DARnet Andy Roberts

Flamenco Flashmob in Spanish Bank

2012-05-26T05:55:07Z

“Encouraged by the recent events surrounding Bankia, into whom the government is injecting billions of euros while the Spanish population is plunged into misery, we wanted to join the many criticisms against this theft.”

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Flamenco Flashmob in Spanish Bank

Action Research Cycles MediaWiki Template

2012-05-22T09:43:12Z

We need to keep better tracking records for the various types of ongoing experiments that are constantly getting set up as part of daily online life.

That’s a problem I’m trying to solve, and the aim may be to have an action logging app that covers this kind of documentation eventually, in order to manage all those spinning plates while on the move, I’m talking mobile now, but in the meantime we came up with the idea of using MediaWiki templates to create structured project pages incorporating multiple cycles, on the intranet and other wikis.

MediaWiki templates provide a consistent style, even if it does look a bit blocky, and can be used to prompt for missing data, to make sure everything gets put down in words, figures and dates. Links and images too.

There are two ways of passing specific data over from the project page to the Template itself, one is using parameters that are referenced by position – 1,2,3 etc and the other is to used named parameters and I think I’m going to try using named parameters for the Cycle template. See there, I’ve already modularised the system by plumping for nested templates with the Cycle Template being called a number of times within some kind of overall Project Header template. They may not actually be nested in practice, but simply chopped together on the calling page but we’ll see about that later on once we get to the coding stage.

Action Research Project MediaWiki Template

The Project template describes the project in terms of an area of online activity to be worked on and a stated intention for improvement.

To start with I’m suggesting the following specification

DARproject $Domain, $Aim, $Strategy to test, $Notes Other variables to take into account

using the above 4 variables to define the project, we next move on to look at individual cycles:

Action Research Cycles MediaWiki Template

DARcycle $Cycle number, $Action to be taken, $Date actioned, $End date, $data collected, $Observed Results, $Reflection, $Conclusion, $Next Action to try

So that’s what I’m up to today, using Mediawiki templates to try and prototype a system for tracking distributed action research projects better online.

Update on Progress with DAR Templates

I’ve got the basic templates up and working using the specification outlined above, tweaked just a little to use positional parameters for the first two variable in the Cycle template, and named parameters for the rest. Rather than nesting templates inside each other, I’ve plumped for a simpler system of just calling the Header then instances of Cycle then the Footer from the content page, so I now have three separate templates which work together. The result is as intended.

Here’s a screenshot from a fictitious example which shows a rudimentary colour scheme and other visual indicators to try and make the functioning of the system as intuitive as possible

The next stage now is to start using the prototype templates for a small but real project as soon as possible and see how it goes.

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Action Research Cycles MediaWiki Template

Embedding Videos from Facebook

2012-05-19T11:00:44Z

If your video camera operator (thanks to Linda) has turned their apparatus sideways, the resulting portrait styled video works better uploaded to facebook and embedded than it does on youTube.

As discovered over on http://andyroberts.me/havering-folk-club/the-rowan-tree-song-at-haverfolk-for-cloudstreet-guest-night

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Embedding Videos from Facebook

Mid May Time Capsule

2012-05-16T07:42:42Z

Here’s the mid May time capsule including photos from the Kew temporary garden outside the British museum, goslings at Alexandra Lake, Wanstead Flats and the London Orbit Tower.

Last year the themed garden from Kew at the British museum was Australia, with mostly the dry regions of Australia represented, because that’s what the site has been used for in previous years to best advantage, eg the South Africa garden. This year it’s going to be North America and I believe the installation is already well underway. They brought in some impressive rocks too.

Australia Garden at British Museum

Taken May 12, 2011 at 9:51 am

The memory can play tricks when it comes to thinking that the seasons are advanced or retarded, but the time capsule provides evidence. Clearly there were Greylag Geese goslings up and about around the Alexandra Lake this time last year, and at about the same time I counted 42 Canada Geese goslings. This year at just after the same date, there are 34 Canada goslings so far, and no sign of any breeding Greylags yet. Also no mallard ducklings and very few coots chicks spotted so far.

Greylag Geese and Goslings

Taken May 13, 2011 at 11:42 am

Greylag Goose Tongue

Taken May 14, 2011 at 11:23 pm

It’s taken almost the full year but the Orbit Tower is now officially completed after having been started well before this time last year apparently. The structure is controversial as ever, not least because of the mystery surrounding how the public will be able to climb the tower. It’s going to be open during the 2012 London Olympic Games, and it seems like there will access via general tickets to the Olympic Park, which cost £10 but then recently it was announced that Orbit Tower Tickets will cost £15 and it’s not totally clear whether this is in addition to the Park tickets, but I suspect that to be the case.

