I was thrilled to see that Kinsale has kicked one off too and they had 103 kids at their first one. Well done!

Annnd I’ve just spotted that they now have one on Sundays in Blackrock Observatory.

If you are anywhere even vaguely close to either club I would encourage you to go with your children. I am absolutely convinced that early exposure to “computers” in a creative setting (not as consumers reading web pages or playing games) gives children a swathe of new opportunities in life that they would otherwise miss out on. They may never be programmers but they may become designers, engineers, scientists or artists.

This is also absolutely not a thing only for middle class, technical parents. The clubs have plenty of spare computers and people there who can help/guide the kids. You just have to be there to mind them

The contact details for the City one are here. It is on every Saturday morning in the NSC in Mahon.

Kinsale details here.

The Kinsale one is on this evening at 7pm in The Trident Hotel. Please contact them if you are intending to go so they have an idea of numbers. They use an SMS system to gauge numbers each week where you just send Y/N in reply to a text message.

Blackrock details here.

Munster Programming Training

I should also mention the granddaddy of them all, the brilliant Munster Programming Training course which has been going for many years in UCC. Coder Dojo founder James Whelton attended it himself so it must be good! It is targeted at Transition Year students as preparation for participation in the “All Irish Schools Programming Competition”. Full details here.

As I have been officially obese for the past few years, I was in my regular new year weight loss mode and wanted to do it in a healthy way. The book sounded like an intriguing approach so I bought it on Kindle.

Unlike the relentless quackery that surrounds diet and diets, this was written by a man who worked his entire career as a doctor and researcher. His credits include the NIH and the Cleveland Clinic. I have to say, he makes a very strong case. If you can’t face the very very long book, grab a copy of the Forks Over Knives documentary which summarises his and other doctors’ thinking.

The core argument is that the gigantic increase in meat and dairy consumption is to blame for many of our ailments and these problems can be stopped and even reversed by switching to a much more veg-based diet. Basically like we used to eat in every society before we became rich.

So for kicks and giggles I have decided to try a mainly plant-based diet for the next “while” (duration TBD). I haven’t given up meat and dairy completely but I have cut down hugely.

In the past two weeks I have had no red meat, no eggs, cheese once, some weekend rashers/sausages and a smattering of turkey/chicken. The only dairy I get is a splash of milk in my tea. I tried both rice milk and soy milk and they are gross. A soy latte is an abomination.

On the veggie side, I have had lots of veg (duh), lots of fruit, seeds, wholemeal breads, porridge, hummus, salad and pickled veg. On the pure veggie side I have had Dee’s Spicy Bean Burger (not bad), Linda McCartney’s veggie sausages (surprisingly spot-on both for texture and taste), Brendan’s Vegetarian Burritos (nice taste but pure slop) and fried tofu with a ras el hangout coating (texture is too squishy).

Things I cannot stand about most veggie food in cafes etc are the ubiquitous bell peppers, aubergines and courgettes. Everything tastes the bloody same.

Tomorrow I’ll do a middle-eastern type thingy with falafel which I have become addicted to.

On the recommendation of several veggies I got the Veganomicon cookbook which I have just started and is a good fun read.

Plan for next week is more beans, more texture and less chicken/turkey. The only thing I’m not giving up is the Friday chicken curry. I did a butternut squash curry last week and I’m sorry, but no.

Texture remains an issue with all the non-meat proteins. I’m going to take trip into Quay Co-Op on Saturday to see what else they have. Seitan maybe? I’ll also see what else Tobairin in Bandon has (they do the burritos and the tofu).

Funnily enough I’m doing more a vegan thing than a vegetarian thing. Who would have thunk? Let’s see how long I last.

Another update in a few weeks.

However, it it critically important that anyone who relies on their standard roof aerial to get RTE, TV3 etc knows what is happening on Dec 31st 2012. Whilst there have been Saorview flyers in the post and the Dept of Communications has put together this horror of a web-site, I have severe doubts that those whom it will affect most are even aware of the analogue TV shutdown. My biggest concern is that older people are the ones most likely to be still using non-digital TV and they simply won’t know that the switchover is happening.

