Blog Archive
This is part of my blog, which I have long since stopped maintaining. The page has been preserved in case its content is of any interest. Please go back to the homepage to see the current contents of this site.
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A Writer in the Family
Years ago, in my early twenties, I was convinced I’d be a successful author someday. One by one, my more literary friends got pieces published—short stories, poems—while I didn’t. Of course, it didn’t help that I wasn’t a good writer, and more importantly didn’t actually try getting anything published. But it became a minor running joke that all my friends would “get published” before I did. So it’s with a great sense of both pride and inevitability that I can now congratulate our son, at the age of 10, now being a published author!
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Another Shenzhen Special:15 Minutes with the MAFAM M11
Thanks to an excitingly mis-sold internet purchase, we are now in possession of the latest in exciting mobile technology - the MAFAM M11. (If you’re mentally incapacitated, you could have one of your very own for 24 whole US dollars!) Let’s jump in and see what this technological marvel has in store.
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SuccessWhale.com Discontinued as of Today
As far as I know, SuccessWhale is not being actively used by anyone any more, so I have chosen not to renew the domain name
successwhale.comwhen it expires today. Like most of my past web-based projects, it will continue to live on at anonlydreaming.netsubdomain, in this case sw.onlydreaming.net, but will not be actively maintained there. As well as its graphical web interface, SuccessWhale also has a back-end API that used to run on a SuccessWhale subdomain. This has now moved to https://successwhale-api.herokuapp.com/. The OnoSendai Android client already uses this address for the API as of update 479, so you may need to update. Thank you to all the SuccessWhale users over the years! -
Automating the Roast Dinner Timing Chart
Against all my expectations, the most popular page on this website (at least, the most visited) turns out to be “The Great Roast Dinner Timing Chart”, which was my attempt to help newbies at the revered British art of the Roast Dinner get their timings right. I first posted it over eight years ago—in the intervening time I have cooked a lot of roasts and tweaked my timings a bit, so it was in need of an update. I’ve also cooked roast dinners to serve at all sorts of different times, with variations on the ingredients, so I thought the old list to cook certain things for a fixed 7pm dishing-up time could use some improvements too.
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Coolest Robot of the Day
Today in Cool Robot News: A team at Harvard University have developed their tiny RoboBee so that it is equally at home in water and in air. No mean feat by itself, but check out the way it crosses that tricky barrier between water and air: it splits water into oxygen and hydrogen to create buoyancy, then once its wings are clear of the surface it ignites the mixture to push it off into flight. Check this out!
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Migrating from Jekyll to WordPress
Over the course of many years, I’ve changed blogging software several times, including WordPress to Jekyll and back again twice! One thing I’ve found is that while migrations from WordPress to Jekyll are well documented, with various scripts and plugins available, the reverse from Jekyll to WordPress seems to be a rarer switch and therefore not as well written up. To that end, here’s a quicky summary of how I moved from Jekyll (with Disqus comments) to WP in 2017.
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The Apocalypse comes to Weymouth
In the shadow of Hurricane Ophelia, Saharan dust and smoke from Iberian wildfires has been blown towards the UK, resulting in eerie orange skies across the country. I took this photo looking across Portland Harbour into the dim orange sunlight this morning. No filter required!
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Proper Emmets
In contrast to two years ago, this year’s holiday was mercifully free of stifling nights and sweltering days. This year we stayed in a caravan by the sea in Cornwall, a much more relaxed (and cheaper!) affair. Since we live by the sea anyway, a seaside beach holiday wasn’t high on my list of priorities, and in truth grey skies and cold winds prevented any sunbathing opportunities. Instead we did proper
grockleemmet stuff, touring some of the county’s attractions.
Vienna’s wordy travelogue came courtesy of the many hot evenings where, sharing a single room with a child who was trying to sleep, we would sit silently and miserable on sticky varnished floors, trying to think of something to pass the time. Having more than one room this year was a godsend, and now I’m not sure I’d want to go back to single hotel rooms between the three of us.
The downside is, if you were expecting an interesting post to read, all I have for you are photos!
What I Did On My Holidays, by Ian Renton, age 32¼ We explored Par beach at night, and came back covered in mud…
We visited the Eden Project, sweating through the rainforest and eating typical Cornish burritos…
We resisted the urge to buy car insurance at Newquay Zoo—though given how often Google Maps had me driving down narrow muddy lanes and through fords, it might not have been a bad idea…
We climbed approximately a million steps to the top of what once was Tintagel castle, drank mead and tried to learn Cornish…
We ate pasties in Marazion, walked to St Michael’s Mount and got the ferry back…
We missed a boat, ate tapas and drank Estrella de Galicia in Fowey, then explored the Lost Gardens of Heligan…
And then, all too soon, it was over.
Until next year!
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Adventures in Belgium
Freshly back from a work trip to Bremen at the end of May, they sent me off again for two weeks in Belgium at the start of June, to the exciting seaside destination that is Zeebruges—a town famous for its commercial port, its 1980s ferry disaster, and very little else. By and large our days there were long and consisted of “hotel, naval base, pub, hotel, repeat”, but the event turned out a great success.
Most of my photos are singularly unexciting shots of grey boats trundling up and down in straight lines. But this one below I’m particularly fond of, not for its exciting subject matter (not so) or composition (likewise), but simply because it’s the most Photoshopped-looking photo I’ve ever taken.
Between sea trials and industry days we did get a massive four hours to do the tourist thing and explore the nearby city of Bruges. In contrast to Zeebruges, a town that seems to exist solely to support its harbour, Bruges is an ancient city full of historic buildings and riverside restaurants.
To lead out, here’s some of the better photos from the evening.
Flags flying in front of the Church of Our Lady
Buildings by the side of Rozenhoedkaai
Boats tied up in the Canal
Market Square at Dusk
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This Week's Helpful Advice: Don't Help the Poor?
Our local newspaper, the Bournemouth Echo (beware of annoying ads & trackers), is as ever a font of useful advice. This week it comes from the police, who are letting us know that helping the poor is a bad thing. Now I’m not too upset with the usual idea trotted out, of offering food and drink to beggars instead of money lest they spend the money on booze and drugs. But apparently even that is now discouraged.
Now I’m not sure whether “professional begging” is really a major problem, but as I understand it a “professional beggar” is someone who has no better way of making money than braving the streets, risking abuse, violence and inclement weather, begging strangers to spare enough cash that they can get by. Sure, they may have a place to go back to at night, putting them one step higher on the poverty ladder than the homeless. But does that make them somehow undeserving of help? Does it make them so undeserving of help that we are advised not to give food to any beggar, just in case they should be a “professional” and not a “real” homeless person?
Apparently so.
And don’t forget, the article helpfully reminds us, helping poor beggars on the street by giving them food “falls outside Bournemouth council’s homelessness strategy”. Ah yes, the homelessness strategy. The one where you can only get into the night shelter if you’re a local? The one that famously includes blasting out Alvin and the Chipmunks songs at the bus station all night to stop people being able to sleep there? Great strategy there, Bournemouth council. Just great.
HELP THE POOR. HELP THE HOMELESS. ALWAYS.