The Orbit Tower 12th May 2011

Taken May 12, 2011 at 12:16 pm

The Orbit Tower 12th May 2011

Taken May 12, 2011 at 12:16 pm

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Mid May Time Capsule

WordPress Child Themes Installed in One Click?

2012-05-14T12:46:35Z

I’ve been requested to make a tutorial about how to install WordPress child themes so here goes.

WordPress Child Themes Explained

A WordPress Child Theme is a Theme which inherits some or most of its workings from an existing theme on the same installation. It’s like your own copy of another theme, a fork, a duplicate, but still relying on the original theme for many things.

Why you need a Child Theme

The reason why you need a child theme is so that you can make changes to the theme files, such as editing the stylesheet or adding code into the Header or Footer files, which won’t be overwritten if and when the Parent theme is upgraded.

If you understand Cascading Stylesheets ( CSS ) you can make changes and additions to the stylesheet which customise or improve the appearance of your site. You may also need to add bits of code into the header or footer files in order to call a script which can’t be done with a plugin, like Tynt or Crazy Egg for example. Or you might know just enough PHP to be able to go through the main files reducing the number of database calls to speed up your site by replacing the generic with the specific. If you don’t use a child theme then you run the risk of losing all your customisations when the parent theme is updated, or else getting stuck left behind with an out of date version of the main theme’s code.

How to do it

To make it as easy as possible I’m suggesting the use of a plugin to create your child theme, but for now, I don’t believe there is a way to do everything ( including the creation of new theme files) entirely within the WordPress dashboard yet, so you may still need to complete one or two simple steps using either the filemanager in the cPanel dashboard at your webhost or using FTP.

The plugin is called One-Click Child Theme and you can find it here: http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/one-click-child-theme/

Install the plugin, activate, and then navigate to Dashboard, Appearance, Themes

With the theme you wish to create from active, you should now see an additional Option next to Widgets and Menus called Child Theme – see screenshot below:

So now you click on the link “Child Theme” which creates and activates your new child theme for you, after asking you for a name and description. Your new child theme will also have the link “Child Theme” but don’t click on that ever, or else you’ll create a grandchild, not really a good idea.

If you now go into the WordPress theme editor, Dashboard, Appearance, Editor you’ll see that there are only two files available with the new child theme – rtl.css and style.css
These are stylesheet files that call back to the parent theme, and it is by editing these files that you can add your own cascading styles for altering the appearance of your site and much more.

If you need to change other files such as header.php and footer.php, then you need to copy the parent files into the folder which has been created on your WordPress server at /content/themes/

Make a note of exactly what your child theme folder has been named, then go down into the original themes folder.

Select the file you need to copy, eg footer.php in the example in the screenshot below, then select the “Copy” action at the top. In the destination path box, overtype the parent name with the child name and press Copy. The copied file will now appear in the list of available files in the theme editor, where you can begin your customisations.

There are other plugins available, some of which claim to offer file copying options during the child theme creation process, but none have ratings and are untested by myself. If you have had success with any of these or any questions, please leave a comment below.

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WordPress Child Themes Installed in One Click?

HMS Ocean Helicopter Warship at Greenwich

2012-05-22T11:53:03Z

There’s a bloody great helicopter Warship moored in the Thames at Greenwich!

When I surfaced at Greenwich on Thursday, there were two remarkable ships on view. The newly reburbished and reopened Cutty Sark is looking great now, with all the scaffolding and stuff gone, so you can see the glass building that surrounds the bottom half of the hull as it should be seen. With a slight lengthwise curve to the roof, the old ship has an impression of movement, more like she’s back sailing on the water than when it was just sunk in a darkened concrete hole of a dry dock.

Lynx helicopter

And out on the river Thames itself, before embarking the motor cruiser to see the Cable Car Crossing and the Thames Barrier, the scene is dominated by an enormous grey warship. From the waterside, the shape of HMS Ocean is disorientating. The superstructure is asymetrical, and the main hull looks like it’s been sliced lengthways, revealing two big holes at the side. Seeing the platform jutting out on the port side, it looks a bit like a traditional aircraft carrier, but it isn’t. It’s a helicopter ship, carrying eight Lynx helicopters there to patrol the no fly zone during the London 2012 Olympics.

HMS Ocean at Greenwich

According to information I looked up later, there are both Army and Navy Lynx helicopters onboard, as well as serving as a base for anti terrorist units during the period of the Games. Greenwich is used to seeing large Navy ships moored in the Thames, such as HMS Illustrious last year.

