Category Archives: Uncategorized

Wow, Nicola’s just told me she’s trying mysupermarket.co.uk.. It seems to pull the data off four supermarkets (tesco, asda, sainsburys, and occado), and provides a completely alternative interface onto ordering online from them. Which is GREAT because Tesco’s own website doesn’t bloody work in firefox unless you change the browser ID to IE7.. (but itContinue reading “Online supermarket wow”

Some new photos uploaded: * From Chinese new Year on portobello beach last Thursday. Much Poi drunken fire excitement! * A couple from wandering round Edinburgh now it is warm enough to venture out taking photos again. Photos are on Flickr. oooh excitement, looks like I may finally have to get a Flickr pro account.Continue reading “New photos”

Well, New Year seemed to go pretty well: we went round to Dave/Helen+Diego’s as usual, and caught up with them, as well as Iain,Naiad,Alex and Marianne. Both David, Diego and Helene seemed to enjoy our gift. I took my camera to try and get fireworks pictures, but unfortunately the wind was in the wrong directionContinue reading “New Year”

Cooooool!! Some guys have a video of it here. In summary: Boot Wii in Gamecube mode (which only allows access to certain areas of memory/ GC compatable hardware). However, you can still run custom GC code. Mess with the physical address select lines on the memory chips so that you can manually select out ofContinue reading “Wii console finally hacked!”

… is coming along nicely! I’ve disassembled about 75% of the driver now, and can talk to XD cards and receive the expected responses. The hardware interface is slightly more complex than the simple bitbanging interface I expected, and there are still a few mysterious fields of registers I must work out. I could writeContinue reading “Linux Ricoh XD support”

As I currently can’t sleep AGAIN due to reading too many interesting things AGAIN and then thinking too much, here is ANOTHER interesting thing. Soon no one will sleep! 🙂 A friend sent me this page about machining with high pressure (20000-60000 psi!) water jets: There are some great pictures of the stuff you canContinue reading “Abrasive waterjet machining”

Oh dear, oh dear, looks like I’m finally back to reverse engineering things again. The media reader in my new laptop supports MMC/SD/MemoryStick/XD cards. However under linux, only SD cards are supported as the manufacturer (Ricoh) won’t release the docs. I won’t be having this. The SD support is possible because the card uses theContinue reading “Ricoh media reader under linux”

I’ve been investigating Column Oriented DBMS systems today. These are designed for data warehousing applications (as opposed to transactional processing). They use a data storage mechanism which is orthogonal to standard row oriented DBMSes. “Normal” DBMSes are row based: they store each row of a table as a contiguous record. Column oriented databases store eachContinue reading “Column oriented DBMS”

Behold my latest gadget: . It is a Squeezebox, a thin client music playback system; music is streamed from my flat server running the squeezebox daemon (which is opensource and available on many platforms). This seems the ideal solution to the problem of multiple codecs to me: the server takes care of translating from theContinue reading “gadgetgadgetgadgetgadget”

I’m finally starting to feel like low level hardware things again at long last. Following the vague instructions here I now have a functional bluetooth sniffer for free! I’m not sure quite what to do with it now; I think I’ll fix up the linux software to handle it properly (I believe ethereal/wireshark can alreadyContinue reading “Bluetooth sniffing”