Author Archives: david

Your choice, your reputation

Earlier in the year we ordered made to measure curtains from Laura Ashley. They quoted 7 weeks delivery but arrived 5 weeks after our order and have been exactly what we wanted. Following this experience, deciding to place a subsequent … Continue reading

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Banking on Trust

I last wrote about our experiences with HBOS in This is not the bank you want, but tonight has proved that things really could get worse. Towards the end of April we opened a new account with Halifax to try … Continue reading

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Rosie Gets a Blog

It would have been a busy weekend for us without the problems a server upgrade threw my way, but one nice change is that Rosie now has her own blog! She’s been on a journey of discovery getting wordpress installed … Continue reading

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Adding a RAID array

The home server (a Tranquil PC BBS2 as I wrote about before) started life with a 2 disk 250G RAID array and soon saw an additional 2 disk 1Tb array added. It’s done us well and just sits there purring … Continue reading

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This is not the bank you want

It’s been one of those days again. We had a lot of small tasks to do while in town this afternoon and the 2 hours we had was always going to be a short time, but with some fast walking … Continue reading

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Photos

Earlier this year my pro account at flickr expired. I had the usual notifications prior to this and it casued me to start wondering what I wanted to do with my pictures. This wasn’t an easy question to answer as … Continue reading

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When the boot hangs…

In my attempts to get a home built kernel running on my phone I’ve had quite a few times where things haven’t quite worked and I end up stuck at the HTC screen. As there isn’t any output via USB … Continue reading

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One year on…

Just over a year ago I wrote This is not the Android you want and as I’ve been spending time with android again I find it a little depressing how little progress has been made. Google have made their publishing … Continue reading

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Camera HAL Module

I’ve spent a bit of time looking at a module that would allow the camera sensor on my phone to work with the new ICS interface. I’ve not made as much progress as I’d have liked, but have the start … Continue reading

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Android Kernel Debug

Recently I’ve been trying to trace some kernel debugging being generated on an android phone and the relative shortness of dmesg has been proving an issue. I figured there would be another way and of course there is… On a … Continue reading

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Building for HTC Desire HD

This is for a build in ~/work/android/system rather than the usually quoted ~/android/system. Start off in the usual way… sudo apt-get install gcc-multilib sudo apt-get install bison flex schedtool cd work mkdir bin curl https://dl-ssl.google.com/dl/googlesource/git-repo/repo > bin/repo chmod a+x bin/repo … Continue reading

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Goodbye Ubuntu

It’s time. I’ve finally had enough of the workarounds and issues thrown up by Ubuntu’s change to Unity. So, Linux Mint looks like it will tick most of my boxes and appears to have a growing community around it (quite … Continue reading

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Timelapse Processing

I’ve always enjoyed creating timelapse movies and with newer digital cameras it’s easier than ever. I bought Rosie a GoPro Hero2 camera at christmas and this has a dedicated interval shooting mode that works very well. My D300 also has … Continue reading

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Building OpenWRT for Bifferboard

Since getting the bifferboard booting and discovering that the opkg python segfaults, I’ve been looking at getting a custom build of OpenWRT (that includes python) built. On the face of it this should be straightforward, but sadly it hasn’t quite … Continue reading

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Bifferboard

This post is another of those “this will help me more than you” ones, but you never know, it may help someone other than me! Today marked the first time I had plugged the Bifferboard into the network and after … Continue reading

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Virtual Mail Aliases

When setting up my current servers email system, I managed to get almost everything working via SQL tables that allowed me to use a web interface for the day to day administration. It also allowed users to control most aspects … Continue reading

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NoSQL

NoSQL databases have been around for a while and they offer a lot of attractive features. I’ve been meaning to have a look at CouchDB for a while and having some time I’ve spent some time over the last few … Continue reading

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This is not the Android you want…

Compared to Apples “one size fits all” iOS, Googles Android comes in a myriad of different guises. By choosing to partner with different firms they have ceded absolute control over how their operating system will look to those how manufacture … Continue reading

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Kernel Building

First attempt at getting a new kernel for my phone, an HTC Desire HD. Download the source from http://developer.htc.com/ Expand it into a directory As we’ll be building for ARM, we need the cross compilation toolchain, so install relevant packages. … Continue reading

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Android

I’ve been using an Android phone since late 2009 and am now on my second phone. I’ve found Android to be easy to use and the over the air updates I’ve experienced from 1.5 to 1.6 and 1.6 to 2.2 … Continue reading

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