Combined Operations badge

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HMS Ocean Helicopter Warship at Greenwich

London Cable Cars Crossing The Thames

2012-05-11T08:16:49Z

It was back in 2010 that I reported the London Cable Car Thames Crossing may go ahead, and now here it is. stretched over London’s River Thames between North Greenwich ( The O2 Millennium Dome) and The Royal Victoria Docks for the Excel Centre, the ‘Emirates Air Line’ consists of 34 cable cars suspended 50 metres above the river taking 10 people each. That’s up to 2,500 passengers an hour, equivalent to 50 buses or the hourly number of people passing through the nearby Blackwall Tunnel by road.

The slender suspension masts were erected last month and after weeks of testing, the gondolas have now been attached and can be seen slowly passing each other in the videos and photographs I took from the deck of a cruise boat en route to the Thames Barrier yesterday.

So the cable car gondolas are in place and operational, the next question being will the service be fully tested and open to the public in time for the London 2012 Olympics starting in less than 100 days time?

For the duration of the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics the Emirates Cable Car Crossing will help to transport spectators and athletes between two Olympics venues: The O2 dome (renamed North Greenwich Arena for the Games) where gymnastics and basketball will be competed, and the Excel Exhibition Centre, temporarily(?) home to combat sports.

But what about after the Olympic Games are over – the legacy? Will enough Londoners find a cable car more useful than the Jubilee Line, DLR or buses on a daily basis or will it become little more than a compliment to the Orbit Tower, a visitor attraction for tourists and photographers?

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London Cable Cars Crossing The Thames

Queen Elizabeth 2nd

2012-05-09T10:01:15Z

Queen Elizabeth 2nd, a photo by AndyRobertsPhotos on Flickr.

I must have been in a funny mood when I stopped to photograph this damp patch on the pavement just because the shape of it jumped out at me for looking a bit like the Queen’s head. It’s a phenomenon called “Pareidolia” which I’ve written about before in evidence-of-life-on-mars-and-figures-found-in-rocks Pareidolia is when a vague or random image is perceived as recognisable. The old ink blot phenomenon beloved of psychologists in old films and comedy. Maybe you can’t see the face at all? It’s not quite as obvious as the previous example, the face in the rock:

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Queen Elizabeth 2nd

At The Bastille In Paris for Guitar Strings

2012-05-08T12:00:09Z

Seeing pictures of young Socialist Party supporters celebrating their Presidential Election victory in Paris at the Bastille, reminded me of the few occasions I visited the Bastille myself.

Paul Beuscher la librairie musicale de Paris

When I lived in Paris the only time I ever came out of the Metro at Bastille would have been to go to the big music shop, Paul Beuscher. It’s still there today, not covering quite so many shop fronts, and specialising more in pianos than guitars, but still there. The first time I went on the advice of somebody who had told me it was the best place to buy replacement guitar strings, because you could buy singles instead of having to buy a new set every time one broke. Breaking strings was an occupational hazard, we didn’t have portable amplifiers in those days, played purely acoustically, so there was a tendency in noisy corridors or streets to get maximum volume by hitting the strings hard. You know that if you go just a little bit too far a string will break, but every so often you get carried away and it happens. I was asked very recently why I don’t cut off the ends of the strings like most guitar players do when restringing, and it’s for that very reason. If a string breaks near the bridge, which is the most likely place, you can sometimes put the same string back on again, by retrieving the little nipple end that’s fallen inside the hollow guitar body, threading the end of the string through the ring, tying a knot in it and then tightening the string back up to playing tension again. But you can only do that if there is enough leftover string beyond the machine head to pull back through a couple of inches at least. If it works, then that’s great – you can carry on playing the same pitch without having to go away and find a replacement. Of course you could always carry a set of spares around all the time, but that would have required a certain organised resourceful lifestyle which just wasn’t possible in the 1970s! I had more than most, though, which meant that other guitarists often asked me if I could lend them a spare D string or more likely a top E in passing. I couldn’t afford to do that very often at all of course, otherwise it would have just been me all the time having to make the trek to Paul Beuscher’s music shop at Bastille to replenish everybody else’s supplies.