I strongly recommend that if you know anyone who is not on Sky/UPC/etc and is still using a roof aerial to get their small set of channels, let them know they need to move to a digital receiver in the next 12 months. In fact they can move now, since the Saorview service is working really well.

Given the dire financial situation in the country, any extra cost on people is going to be a strain so I was thrilled when Barry from tvtrade.ie contacted me about the Xoro DTV-M5 Digital TV Receiver. He had read my review of the Ariva and wondered if I would review their inexpensive Xoro box for them. At €49 for a fully-functional Irish Terrestrial DTV box, of course I said yes. He shot me down a review unit for free a couple of days later and I’ve been beating it up for the past few weeks.

Short aside: I need to clarify the difference between “Saorview” and Irish DTT. You will see a lot of boxes on the market like the Xoro that are labelled Irish DTT or Irish Digital TV but which are not Saorview-certified. You shouldn’t worry about this in the slightest. Either the boxes obey the relevant standards that Saorview uses or they don’t. If they don’t, you simply return the box for a full refund. It’s a bit like saying your PC is certified to access the internet. That’s why we have Standards in the tech world. The key thing with Saorview is that the box can decode MPEG-4 video and can display the Programme Guide (EPG). The Xoro does both perfectly.

First the basics. The really nice thing about Saorview is that if you have an alright RTE aerial signal now, you literally unplug the aerial lead from the back of your TV, plug it into the Xoro box, plug a Scart or HDMI lead from the Xoro back to your TV and you should now be receiving RTE, TV3, TG4 and some other stations (not UK) in crystal clear digital. You also get a bunch of Irish radio stations in digital too. It really is that simple. In fact, even if you have a buzzy RTE signal, it’ll probably work perfectly and fuzz-free for Saorview.

Now on to the Xoro box itself. It’s tiny! I love getting neat units like this which can fit into the smallest nook or cranny. The front panel has just Power, Channnel+, Channel- and USB. I really wish all the box manufacturers would put the USB on the side or the back but most have it on the front. More on USB later.

This picture shows its size compared to an XBOX (excuse the messy cable setup, I moved it quickly between rooms last night so the kids could watch the Toy Show):

Usage is dead simple simple and the box goes from off to showing a TV programme in a couple of seconds. You can channel change up/down as you’d expect and Saorview has a 7-day Programme Guide, so you can see what’s coming-up on-screen. You can use Scart (for older TVs) or HDMI (for LCD/Plasma) to connect to the TV. It handles all the various picture resolutions up to 1080p but I’m pretty sure nothing on Saorview is at that high-res yet. There is teletext handling there too but as it’s not 1987, I didn’t bother check. The remote is fiddly compared to a Sky+ one but is fine and you get used to it in a few minutes.

Like all Irish DTT boxes, the TV channel list is as follows:

• RTE One
• RTE Two HD
• TV3
• TG4
• 3e
• RTE News Now
• RTE Jr
• RTE One +1
• RTE Aertel

Radio is as follows:

• RTE Radio 1
• RTE 2fm
• RTE Lyric fm
• RTE Radio na Gaeltachta
• RTE 2XM
• RTE Choice
• RTEjr
• RTE Gold
• RTE Pulse
• RTE Radio 1 Extra

The bit that really impresses me with the Xoro is the USB/PVR. Basically you plug a portable USB harddisk into it and you now have the ability to pause/play/record/timer-record anything that is being broadcast. The overall setup is similar to Sky+ but obviously isn’t going to be as slick. Unlike the hell that is the Ariva 120, it all works really well including getting the programme name right (helllllo Ferguson, can you sort that out?).

I did have issues with one harddisk but it turns out that this is a very common problem. Harddisks of around 500GB capacity that are USB-powered struggle to get enough juice from many USB ports. In fact my troublesome one doesn’t work on any of my PC’s USB hubs either, I have to use a split-cable for it. The same split-cable trick worked on the Xoro. In general (not Xoro specific) you should either use a smaller less power-hungry HDD, which are hard to get, or use one that has it’s own power supply. Also these set-top-boxes prefer to format the harddrive themselves. It only takes a second.

