Lurch of the eligible herring

Lurch of the eligible herring http://zimpenfish.posterous.com Most recent posts at Lurch of the eligible herring posterous.com Fri, 30 Dec 2011 13:47:38 -0800 Mac + Garmin ANT Agent 2.2.0 = Forerunner 310XT activities not transferring to Connect? http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/mac-garmin-ant-agent-220-forerunner-310xt-act http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/mac-garmin-ant-agent-220-forerunner-310xt-act If you've recently updated Garmin ANT Agent to 2.2.0 and your activities are missing from Garmin Connect, despite claims to the contrary in the status window, create a meaningless goal of type "Any Activity Type".

Connect-goal

That seems to free up the synchronisational confusion caused by "Could not download goals" (I had no goals) and get your activities transferred correctly.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Tue, 13 Dec 2011 08:30:21 -0800 Link dump from RSS backlog http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/link-dump-from-rss-backlog http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/link-dump-from-rss-backlog Apologies if I've covered any of these already.

http://laughingsquid.com/the-ultimate-hamburger-by-modernist-cuisine/
Mushroom? No chips? RUBBISH.

http://www.architizer.com/en_us/blog/dyn/35672/an-urban-emoticon-that-measures-the-happiness-of-cities/
Someone buy some EL wire and make a UA version of this please

http://www.bridgestone.com/corporate/news/2011112901.html
Yet more "airless tire" vapourware (see what I did there?)

http://www.loweringthebar.net/2011/12/the-homeland-security-snow-cone-machine.html
Anti-terrorist snow-cone machines

http://www.loweringthebar.net/2011/12/the-homeland-security-snow-cone-machines-were-also-over-priced.html
...are over-priced.

http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/12/funny-fruit.html
Fruit abuse

http://sutured-infection.tumblr.com/post/14015285437/craniopagus-parasiticus
"No, you have a big head"

http://circuitousroute.wordpress.com/2011/12/10/teabags-into-potholders/
Random word poetry

http://www.myinnergie.com/MCT/Default.aspx
This is just for David

http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/12/best-ad-placement-ever.html
When real-life imitates The Far Side

http://www.kuriositas.com/2011/12/goat-tower-caprine-condominium.html
Because goats occasionally need alone time

Dudley Moore was an awesomely talented pianist

http://enwandrews.tumblr.com/
Postcards from virtual worlds

http://undertheinfluenceoffood.wordpress.com/2011/11/30/banana-cranberry-bread-pudding/
Might try and make this at the weekend, it sounds lovely

http://www.facebook.com/note.php?note_id=10150415177928920
Making PHP go like the clappers involves magic, unicorns, and tracelets

http://mindhacks.com/2011/12/12/explore-your-blind-spot-free-ebook/
We've all got one; why not nurture yours?

http://comicsansproject.tumblr.com/
Logos reimagineered with Comic Sans

http://scienceblogs.com/pharyngula/2011/12/mommy_why_is_that_man_covered.php
Creationists are the dumbest of the dumb

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Fri, 02 Dec 2011 07:34:29 -0800 Dear Path (and other social networks trying to get my business) http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/dear-path-and-other-social-networks-trying-to http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/dear-path-and-other-social-networks-trying-to It's not that I don't trust you - I do - but I don't want to put my surname in. Most places I go by a single name that people know and love*.

Why insist on first name and surname? What's the rationale? It's not like it even has to be my real name since I can create new Paths with fake names.

Really, what's the point except inconveniencing me and jwz?

* people may not actually love it.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Tue, 29 Nov 2011 02:09:54 -0800 One day without Twitter http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/one-day-without-twitter http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/one-day-without-twitter I've not gone mad, the world hasn't ended, and I was slightly more productive than usual in that I managed to write some code for moving posts between Posterous sites and ... that all went horribly wrong.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Mon, 28 Nov 2011 06:45:00 -0800 Separation of Church and State http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/separation-of-church-and-state-ygiAx http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/separation-of-church-and-state-ygiAx

In a vain attempt to regain control of this blog, my instagram cross-posts have moved from here to zimpenfishtagram.posterous.com.