The Mazet Paris

One occasion was a more sever emergency than just a string break. I had a guitar stolen from underneath the pinball machine in the cafe Mazet. Having the means of earning a living suddenly disappear is quite a scary position to be in. As luck would have it, the music shop had a big sale on which included a bin full of broken guitars at next to nothing prices. After rummaging around I was able to find an Epiphone six string guitar that was only damaged by a large split on the side of the body. So it was perfectly playable and the sound quality seemed oddly unaffected by the broken wood too. A snip at 150 French francs, equivalent to about £15 then and maybe about £150 in today’s money. Musical instruments and most other thing were generally more expensive in France than in England, particularly so in Paris. Still are. Mid range guitars are probably quite a bit cheaper now than they were then, you could probably buy a playable guitar brand new and undamaged for the same amount, it wouldn’t be as good as my old Japanese built Epiphone though. A few years later Epiphone moved production of their guitars from Japan to Korea and the build quality suffered. Now they make cheap guitars in China, nothing to do with the original Epiphone. I kept and played that old broken Japanese Epiphone for many years afterwards, until the fixed bridge broke and I didn’t get around to having it fixed, what with the broken side as well. Then somebody persuaded me to sell it to them, which I should never have agreed to. Nearly all the guitars I’ve ever sold, I wish I still had. That’s life.

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At The Bastille In Paris for Guitar Strings

Red Bush Spiced Tea

2012-05-06T17:05:34Z

If you drink tea instead of coffee because the day is getting later and you don’t want coffee to keep you awake later when you go to bed, well did you know that a cup of tea contains about a half as much caffeine as a cup of instant coffee anyway? People who enjoy a nice cup of tea tend to carry on drinking several or many cups a day, so the total caffeine intake can become the equivalent to drinking two or three cups of coffee in the afternoon and evening, which is asking for trouble right?

I don’t drink beer and wine very often these days, and I’ve never enjoyed fizzy sugar drinks so I started drinking herbal teas decades ago of various sorts, and some are really good but only in small doses. Then I discovered the Rooibos or Redbush tea, branded as “11 O’Clock” or “Tick Tock” which is a caffeine free herb tea that actually tastes more like black tea than the green herb and fruit concoctions, and quite soon becomes an acquired taste that is actually more satisfying and thirst quenching than black tea, breakfast tea, indian tea, tea tea etc. So it’s good news that Rooibos is actually good for you with lots of antioxidants, and not in any way bad for the health.

Now rewind a decade or two and somewhere in East London I discovered Palanquin Spiced Tea. If you’ve ever ordered masala tea in an Indian restaurant you may be familiar with the idea of pungent spices boiled with tea, usually boiled with the milk and sugar too. Palanquin were the first to make it work as a tea bag, and not by any means as a pale imitation of the real thing. You can get other spicy teas, such as Celestial Seasons Bengal Spiced, and the range of Yogi teas but the balance is all lop sided to my taste, whereas Palanquin gets it right. The only problem was, well two problems – availability was patchy. You could find Palanquin spicy teas in East London supermarkets for a while, but you know how fickle they can be with local products (Palanquin is now made in Essex) and being based on a black tea, you can only drink so many cups a day without getting overcome with tannins and caffeine, especially of you let it brew for a bit too long, in which case it just gets stronger and stronger. But now Palanquin have started blending Rooibos or Red Bush tea as well as the standard black tea, and red bush doesn’t do that. You can leave the teabag in the cup for half an hour if you like and it doesn’t get that stewed taste at all, it just goes cold. And when you’ve drunk the tea you can pour more boiling water over it and it makes a perfectly acceptable second cuppa. Roibos is everywhere now and there’s really little or no reason to drink black tea anymore, well maybe after a Turkish meal or something in a little glass.

But now for everyday tea drinking you can get red bush spiced tea from Palanquin and that’s just about the ultimate perfection as far as I can taste, if you can find it. Or order online one day when the website ordering system is up and running properly.

http://palanquin-tea.com/

Red Bush

Caffeine free

Palanquin Red Bush Tea, with its many positive health benefits is a great choice for health conscious people.

Red Bush

Cinnamon

Ginger

Cloves

Black Pepper

Cardamom

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Red Bush Spiced Tea

How To Eat RAW Chickpeas (Garbanzos, Chana, Grams)

2012-05-05T17:09:10Z

You don’t have to boil chickpeas for forty minutes or more to make them edible, you can eat them raw if you just allow them to go through a natural process that converts the inedible dry starches into tender sweet tasting legumes.

Raw Hummus with Sprouted Chickpeas Recipe

Sprouted Chick Peas And Raw Hummus

I won’t witter on about my record player again today, although the novelty of having one working still gives much pleasure, no I’m going to indulge another interest of mine – food.

The food is sprouted chickpea hummus.

I’ve been making raw hummus from sprouted chick peas regularly for months now, and the recipe has settled down without much in the way of variation. It’s easy enough, nutritious, cheap and tastes great, so why tamper with an almost perfect recipe? Today I discovered a small improvement through the use of brown chick peas instead of the usual light coloured ones. I tasted a few of the sprouted brown chick peas whole before mashing them up and the flavour is stronger, more like that of fresh green peas and less starchy, so that was promising and the resulting hummous didn’t disappoint either. I don’t seem to have any photographs of my home made sprouted chick pea hummus and I don’t really do recipes with measured ingredients lists and separate methods, because that’s not how I cook so I’ll just list the contents and explain the minimum necessary.