If you have a bunch of media files (movies, tv, music), you can copy them onto the harddisk and the media player on the Xoro should be able to handle them no matter what the format. I tried an SD AVI, a 720p x264 MKV and a 1080p AVI and they all worked perfectly.

There’s not much more to say. It’s a very impressive piece of kit at a shockingly low price and no-one should have any hassle figuring out how to use it. If anyone asks me to recommend an Irish DTT box from now on, I’ll point them to the Xoro.

And please, let older relatives and neighbours know that the switchover is coming and they need to get a DTT box. In the UK they are doing information days and a travelling roadshow across the country to let people know. What are they doing here?

13 minutes really just left me wanting more. Given that the Late Late cannot compete for “celebrity” guests with the UK chatshows, how about more time on fewer meatier guests like this from now on?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sc_i-5FivE

One fantastic outcome from yesterday’s blogpost was John Handelaar and others pointing out that I’d given up too easily on trying to extract the river level data from the Bandon FEWS web-site. And it turns out they were right. A small amount of messing around and I was able to extract out the water level and the date/time.

I’ve been meaning to do more with Google Fusion Tables for ages and this seemed like a good opportunity. It’s like a Google Docs online spreadsheet but with knobs on. So  you can populate, query, visualise etc using an API. I decided to use that to make the FEWS data available to everyone. Of course then I ran into the horror that is OAuth2. But a fair bit of messing and stomach cramps later, and I got that working too.

So we now have the hourly Bandon river level data available to use for whatever purpose your fiendish minds can come up with. I’m thinking trends, analytics, charts, maps, mashups with weather data, other alerting methods (email, Twitter DMs, iPhone Alerts), a Facebook Fan Page, widgets for other Bandon-related sites. What other ideas do you all have?

If you want to embed that live graph on your own site or blog, just paste this code in:

<iframe width="500px" height="300px" scrolling="no" frameborder="no" src="http://www.google.com/fusiontables/embedviz?gco_allowHtml=true&gco_displayAnnotations=true&gco_wmode=opaque&gco_chartArea=%7B%22top%22%3A%2230%22%7D&containerId=gviz_canvas&rmax=250&q=select+col1%2C+col0+from+2191951+&qrs=where+col1+%3E%3D+&qre=+and+col1+%3C%3D+&qe=+order+by+col1+asc&viz=GVIZ&t=TIMELINE&width=500&height=300"></iframe>

You can export the data to CSV and play with it offline in Excel etc or you can go fancy and query it live over the API.

e.g. this API call grabs all of the data in one go (you can test with your browser): https://fusiontables.googleusercontent.com/fusiontables/api/query?sql=SELECT+ROWID,+riverlevel,+datetime+FROM+2191951

But of course you will be able to do far more complex queries than that, once we have a decent body of data. See the Google Fusion Tables Guide here.

Note that I was forced to use that awkward date format to make the timeline feature in Fusion Tables work correctly.

I don’t know if anyone wants the data or will find a use for it but this first step was critical to enabling them to do so. Hopefully this will be a trigger for others to liberate locked-in non-private data on other public sector sites.

Or it could be an opportunity for County Councils to take this tough time we are all living in, where Capex projects are few and far between, and start a Data Liberation Project in every Council department in the country. Nothing I did over the past 24hrs cost a single solitary cent apart from people’s time. And based on recent conversations with old college friends, time is one thing a lot of Council Engineers have on their hands. If any Council people are interested in reading more they should have a look at the links in this post I did at the start of the year.

Comments? Thoughts? Improvements?

I have had a few thoughts on other things we could do with that live river-level data for the community. Web-apps, Twitter integration, Analytics, Trends etc etc.

However, despite several communications, I have been unable to get any response from Cork County Council about getting access to the live data. All the OpenData initiatives around the world (including Ireland) are obviously passing them by.

Even something as simple as a Twitter Account could be useful and interesting. So I created one called @BandonFEWS. Of course then I had to get at the data despite the CoCo’s silence. I dug around the Bandon Flood Warning site but it is built in such a way that the data is not machine visible or scrapable.

