forum and a voicemail account hotline (+1 206-984-4FUN) has to be good. I’m not […]
I’m, like, totally serial!
I hooked up an old Matrix Orbital LK205-24-USB LCD display with my Arduino today. This 80-character backlit display can be plugged into a computer using the handy dandy USB cable (hence the -USB part of the name) but it turns out it has a 5V TTL serial jumper on the back which can provide power […]
Doorbell update
Quick update to last week’s post about the doorbell project. I’ve now squeezed in into an Altoids tin (surely everybody’s favourite project box), complete with a little hole for the radio antenna. It’s now permanently connected to the Mac Mini in the living room, meaning roo_house on Twitter now makes an update (“There’s somebody at […]
Roo’s desk / Ray’s desk
Here’s a photo my wife took in January, in which she compared my desk (clean, covered with monitors) with her desk (messy, covered with textiles). I don’t think I work at the desk in my home study nearly enough. My desk at work certainly isn’t as tidy as that. My office wall looks like this, […]
Hacking the doorbell
I bought a new doorbell. It actually came as a set, with two ringers. One is battery operated and the other is mains powered, plugging straight into the wall. I once again find myself attempting to keep up with Nick. Having seen his doorbell project I knew exactly what I had to do: it was […]
Current Cost Charting fun
Nick has already written a nice introduction to using the Google Chart API for drawing charts of household power consumption over time. I’ve been playing with some other parts of the API as part of setting up a web-based dashboard so Rachel and I can keep an eye on our house’s power (as monitored by […]