The main thing I suppose is getting the chickpeas to sprout with a close to sprout with a close to 100% success rate. Soak overnight first and most of the next day, so about 16-20 hours is the kind of time, as long as the dried peas have finished swelling up. It’s best to do a small quantity and then start up another batch a day or so later, rather than have too many at the same stage at once. So I use a glass jar, with the dried peas filling about 10 % of the jar, filled with water. The chick peas then swell to fill about a quarter of the jar, and I find that laying the jar on its side prevents swelling peas from getting jammed in against each others, which is not the effect you want. They need to be able to move of their own accord if they want to. OK, so once soaked they need to be rinsed in cold water and the easiest way to do that is in situ, using a piece of muslin over the neck of the jar, fastened in place with a rubber band. That’s the best way to sprout stuff, in glass not plastic. The sprouts are rinsed again about twice a day, and are kept in the daylight in front of a window during the daytime, then I move them away from any cold draughts at night. This way I seem to be able to keep up production all the year around whereas previously I used to have trouble from around November onwards.

The sprouts are ready to eat raw in just about 2 days after soaking. Once the little white shoots are clearly visible on nearly all the chick peas, and before they are much longer than about one centimetre. You CAN let them grow on a bit bigger but they don’t improve and there is a risk of something going off so I think it’s best to halt the process and either consume or refrigerate the sprouts once the conversion of storage into growth has occurred and you can see the root shoot starting to move out from the little globe of transformed starches.

So that’s how to sprout chick peas, now for making the hummus.

Place the sprouts in a food processor, I use a moulinex mini chopper but anything with chopping blades will do. Don’t use a liquidiser goblet though, they just burn out when you add the tahini and everything slows down. Trust me, I tried several brands and anything less than a super expensive industrial grade liquidiser won’t last long under the demand.

Add cloves of garlic. To give an idea of quantities, I’m talking about enough hummus for two people’s substantial lunch here and that comprises half an ordinary coffee jar of sprouted chick peas, three small cloves of garlic or one big one. That sort of thing.

Start up the chopper, or ‘blitz’ the mixture I think is the current terminology for engaging kitchen power tools…. to roughly chop the peas and garlic together. Add a generous quantity of olive oil and chop finer, almost to a paste now. The rest of the ingredients are a good dash of cider vinegar or white wine vinegar and some lemon juice. These are interchangeable really, so if you run out of lemons that’s not an obstacle. Black pepper, just a pinch of salt – commercial hummus is much too salty, for shelf life purposes. A pinch of cayenne pepper or chilli powder. A teaspoonful of sesame seeds. The tahini itself goes in last, after giving everything else a good blending, about a tablespoonful, including some of the oil if your sesame paste has separated a bit, which is quite normal with some brands. The ‘light’ tahini is perfectly acceptable too, but seems to just work out a bit more expensive because you tend to use more of it.

Now then, after adding the tahini and starting up the mixing machine again, everything will slow down and start to gum up because tahini is thick and sticky. Don’t carry on very long at that stage because that’s how you burn out motors. The trick now, is to start to add a small quantity of water, then a bit more, until the mixture frees up and blends to a paste, still with a bit of coarse texture though and then that’s perfect. Done.

So that was my recipe and technique for making sprouted chickpea hummus, an ideal raw food vegan nutritious and tasty meal or snack food.

With thanks to Dave’s Experiential Kitchen years ago for getting me started, and to Ian Tindal for the suggestion of sprouting brown chick peas.

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How To Eat RAW Chickpeas (Garbanzos, Chana, Grams)

On My Gramaphone Record Player

2012-05-04T06:59:39Z

I finally got around to setting up my gramaphone record player deck again yesterday after having a bit of a clear out during the week, to make some space. I’d mean meaning to do this for goodness knows how many years now, but you know how it is…

The Rutles

On the deck left over from whenever I last used it, and thus used as the test record to see if it the replugging was all working: The Rutles.

Great to hear old favourites like “Cheese And Onions” again. “The Rutles” album sounds just like an affectionate pastiche or a lost Beatles album, using similar sounding orchestration and composition techniques to those found on Sergeant Pepper, Abbey Road and other great Beatles records.