I discussed this problem with fellow tech-person Gordon Murray of Murrion Software just up the road in Carrigadrohid and of course he had a solution!

Gordon’s company has a very smart SMS service which can both send SMSes and receive them in order to act upon them. By signing up his service’s “phone” number to the FEWS SMS alerts, he can then do something with them. In this case, he takes the SMS, interprets it and then posts it automatically to the @BandonFEWS Twitter account.

Nice one Gordon! If you have any need of inbound or outbound SMS services, give him a shout.

Now if only Cork CoCo would give us access to all of the live data, we could do some really interesting things for the community for free. Anyone got any influence in there to make this happen?

Until yesterday I had only used the satellite bit which gives you BBC etc. It works very well except for the lack of a programme guide. I recorded Doctor Who onto a portable hard-disk using it yesterday! But I really wanted to try out the terrestrial bit. The other night we watched Masterchef Ireland using the RTE Player on a 37″ TV in a browser, full-screen. Not recommended if you value your eyesight or sanity. Sidenote: Dylan surprisingly non-infuriating but I had a big belly laugh when I heard a guy who serves steaks on paving slabs calling someone’s food “contrived”.

Our old roof aerial hasn’t been working right for years and I wasn’t sure where the problem was. So yesterday I cut the cable in the attic near the ingress hole and wired it straight into a old TV I hoisted into the attic. It confirmed that the aerial itself was banjaxed but there was no way I was doing a Rod Hull on it. I grabbed a pair of rabbit ears and then tried them to discover that I could get traditional analogue RTE1 and RTE2 reasonably ok with a bit of noise but not TG4 or TV3.

I wondered if that signal was enough to get the new Saorview Digital Terrestrial working on the Ariva box so I brought the box up into the attic and amazingly it worked instantly! Perfect digital picture on RTE1, RTE2, TV3, TG4 with full on-screen programme guide too. I had some interactions with people on Twitter last night who confirmed that even if your old analogue signal is poor, you may still be able to get Saorview.

Unfortunately the rabbit ears don’t have enough welly to feed a splitter box so today I’m popping into Dwyers Electrical to get this aerial and I’ll fit it in the attic. This type of aerial may be necessary for a lot of people in West Cork due to all the hills. But check using your old aerial first. Hopefully this will work with the splitter so we can have old analogue TV in most rooms and then Saorview in the room with the Ariva box. If they drop in price even more, we may buy another one.

So if you are tired of buzzy noisy old-school analogue TV in West Cork or if you are tired of paying the Rupert tax and can live without Sky Sports, you can save yourself a fortune by going down this route.

I have been very bitchy about Saorview since it was announced. It has taken Ireland 13 years to catch-up with the UK’s OnDigital/Freeview. I worked in a company that talked to RTE about building a Digital TV box in 1998! Celtic Tiger my arse, more like Celtic fat tabby sitting in front of the fire for a decade, scratching its hole. But now that it is here, I have to say it’s very well executed. And €99 for that box is a complete steal.

The downside is that is doesn’t cover building rental but surely some joined-up thinker in the Council is already working on a deal with NAMA to get properties for rental at 10c on the Euro or less? What is the point of having unused empty crumbling buildings when they could be generating rental income and be maintained?

There is nothing even approaching hot-desking in Bandon. As I’ve written before, the lack of Fibre is a millstone around the neck of the town but at least 12 Mbs ADSL should be available to anyone near the exchange.

Based on my last post there is at least one NAMAfied office building in Bandon. Anyone interested in trying to do something with it? Maybe even some sort of Co-Working space?

Go on, you know you won’t be able to help yourself. I immediately zoomed into Bandon to see what was there. Surprisingly few properties actually.

Head on over to the site and click on any dot of interest to see what property it is. Some of the locations will be off as they rely on Google accurately converting text addresses to lat/long. Of course if we had a Post Code system in Ireland, we wouldn’t have that problem. What’s the current prediction for that? 2015?

