Recently I’ve been doing a tonne of work with Google Compute Engine, Google’s equivalent of Amazon EC2 and S3. It’s good, very good, and I’ll write up more about how we’re using it at a later date. All interactions with your Instances (boxes) is through the gcutil program, which is very neat and clean, but also (behind the scenes) basically SSH and the GCE REST API, so pushing and pulling filesis really just scp etc....
I bought a cheap and cheerful weather station a few years ago because it was on offer in Maplins (yes, I shouldn’t be allowed to go the on my own). Seeing what the weather is up to is interesting enough, but generating graphs and tracking over time is much more interesting. Luckily, the weather staions wireless display had a USB socket on the side and with a little Googling it turned out to be not too difficult to get working....
A few weeks ago Joel Gascoigne,a chap who I’ve really come to admire since I first ran across him 18 months ago wrote a brilliant blog post about building an excerise habit. I’m yet to get regular exercise into my routine (I will, I’ve identified the slot in the day), but it reminded me of a post I wrote years ago about having a daily routine. Over the intervening years my routine has changed, and I thought it was time to rewrite the post....
I fell in love with timelapse films as a child. There really is something magic about watching plants growing in front of your eyes, or seeing landscapes grow and evolve right in front of you. Creating timelapse films used to be the preserve of the professionals with hugely expensive kit, but no longer. I’ve been making use of an amazing open source project called Canon Hardware Development Kit I’ve been producing timelapse films for the last couple of months....
For a few years I’ve been interested in reducing my environmental footprint, and the footprint of my business. Working from home this naturally means reducing the amount of energy my home is using. The first step on this road is measuring how much energy you use, and to a certain extent being aware of how much energy you’re using will lead to you reducing the amount. To this end I bought a Wattson a few years ago, a really beautiful energy monitor....