“The album contains some obvious send-ups of Beatles numbers such as “Ouch!” (“Help!”), “Love Life” (“All You Need is Love”), “Piggy in the Middle” (“I Am the Walrus”), “Doubleback Alley” (“Penny Lane”) and “Get Up And Go” (CD reissue only — “Get Back”). However, its real tribute is in its subtly layered blending of elements from many classic Lennon-McCartney tunes.” http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rutles

After searching for the sleeve in which to put the vinyl record away, I found there was already another copy of the disc inside, which means I had two copies for some reason, and the one I had played was in much worse condition, which may have accounted for the slightly disappointing sound quality coming from the undersized loud speakers I had connected, and the way the record deck amp was connected through a mid range compact HiFi system.

Steve Tilston

Next up, after hearing Steve Tilston play one of his oldest songs “Normandy Days” in Maggie Boyle’s kitchen I was looking for his first “An Acoustic Confusion” album but instead out came “Songs From The Dress Rehearsal” his 3rd album, from 1977. Despite not having heard the songs for a decade or more, most sounded welcomingly familiar and beautifully recorded. After the worn out Rutles LP, this one sounded much much better with Steve Tilston’s voice in his mid 20s I think, mature and confident, always a technically impressive guitar player, here with very sympathetic arrangements. Now the advantage of analogue sound over compressed digital could be heard loud and clear with gorgeous acoustic bass, harmonica, voice and guitar separation. The single fold album cover has one slight problem though – the sleeve notes are printed over a black and white photograph and this makes some of them unreadable! This part is clear though:

“All the songs were recorded as played with only the minimum of overdubbing and I think a very good live sound is the result, totally approaching a performance and not at all like the vivisections that I’ve found myself taking part in before – in fact the session was so relaxed you can almost hear me smiling on some of the songs”

http://www.stevetilston.com/discography/songs-from-the-dress-rehearsal

Keith Tippett Group

I’ve just booked to see Keith Tippett Octet at @vortexjazz on Wednesday. A great UK #jazz musician.

— Patrick Hadfield (@patrickhadfield) April 23, 2012

I was chatting to Patrick Hadfield at the London Bloggers last week, who had a ticket to see Keith Tippett, still gigging apparently, which put me in mind of the great album I own called “Dedicated to you but you weren’t listening”. I decided at the time this would be the first record to go on my new set up, but it ended up 3rd but but no means last.

Wow. This album intrigues, thrills, delights and builds up into some really big sounds. Modern Jazz from 1971 with several members from early Soft Machine ( Robert Wyatt, Elton Dean, Roy Babbington) incarnations performing, well rehearsed, improvised and enthusiastically performed. This was all surprisingly familiar too, it’s funny how music memory survives so well.

http://www.mindyourownmusic.co.uk/keith-tippett-biography.htm

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On My Gramaphone Record Player

Freely Distributed Research Data Coming Soon?

2012-05-11T17:22:10Z

This is the problem: Academic research findings are currently distributed mainly in expensive journals and publications. These are hard to find with restricted access and either unavailable online or only accessible by subscription via another expensive paywall. Often the source data is omitted. This reduces the number and type of people who can benefit from scrutinising the research data and limits the progress of science to the detriment of all.

It isn’t totally clear who is mostly responsible for this state of affairs, but the most likely culprit seems to be a combination of academic publishing houses, university institutions and an elite of the most established academics themselves.

Recently a campaign has been born to try to free up the results of published research from out of the hands of the worst exploiters.

Elsevier — my part in its downfall.

Elsevier is not the only publisher to behave in an objectionable way. However, it seems to be the worst.

http://gowers.wordpress.com/2012/01/21/elsevier-my-part-in-its-downfall/

while other blame the University establishment:

it’s not publishers. It’s the universities themselves.

http://scholarlykitchen.sspnet.org/2012/04/12/the-academic-spring-shallo-rhetoric-aimed-at-the-wrong-target/

And now here comes news that none other than Jimmy Wales, the man who took the credit for Wikipedia and a well known Ayn Randian, is being drafted in by the libertarian Conservative/liberal British government to help “make all taxpayer-funded academic research in Britain available online to anyone who wants to read or use it.” And it’s not just the abstract, summary of findings or the written up research conclusions which are intended to be distributed in an accessible form either:

“One of the big opportunities is, right now, a journal article might be published but the underlying data isn’t and we want to move into a world where the data is published alongside an article in an open format, available free of charge”

http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2012/may/01/wikipedia-research-jimmy-wales-online

There has also been a move by one of the big funders of research to back Open Access:

But science in general isn’t complete until it’s been published, and for the Wellcome Trust we want to maximise the impact of the research that we fund. That’s why open access is so important; research isn’t finished until it’s been published, and by publishing the results of the research that we fund in open access formats it means that as many people as possible are able to have access to the literature without any hindrance at all, and that of course will ultimately maximise the value and the outcomes of the research that we fund.