Thanks to Posterous for their posterous gem which made this a very simple task.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Mon, 28 Nov 2011 03:39:00 -0800 A Twitter-free week? http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/a-twitter-free-week http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/a-twitter-free-week

Trying to shamelessly copy @lipsticklori's idea of a twitter-free week and being scared at how embedded Twitter is in my life:

I'll still be sending my Instagrams to @zimpenfish_p which is possibly cheating but I can live with that.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Mon, 28 Nov 2011 02:50:55 -0800 Dogs must not poo butterflies http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/dogs-must-not-poo-butterflies http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/dogs-must-not-poo-butterflies Moved to zimpenfishtagram

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Sun, 27 Nov 2011 13:57:00 -0800 Makes the boys wink http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/makes-the-boys-wink-69984 http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/makes-the-boys-wink-69984 Moved to zimpenfishtagram

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Wed, 10 Aug 2011 10:02:25 -0700 Boxerchips clever box http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/boxerchips-clever-box http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/boxerchips-clever-box

P466

P468

P470

P472

P474

See the full gallery on Posterous

One piece, no glue.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Tue, 02 Aug 2011 14:14:00 -0700 Contrails http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/contrails http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/contrails

I've been running a webcam pointing at the sky to generate pictures and timelapse movies of clouds for a few months now. After a daft conversation on the Jabbers, I thought it would be interesting to see if some image processing trickery could be used to automatically spot contrails.

The answer appears to be "Yes ... but."

Using the LSD algorithm (entirely through their sample code, thank you) to detect line segments and some Perl to look for "pairs of lines which are close together, going the same way, mostly parallel, and a reasonable length", I have alpha 1 of "Contrail Spotter".

Unfortunately the false positive rate is too high. Rain and clouds easily confuse the algorithm. Tweaks will be made. More on that later.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Mon, 04 Jul 2011 04:33:48 -0700 Film types have turned up to pimp their movie. http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/film-types-have-turned-up-to-pimp-their-movie http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/film-types-have-turned-up-to-pimp-their-movie

via Tweetbot for iPhone

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Mon, 13 Jun 2011 03:53:53 -0700 What the helling hell? http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/what-the-helling-hell http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/what-the-helling-hell

P183

If I pay £1.39 for an offline RSS reader, the least I bloody expect is that it downloads things for offline reading.

How the hell did this pass App Store approval?

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Fri, 17 Sep 2010 15:06:00 -0700 Non-monotone timestamps in ffmpeg http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/non-monotone-timestamps-in-ffmpeg http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/non-monotone-timestamps-in-ffmpeg

Non-working:
rjp> ffmpeg -i VIDEO720pDD5.1.mkv -s 640x360 -vcodec libxvid -r 23.98 -aspect 1:1 -b 1200000 -acodec copy output.avi [...trimmed...] Stream #0.0 -> #0.0 Stream #0.1 -> #0.1Press [q] to stop encoding[NULL @ 0x101866c00]error, non monotone timestamps 12288 >= 122889kbits/s av_interleaved_write_frame(): Error while opening file

Working:
rjp> ffmpeg -i VIDEO720pDD5.1.mkv -s 640x360 -vcodec libxvid -r 23.98 -aspect 1:1 -b 1200000 -acodec libmp3lame -ar 128000 -ac 2 output.avi [...trimmed...] [...video happily encoding...]

It's the 5.1 channels which seems to cause the "non-monotone timestamps" problem.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Fri, 20 Aug 2010 06:25:37 -0700 Today's Song http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/todays-song http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/todays-song I just bought a laminator
I'm gonna laminate you
But I'll need to slice you up
And drain your bodily goo

First I'll laminate your lovely ears
And then your lovely toes
I'll have to laminate late at night
So no-one else will know

When I'm done, I'll have a break
And put you on my wall
Or maybe in a gallery
Or sold from a market stall

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Wed, 11 Aug 2010 09:04:00 -0700 Is this Mail or Byline being mad? http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/is-this-mail-or-byline-being-mad http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/is-this-mail-or-byline-being-mad

When emailing articles from Byline, if you accept a typing correction
in the "top" area, something weird happens.

