Today I took a look at the Rasberry PI website and found this video:

It demonstrates XBMC – another free media centre software solution – running incredibly well on hardware that costs $25/$35 (depending on model). I am in awe at what the Raspberry project has achieved, and will forgive the annoyance that had I waited a few months I could have saved myself > £150.

This project has drawn the attention of the media – I discovered it care of The Register – for trying to rekindle computer & electronics hacking (in the true sense of the word) as a hobby. I have little doubt that it will accomplish this and spawn a major community much like the Arduino has.

One of the advantages that this has over the Arduino is that with the $35 model there comes ethernet, HDMI and USB onboard, far simplifying things for people who just want to get going. An ethernet connection makes a lot of sense when it’s likely that people will be using these as frontend devices, or setting up networks of them to communicate and do really cool things.

I’m really looking forward to getting my hands on one, but with the initial batch of just 10,000 units likely to sell out quickly, it may be a while before I can. I sit waiting for the store to open anyway.

Update:

Bit-tech have a good overview of what the Raspberry Pi is all about.

The downside to the SqueezeBox devices is that the quality comes at a price, one which is impossible to justify at the moment. However, it happened that the following year O2 were having a fire sale of their Joggler device. I snapped one up for the bargain amount of £50 with the intention of using it as a home automation controller.

Well, the automation dream also comes at an even less justifiable cost and so the Joggler has been sitting idle in a drawer waiting for a project to bring it back to life. Thanks to the UKHA mailing list it now has a purpose. My Joggler has been reborn as a budget SqueezePlayer having followed some really easy steps.

With it connected to my surround amp, I can now stream music from my existing SqueezeBox Server and even control it remotely with a web browser. One less bit of idle kit, one new feature, and at £100 less than it would otherwise cost.

The Joggler is a popular device for customising, and there are Ubuntu builds available for it (rather than the onboard O2 OS). If you want to play with one, they are no longer available for sale from O2, so you will need to look on eBay or similar.

So, for people who just can’t wait I’ve decided to upload it here: killerlight2-2.0.1.

Yep, after far too much procrastination, the successor to my first WordPress theme is here.

It has taken a week of evenings to convert it from a layered Photoshop design into HTML and CSS. The previous version of KillerLight was based on the code of the K2 theme, and ended up being heavily customised. This time around, version 2 is based upon Thematic and very little in the way of HTML changes has been made – just a few more wrapping divs here and there. This should lead to a very robust theme.

Gone is the animated header background, at least in this version. It caused far too many complaints and confusion, although I still think the idea is sound provided the animation is subtle.

I’m going to submit the theme to WordPress.org’s themes directory soon, and once approved (fingers crossed) it should be easy for people to find and install into their WordPress v3 site.

More information can be found on the Idea Cog website, where information about the theme is being hosted.

EDIT: Until the theme is available on wordpress.org, you can find a download link on this post.

Last year in the run up to Christmas, I found the best gingerbread I had ever tasted, being sold by bakery chain Cooks. I liked it so much that I bought a batch for everyone at work to enjoy. Unfortunately there wasn’t any of the same this year, so I decided to give it a go myself.

The key to trying to match those sold by Cooks was going to be the mix of spices – their dough didn’t contain just ginger – and baked consistency, as they were nice and soft.

Fortunately, pretty much the top result in Google was a great recipe that allows for soft or crispy results and involves lots of winter-associated spices. The only issue was liquid molasses is hard to come by on this side of the Atlantic, but granulated molasses – basically a very soft dark brown unrefined sugar – seemed to do almost as good a job.

The result was delicious, and now my sister wants me to teach her how to make it!

Some people don’t stop at making delicious biscuits, as gingerbread can serve a purpose as building material too. Ever seen a gingerbread house? Bet you’ve not seen one like this (as seen on Instructibles):

Surprisingly few people have heard about Umbraco, despite it running some very well-known websites, including Microsoft’s ASP.Net site – now that’s got to be a great endorsement!

Umbraco is an open-source Content Management System which runs on the .Net 4 platform. There is a very vibrant community behind it, where you can go if you ever get stuck.

If you’re entirely new to it, I would highly recommend going on at least the Level 1 training run by Doug Robar. This course starts from the basics, and at the end of the 2 days you should be able to build an Umbraco site from scratch. A word of caution though – if you’re not technically minded, you could struggle. This is a course for web designers and developers, not content editors. As far as I know, there isn’t any formal training for content editing, but it’s so easy that those who are building a site should be able to train the content editors in a short amount of time.

You can go further into the powerful depths of the CMS if you are an ASP.Net developer, by attending the Level 2 course run by Darren Ferguson. This is an intense course covering amongst other things the Razor syntax support which is being pushed as the primary method for adding functionality to templates (macros, in Umbraco terminology).

I attended both of these courses a couple of weeks ago, and it was a very friendly and intense learning experience. It left me very excited to start working with Umbraco and the Umrbaco community, so much so that I have ported the Idea Cog website to Umbraco (release pending – I’m just doing some more testing and changing the site a little).

So, I can now proudly show off my certification badge:

Note: the courses run by Doug and Darren are UK-based, but there are trainers all over the world. Also, my training was in London, but there are other regional training sessions available. Keep an eye out on their sites for details of the next training sessions.

Installation

The Interface

Project Planning

Scheduling

Hopefuly at some point I’ll find the time to update the Idea Cog website with these videos.

… just got to wait that little bit longer

I decided the weekend before last that I can’t continue trying to promote Foresight without having some business cards to give to potential customers. Given that I’m trying to get the software known on a budget of effectively zero, word-of-mouth and hand-to-hand promotion is forming a key part of my initial strategy.

Designing stuff is always fun, but designing a business card is also difficult. It’s something that will give a lasting impression within seconds of it being presented, must contain lots of information in an attractive manner, and most importantly of all it must be correct! Unlike digital media that I work with on a daily basis, in print the ink has a tendancy to be permenantly etched into the paper stock.

I decided to keep my cards quite simple, but also made them serve a dual purpose. Not only do my cards have the name of the business and my contact details, but they also remind the recipient of what my flagship product is and what it’s about.

I also decided to only include online contact details – email address and website URL. These are certainly sufficient for most people’s needs. I didn’t include a phone number because for one I don’t currently have a dedicated business line (I’m working on that at the moment), but also I have a day job that I plan on keeping for the forseeable future and so wouldn’t be around to answer it anyway.

I ordered the cards from moo.com, having found them through Top CashBack (see my earlier post for details). They have a brilliantly designed site, with a well-built submission process. They also have order tracking so I was always able to check on my order.

The cards arrived today, 3 days ahead of the estimated delivery date. I’m really pleased with them, and the card they are printed on gives a real feeling of quality – all important when trying to promote one’s wares. They aren’t cheap though, at £10 + P&P for 50 cards. Those cards will very quickly disappear with my initial upcoming ‘friends & family’ marketing/awareness campaign.