http://www.wellcome.ac.uk/stellent/groups/corporatesite/@msh_peda/documents/web_document/wtx063305.pdf

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Freely Distributed Research Data Coming Soon?

iPad Roaming with 3G or WiFi

2012-05-02T14:07:38Z

You do see a number of iPads or other tablets out and about on the tube and at meetups, but nowhere near so many as the smartphones which are everywhere. I wonder how many are tucked away in people’s bags though, and do come out when they reach their destination, or at various top off points for coffee etc. On the whole though the iPad is probably most at home semi permanently based either in the workplace or on the sofa. That’s when it’s getting hammered as a useful day to day tool for looking anything up or showing somebody something. It’s just that you get so used to being to do those two things whenever prompted, that being stuck somewhere without any connectivity starts to feel like having your ears cut off, or some other body part.

Luckily I opted for the 3G specification when I ordered my iPad a year or so ago, and it came with an O2 micro sim card which allows it to connect like a mobile phone wherever there is cellular network coverage, which basically means almost anywhere at all except my mum’s house, or places where I like to hide away on holiday sometimes, which is not necessarily a bad thing. That’s not a free service though, so you either have to sign up for a regular monthly contract, again like a phone, or else pay £10 or £15 for one month which I’ve ended up doing only for about one third of the past 12 months. Yes! I spend a lot of time staying at home. Oh by the way, that’s a recurring monthly charge so you have to remember to cancel it again if you only want to take it out for one month. I forgot once. The data allowance sounds a bit low but it’s actually quite generous and I never exceeded it, it’s just badly worded so you can get confused between a daily or monthly allowance of 1Gb. You can watch a few youTube videos a day ( if the reception is good enough) without going over, perhaps not if it’s every day, but my pattern of usage tended to be to activate one month and then use it heavily for just one week.

The access speed with 3G can be frustratingly slow though, so it’s always better to connect the iPad to WiFi if you can. And that’s getting increasingly easy in population centres with many retail places and public service buildings providing some sort of free WiFi. Wetherspoons and Starbucks come to mind immediately, but more and more independent pubs and cafes have it too now. Businesses often provide a public wi-fi service for their visitors too, but one of the most convenient services is the BT FON system. This uses domestic homes broadband routers to grant access to each other when out and about. So if you have a BT broadband service at home, when you are out somewhere in a residential area, you can nearly always find a WiFi connection that you can log into using your own broadband account. How cool is that?

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iPad Roaming with 3G or WiFi

time capsule April May iPad and Podcast

2012-05-01T11:44:56Z

I get sent these ‘time capsules’ about once a fortnight, depending on whether or not I uploaded any interesting photographs about one year ago, and they usually serve to remind me of something worth revisiting, even if it’s only to get an idea of how time is passing where different events fit together. The one below shows that I’d only just got a new iPad and had started to experiment with photo manipulation apps such as tinyplanet, and a very basic wireframe drawing app. There’s also a mindmap created on the iPad, and a picture of the Theatre Royal theatre bar in Stratford, where I’d played a few songs that ended up on one of my podcasts.

tiny cars #TinyPlanet

Taken April 26, 2011 at 4:57 pm

Radio

Taken April 29, 2011 at 10:07 pm

Some things I can’t do on the ipad 2 yet.

Taken May 3, 2011 at 3:28 pm

showoff

Taken May 6, 2011 at 10:46 pm

Knees up Theatre Royal Podcast #46

andyroberts.me/podcast/from-the-theatre-bar-theatre-royal…

Taken May 8, 2011 at 9:01 pm

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time capsule April May iPad and Podcast

Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy

2012-04-30T10:29:36Z

You can see the Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy building from the train between Manor Park and Ilford, on the mainline from Liverpool Street Station to Shenfield, or intercity to Ipswich and Norwich. I saw the earthworks when it was being built, but didn’t know what it was at the time. Now there’s an enormous black shed over the site, with large red lettering which reads “Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy” The words are so big I couldn’t even fit them into one photograph with my camera set to widescreen!

Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy building

So what is do they do there exactly? Well, pretty much what it says on the tin, but what they omit to say in the title is that it’s all linked to the Crossrail project.

The establishment of a Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy (TUCA) is central to Crossrail’s delivery plans and its legacy to the industry.

What is TUCA?

The Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy (TUCA) is a purpose-built training facility that supports the key skills required to work in tunnel excavation, underground construction and infrastructure.

By building and establishing TUCA, Crossrail is contributing to the development of new qualifications and Health and Safety standards across the industry.

