We Saw a Chicken …

Author: scruss

  • George Stewart

    BBC NEWS | UK | Scotland | Glasgow, Lanarkshire and West | Man ‘killed as he walked his dog’

    I’m not sure what made me look at this article on the BBC News website, but when I did, I think I just discovered that one of my friends from Strathclyde University has been murdered.

    George Stewart was a mature student from Darvel (or ‘Dervel’, as he insisted it be pronounced) who joined Mechanical Engineering in second year in 1988. He’d worked for de Havilland in Ayrshire, and was a time-served engineer. He was working for one of the big engineering companies (maybe Howden) that were just waning under Maggie’s relentless efforts. George breezed through practical work (especially drawing) but found some of the theoretical stuff more challenging. He was a jovial soul, and good company in a lab or tutorial.

    I can’t say for certain that this is the same George Stewart – but Darvel’s a small town, his picture looks the same, and he’d be the right age. Condolences to his family and friends – George was a great guy.
    If you know anything, please contact Strathclyde Police Force.

  • gerald, the tiny fish

    Gerald, the Tiny Fish
    Gerald, the Tiny Fish

    No, he’s not dead. Quite the opposite. Gerald seems to spend a lot of his time lurking flat on the gravel. He was born this way. I think he wants to be a turbot when he grows up.

    He spends most of the day hiding. Twice a day at feeding times, though, he’s front and centre – indeed, seeing his wee bright red form lets me know I need to feed the fish.

    When he sees me coming near the tank, he starts revving up his stubby tail. When I open the lid, he jets vertically up to the surface (paying scant attention to obstacles and other fish) and frantically scoots around waiting for the flakes. After nomming far more food than such a small fish should really be able to eat, he sinks back down to one of his hiding places.

    We’ve had other platies born with similar buoyancy defects, but they’ve never lived as long as Gerald. He seems as happy as a platy could be, and is the only fish that really responds to our presence. Go Gerald!

    (and yes, the tank does need cleaning; limescale on the outside, algae on the inside. And it’s blurry, too – long exposure, moving fish, macro depth of field.)

  • clean coal funnies

  • ah

    I appear to have deeply borked the autotagging of my old blog entries

  • too many instruments

    I just counted, and found out that my instrument collection has 115 strings. I think I should thin the herd.

  • how does he do that?

    Someone asked how the automatic podcast works. It’s a bit complex, and they probably will be sorry they asked.

    I have all my music saved as MP3s on a server running Firefly Media Server. It stores all its information about tracks in a SQLite database, so I can very easily grab a random selection of tracks.

    Since I know the name of the track and the artist from the Firefly database, I have a selection of script lines that I can feed to flite, a very simple speech synthesizer. Each of these spoken lines is stored as as wav file, and then each candidate MP3 is converted to wav, and the whole mess is joined together using SoX. SoX also created the nifty (well, I think so) intro and outro sweeps.

    The huge wav file of the whole show is converted to MP3 using LAME and uploaded to my webhost with scp. All of this process is done by one Perl script – it also creates the web page, the RSS feed, and even logs the tracks on Last.fm.

    Couldn’t be simpler.

  • Nobody Waved Good-bye by Don Owen, – NFB

    NFB is featuring the well known long-neck banjo-strumming ne’er-do-well drama Nobody Waved Good-bye this week.

  • hot off the press: Green Energy and Green Economy Act 2009

    Green Energy and Green Economy Act 2009.

    (more at:Legislative Assembly of Ontario | Bills & Lawmaking | Current Parliament | Bill 150, Green Energy and Green Economy Act, 2009.)

  • Ken Reaume gives away his early discography

    Ken is no longer performing under his given name, and has decided to give away his early recordings, Hope in Another Place and Ken Reaume. They’re good.

  • sometimes you just have to …

    smiley spreadsheet
    smiley

  • frag

    I really don’t know how a Windows system disk can get this fragmented:
    fragmentation

  • That’s $34,600 per parking space …

    $173-million will add about 5,000 more parking spaces at 12 GO train stations around greater Toronto

  • out on my bike

  • rather a new wearer of clothes

    batavus crescendo
    So my quest for the Sensible Bicycle is over; I found it. Or rather, it found me, for bicycles have lives of their own.

    Curbside Cycle had a sale. They also had, for reasons known only to the manufacturer, been sent just one of their top-of-the-line Batavus Crescendo Deluxe city bikes. I took it for a test ride in the ice and slush of the Annex. It did everything just right.

    Here’s how it measures up to the checklist I wrote about in 2004:

    • Fully enclosed chain — yup. Batavus have a really clever clip-together sectional polymer chainguard.
    • Full mudguards — for sure.
    • Hub gears — 8 speed hub gears, no less.
    • Dynamo lights — a front dynamo hub, no less. Slight marks off for a battery rear light, but it does make the wiring simple.
    • Proper carriers — a really nice alloy one, with built in pump and elastic strap.
    • Anything but rim brakes — roller brakes, in the hubs. I was initially sceptical of their gentle action, but they can stop you to almost the limit of adhesion of the tyres, so they do work well.

    The one thing it does have, but I didn’t think I’d need, is suspension. It irons out the uneven Scarborough spring roads rather well.

    I love the manual; it’s written for sensible riding. Basically, most advice is given as Talk to your Batavus Dealer. The similarity to a modern car manual is striking; just you get on with riding the thing, it implies, and we’ll worry about fixing it. Tellingly, the English language section is the back; these bikes are much too sensible to waste on those silly Anglos.

    I’ve barely walked the length of myself in the last few months, so in even short distances my legs let me know about it. It’s freezy out, but dry and bright – I must go out on my bike again.

    (the title’s from that early eco-geek, and it’s the other half of the widely-misquoted:

    I say, beware of all enterprises that require new clothes, and not rather a new wearer of clothes. If there is not a new man, how can the new clothes be made to fit?

    – Henry David Thoreau, Walden

    For me, it’s perfect; not merely do I not require new or special clothes to ride it, but I have become a new wearer of clothes by it.)

    If you need to find me, you know where I’ll be …

  • the glowing-eyed teddy bear of DOOM!!!!!!!!!

    teddybearofdoom
    Actually, I disturbed a raccoon.

  • the revving gasmeter of walmer road

    it made a nice noise

    the revving gasmeter of walmer road (mp3).

  • acme of acmes

    Acme Burger‘s second location at Bloor near Bathurst is just as awesome as the Queensway one.

  • How to select broken URLS from e-mail

    (without resorting to TinyURL.com, xrl.us or is.gd when posting …)

    Some mail clients wrap URLs in a way that breaks their ability to be clicked on. Trying to explain a method to fix this is tiresome, so here’s an animation that explains it:

    a_handy_guide_to_fixing_broken_urlsBasically, it helps to select the URL from the end to the start. Once you’ve got all the text, copy it, and paste it into your browser’s location bar.

  • timed screen grabs (with mouse pointer) on OS X

    The following shell script will, after a five second delay, save a screenshot every second for the next minute:
    sleep 5
    for f in $(jot 60)
    do
     screencapture -wC $(date +%Y%m%d%H%M%).png
     sleep 1
     echo $f
    done

  • no zapf, dingbats aplenty

    scruss handwriting font

    Well, yes, according to YourFonts.com. You write into a special template, scan it, upload it to their website, add your signature and bank details, and you get a TTF of what you wrote. Next time, I’ll be a bit more careful with baseline  alignment.

    I might mess with the alignment and kerning in FontForge, but otherwise I like it.

    (via Cool Tools)