The internet is one place where we see a wonderful synthesis of creativity in design and engineering. I believe you can teach anyone the basics of web development to a level where they can contribute in some way to web applications and mobile applications. Some of the greatest web-apps were built by self-taught people, not Computer Science graduates.

The key, again, is the word “creativity”. We need to take back ownership of that word from those we would traditionally call “the creatives”; artists, sculptors, authors and actors. Just look at something like Facebook and think about all of the people involved in the creation of that. Creative coders, user interface designers, product managers and Ops people all working together to build an amazing system which impacts 700 million people in a positive way.

Yesterday I attended an event which may be one of the most important initiatives ever in changing the mind-set of Irish parents. Cork Coder Dojo was put together by James Whelton and Bill Liao. You probably know that Bill is a serial entrepreneur but you may not know James. He just finished his Leaving Cert.

The Coder Dojo is a weekly meetup where young people can learn the basics of web development and build sites/apps with the help of the volunteers there. Yesterday was the first one and it felt to me like I was taking part in the beginning of something huge. The room in the NSC was jammed with kids of all ages and their parents. James gave a basic intro to some simple HTML and then he and others went around to help.

I was there with our 12 y/o who has just finished primary school. He is a geek but not a coder. We have built Google AppInventor mobile apps but he has never seen HTML. Within 20 minutes, he “got it”. We had fun embedding images and videos and changing colours. We also did some basic styling with CSS. The next step is to look at JavaScript and JQuery to make a site that does something.

The reason I feel James and Bill are on to something is that I could see many of the parents were not remotely technical. This is not geek parents turning their kids into programmers (well, except for me maybe ), this is smart parents understanding that their kids can re-build this country with their creativity and the right skill-sets. I was pleased to see that Simon Coveney popped in too.

Whilst I know that many secondary schools teach some basic web skills to kids, I think it has to start earlier and be driven by people who build Apps themselves. I see no reason why my 9 y/o or even 7 y/o could not learn simple development. They may never use it, but they will always have an appreciation for it. Maybe in some ways not that different to sending your kids to piano lessons.

The intention is that The Coder Dojo will be on every Saturday. I strongly recommend that you bring your children to at least one. Don’t worry if you don’t have a laptop, the guys have spares (and I can bring a spare too). They will also be rolling it out in other parts of the country.

Head on over to the site to find out the details and register your child. You can also follow them on Twitter. I’ll hopefully see you at the next one.

I’m really really getting sick and tired of this bullshit. It’s a miracle that you can still buy unpasteurised cheese in this country with these drones in charge. If I want to drink raw milk I damn well will and I won’t have some paper-shuffler using “safety” as a code-word for control, telling me otherwise.

The last time I had raw milk I was about 6 years old. It was straight from the cow in my Grand-aunt’s house. I didn’t really like it. But I’m bloody going out this week to see if I can buy some more.

Slow Food Ireland has a petition to try and stop these muppets having their way. I strongly recommend that you sign it before all of your rights to buy and eat what you like are taken away from you.

We really seem to be heading towards a world of zero responsibility and zero consequences with faceless bureaucrats deciding everything. The ongoing collapse of the European project shows exactly where that leads.

More than 63 businesses have signed up to offer deals and there is also the chance to enter Bandon’s Lucky Dip and win one of six vouchers worth €200, redeemable in any member business.

Bandon’s Young Ambassadors will be on the street both days, guiding shoppers to the best bargains and the free refreshments.

Come on down!

We continue to struggle as a small Internet business with 6 Mbs ADSL (512kbs up). If we were slightly closer to the exchange we might get 12Mbs. Those responsible for allowing Fibre connectivity to bypass Bandon have ensured that there will never be a technology cluster in the town. It was a catastrophic oversight and will damage the town for years to come. No business requiring serious levels of bandwidth can set themselves up here.

But even with Fibre in Clon, there are no Hot-Desks in the Technology Park. If you go looking for small business offices in West Cork you either find something over  a shop or you can have an entire building.