Crossrail is working with industry, professional bodies and other organisations with a requirement for skilled underground workers, to ensure that the facilities and training at TUCA are aligned with the needs of the industry.

from http://www.crossrail.co.uk/delivering/skills-employment/tuca/#.T55h6sRYuco

Crossrail itself is the huge engineering project to build a new underground east west railway line underneath London, connecting Heathrow and Paddington through to the City and Docklands, and out through Manor Park and Ilford to Shenfield. Its the beginning of an extra deeper, faster layer to the London undergound system which should really have begun in the 1970s like the RER in Paris. The first trains running on part of Crossrail are due in 2018 with a full through service sketched in to commence in December 2019.

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Tunnelling and Underground Construction Academy

Fibre Optical Broadband

2012-04-29T11:47:38Z

I’ve had a new fibre optical broadband and telephone service installed.

The BT Openreach vans have been busy in our area for months. The fibre optic cables were laid under the streets and up the telegraph poles, ready for anybody who wants to take advantage of the higher data speeds available with fibre optics, and to future proof homes connectivity. I’ve always had a pretty good service through the copper wires though, and since reliability rather than speed is my most important criteria, I elected to remain with my current sluggish and expensive but very reliable broadband provider. Well I would have done if I could have, but they had been taken over by another company, and then another in turn. So I was left on a legacy system yet again.

Finally, BT made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. Six months totally free broadband and landline phone usage, including up to £5 worth per month calls to mobiles, no setup fee, no line rental, no charge for the modem, free to opt out again at any time. Supposedly it’s a trial to test the new voice over fibre service. Whatever. I notice Sky TV are offering similar broadband deals so it’s probably more of an enticement, because we all know how powerful the force of inertia can be, once you’ve plumped for one service or another.

Fibre Optical Broadband

I’m happy to have my house cabled up with fibre optics, all the way to the modem. The old copper wire system is still there, and working as I type, so I have a choice of two broadband connections, luxury. The fibre optic system is about two or three times as fast for downloads and browsing, but more like six or ten times as fast for uploads, which is great when I have a series of half a gigabyte music videos to upload to YouTube for example. Even running in the background, the three or four hour uploads used to degrade the general internet access quality for everybody else on the network, but that’s no longer the case. And I can watch live streaming HD TV channels such as the BBC iPlayer at the same time as uploads and other stuff going on simultaneously.

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Fibre Optical Broadband

This Week at Loughton – 19th April 2012 – Fiona McBain – PLUS – Andy Roberts – PLUS – Ollie King

2012-05-11T17:23:28Z

This week at Loughton 19^th April 2012:

Fiona McBain
At last we have her to ourselves – Fiona has a rich voice – which has been much requested!
PLUS
Andy Roberts
Veteran 70s contemporary and folk songs in a variety of styles. Andy also puts all his own songs online and performs a weekly(ish) podcast from his website
PLUS
Ollie King
Stunning Melodeon playing! Listen here

Door £2

See the full calendar on our website at www.loughtonfolkclub.btck.co.uk

Just a few weeks to Loughton Folk Day on 19^th May 2012. With over 26 acts we’re just finalising the running order. Latest details here

Loughton Folk Club meets every Thursday from 8pm at Loughton Club, 8 Station Road, Loughton, IG10 4NX, it’s next to Brown’s Garage, close to the high road for bus stops, and a few hundred yards from Loughton tube station. There is parking front and rear.

Look forward to welcoming you on Thursday!

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This Week at Loughton – 19th April 2012 – Fiona McBain – PLUS – Andy Roberts – PLUS – Ollie King

April time capsule

2012-05-13T07:50:53Z

April 9^th to April 23^rd, 2011
A selection of my most interesting photos from one year ago.

Congo Cockatoo

Taken April 9, 2011 at 10:14 am

Orbit Tower

Orbit Tower growing up at the 2012 Olympics site in East London.

Taken April 10, 2011 at 12:11 pm

Terrarium

Taken April 13, 2011 at 3:41 pm

Carcassonne

Taken April 14, 2011 at 8:12 pm

Standing Up Workstation

Taken April 22, 2011 at 11:13 am

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April time capsule

Chicken Noodle Stir Fry April time capsule

2012-05-13T07:52:32Z

Chicken Noodle Stir Fry – Steamy

Chicken Noodle Stir Fry – steamy

Taken April 5, 2011 at 5:19 pm

Chicken Noodle Stir Fry

Taken April 6, 2011 at 3:51 pm

Chicken Stir Fry Ingredients

Taken April 5, 2011 at 4:25 pm

Chicken Noodle Stir Fry

Taken April 5, 2011 at 5:20 pm

Wanstead Park

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Chicken Noodle Stir Fry April time capsule