Photo_2

The main content moves above the grey line, and the first letter of the original text remains. A minor bug but one that catches me every time since accepting the typing corrections is automatic by now.

Photo_1

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Fri, 30 Jul 2010 09:39:59 -0700 New Scanner Thursday: CanoScan LiDE 100 http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/new-scanner-thursday-canoscan-lide-100 http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/new-scanner-thursday-canoscan-lide-100 New Scanner Thursday introduces the CanoScan LiDE 100 - driver installation needed a reboot, the software is shockingly bad and you can't assign the buttons to do what you want (e.g. the "copy" button always needs to "print" at the end, you can't just use it as a "scan" button with different settings - exactly what I wanted it for) ...

... but the sci-fi book scanning workflow is now down to

place book on the platter
press the "scan" button
wait until the scanning is finished
remove book and go back to step 1

Because it saves each scan to its own individual file (and the auto-cropping is almost perfect) it's trivial to write a little shell loop to pick up new TIFF files, convert them to the right-sized JPEGs and move them to a "processed" directory.

Compared with the old scanner - place book, preview scan, size scan area appropriately, hit the "scan" button, enter a filename, wait for the scan, repeat as required - this is an immense improvement.

Mind you, if you want to do scanning with varying settings, the software will make you cry after two minutes, it's that awful.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Wed, 28 Jul 2010 01:31:58 -0700 Random code bump of the day http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/random-code-bump-of-the-day http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/random-code-bump-of-the-day Gruber released a new version of his URL matching regexp which seemed like it might be useful for my uri-find module (which needs splitting off from linkylinky since it's useful in its own right.)

Had a mild faff with implementing generic scheme support to do with mismatched brackets in the combined regexp but now you can select between Ruby's URI.extract and Gruber's regexp depending on your local preference.

At some point, I'll flip the live ribot over and see how things go.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Tue, 27 Jul 2010 15:38:20 -0700 This week's unreasonable mental perversity http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/this-weeks-unreasonable-mental-perversity http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/this-weeks-unreasonable-mental-perversity I have taken against the word "so".

Not entirely sure I could explain why except that it feels like it gives unwarranted weight to the conclusion which follows. As if the word itself granted power to the phrase - complete nonsense, of course, but I find that concentrating hard on avoiding the word also helps to concentrate my mind on the actual writing and, hopefully, over time improving it.

It's also horribly vague when used as a qualifier (this may irk me more than the previous explanation, I'm not sure.)

At school, we were told never to use the word "nice" to describe something because it meant nothing; it just sat there, a seeping empty void of description adding nothing but dead weight to your sentences.

I currently feel the same way about "so".

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Wed, 21 Jul 2010 08:39:22 -0700 Sounds like a useful course for me http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/sounds-like-a-useful-course-for-me http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/sounds-like-a-useful-course-for-me

http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/conversation/

Prior to the Dale Carnegie course I believed that conversation was a process by which I could demonstrate my cleverness, complain about what was bugging me, and argue with people in order to teach them how dumb they were. To me, listening was the same thing as being bored. I figured it was the other person’s responsibility to find some entertainment in the conversation. That wasn’t my job.

(via Instapaper)

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp Thu, 15 Jul 2010 08:19:19 -0700 Today's expensive lesson http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/todays-expensive-lesson http://zimpenfish.posterous.com/todays-expensive-lesson If you're going to use rsync with --link-dest for backups, make sure the destination directory is from a successful backup, not one that aborted halfway through or you'll waste lots of bandwidth downloading files you really didn't need to.

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]]> http://files.posterous.com/user_profile_pics/449056/avatar-body.png http://posterous.com/users/KB1K5bruwx rjp rjp rjp