So I was thrilled to see that Bantry now has Hot-Desking in Bantry Enterprise Centre, supported by WCEB. You can rent by the month and get:

• Individual desk area – fully serviced and partitioned
• Access to broadband
• Direct dial telephone number
• Access to canteen facilities and Meeting Room
• Generous car parking
• Linkages to support bodies for start-up assistance

I really welcome this but there are a few small issues:

• Pricing is “on application”. This should be public and on a web-site somewhere
• No mention of what type of Broadband. It needs to be a lot more than ADSL
• It’d be better if weekly options were available too (and even drop-in daily rates)

Enquiries/Expressions of Interest should be forwarded to:

Cork County Council,
Economic Development Section, Floor 14, County Hall, Cork.
Tel: 021 4285560; Fax: 021 4343164
Email: development.section@corkcoco.ie

I’m going to contact them now about pricing/broadband and will update when I hear back. Obviously it is too far for me to go regularly but if it’s a success, maybe WCEB could look at some of the empty buildings with Fibre in Clon? I’d be down like a shot if they did.

And didn’t exactly take off like a rocket with only 3 posts in 2001!

2005 was the year I really got going when I moved from Blogspot to WordPress. Luckily I managed to import everything in the move.

Looking across various blogs, it looks like I’ve written the following in ten years:

• conoroneill.com: 765 posts
• argolon.com: 341 posts
• loudervoice.com: 199 posts
• web2ireland.org: 288 posts
• conoroneill.net: 345
• plus a bunch more scattered amongst random shortlived blogs

Let’s call it a nice round 2000 posts. I guess real writers would consider that a reasonable body of work.

Here’s hoping I keep it going for another 10 years!

My type of running is known, by experts in the field, as walking Last year I did the Courtmacsherry 10k, the Dingle Half-Marathon and the Galway Bay Half-Marathon. All done incredibly slowly and all tough. My dodgy ankle did not help.

My aim for Bandon is to shave at least an hour off my time. It’s not going to be easy since the route is pretty challenging due to hills. But that is balanced by the fact that the views are great. TBH I really didn’t enjoy the Galway race. Urban running, in traffic, even with sea views, cannot compare to something like the Dingle Peninsula. The Bandon run is in some of the lovely back roads between the Clon road and the Dunmanway road near the river. See below:

If you have never run before, why not go for the 10k route? It’s a great way to spend a morning and the pints taste mighty fine afterwards.

I believe the Dingle weekend is their busiest business weekend of the year. Let’s hope the same ends up being the case for Bandon.

Hopefully see you on the route. I’ll be the mentalist wearing these:

Love it or hate it, if you want absolutely up-to-date information on the General Election over the next few days then you have to be on Twitter. Don’t worry, for most of it you don’t have to setup an account.

So the main feeds you’ll probably be interested in are:

• #GE11 – This will be a firehose and only for total politics junkies. A huge percentage of Tweets about the election by everyone on Twitter will have this tag
• #CSW – This is much quieter and is specifically for Cork South West Tweets
• @RTEcorkSTHWEST – This is for RTE’s coverage of the count in Cork South West
• @RTE_Elections – Despite my many criticisms of RTE, this has been a brilliant feed of general election coverage
• General Election Candidates – This is Suzy Byrne’s list of 265 General Election Candidates accounts.
• General Election 2011 – A small list I created of people/accounts talking about the election

And finally, my little geeky project over at CurationByMe. It allows you to pop in a List like Suzy’s and then filter it by a tag. So you can see just #ge11 related tweets by everyone in a specific list, not everything they are saying. Unlike all of the other above, you do need a Twitter account to use it.

Any other hashtags, accounts or lists that people can recommend for Cork South West coverage? Radio stations, newspapers etc?

Please don’t abuse it, they are watching out for that.

Current stats for CSW are very interesting. I’d be very surprised if they match the outcome assuming that the number of remote mountain farmers on boards.ie is pretty small!

Future bonanzas will include €1 coffee days, Free Urru Cotton Shopping Bags , Massive Savings on Wines, Cookery Books, Farmhouse Cheeses, Easter Eggs, Lucky Dips and more.

Mmmm, latte.

I love seeing Urru making a mockery of the long-held belief that you can’t do gourmet in Bandon. Now we just need a few more really good restaurants.