Archive: 2007-10
Sauce for the gander
Shock! Horror! One of our MPs has been forced to endure the indignity of forty minutes of close scrutiny by airport security officials.
Xanimal: Easy XML parsing in Ruby
I was playing around with some XML parsing the other day, and allowed myself to become sidetracked. This is what resulted: a really easy way to extract data from an XML document. It’s called Xanimal for no better reason than that it contains X, M and L in that order.
Royal Mail is rubbish
My colleague James brought to my attention this morning an article saying that online retailers are growing concerned about the impact of Royal Mail’s absolute uselessness on their businesses.
Freeview channel icons
I wanted to have some up-to-date channel icons for my MythTV interface, so I scraped the Freeview website last night. Each icon has had any surrounding white border removed, and they’ve all been composited onto a solid white background. They are also all square, to limit distortion. The sizes vary depending on the original, but most of them are 50 to 80 pixels on a side.
MythTV vs BBC Radio multiplex changes
The BBC have rejigged their DVB-T configuration, with the result that, as of Wednesday, Radios 1 through 4 stopped working. They did broadcast warnings in advance, explaining how to rescan channels to continue to receive those stations. As is often the case, doing things with MythTV turned out to be a little more complicated than with bog-standard consumer receivers. I can’t be the only person to have been affected, and I hope that this solution will help.
Creative Zen Stone Plus first impressions
I bought a 2 GB Zen Stone Plus (awful promo site) at the weekend. I’ve got a hulking great 3rd generation 40 GB iPod that I use to play music at home, but I wanted something a little smaller and easier to use for most of my use cases. I’d been thinking about getting a fancier mobile phone that could also play MP3s, but, in the end, this was a better, cheaper solution.