Ross Brown dot net

It’s been a while since I posted anything here (I bet I’m not the first blogger to write that phrase…) but at least I have an excuse! Sophie Grace is now over 4 months old and weighs over a stone - she’s been taking up most of our time and energy recently (but in a really good way). She’s developing loads; she can hold her own head up, focus on things and she has recently started to chew things. Everything and anything gets a good chewing - fingers, toys, clothes… But the best bit is she has started smiling and laughing - it’s just the best feeling in the world when she smiles at you. I will put up some more recent pics when I get a chance.

We’re planning on taking a trip to South Africa to see Candi’s family next year. We’re hoping to time it when her cousins are off school and the weather is warm. It’ll be really nice to get away for a bit, we haven’t had a holiday for nearly 2 years now and we’re feeling the stress a bit.

My brother Jed has resigned from his 9 to 5 and started his own business. I helped him out with a website (he came up with the company name all on his own) - JB Marine. I hope it goes well for him. Sounds like he’s got enough work to keep him busy at the moment.

I stumbled on this Reading travel info website (I can’t actually remember how - so many links, so many clicks…). Leaving aside for a moment the fact that the site looks like it was designed in a single sitting by a colourblind 4 year old, there is actually some useful content on there.
Because of the appalling site design, it’s actually not possible for me to say with any certainty whether these links will actually work, if not you can get to them all yourself from the main page. Oh, and it seems to be very fussy about browsers, I couldn’t get it to display properly in Firefox and had to resort to using IE (but I’m OK now).

• This link should take you to the Trafficam Reading page, which has a map of web-enabled traffic cameras around Reading town centre. They’re updated every 5 minutes and whilst it’s a shame they’re not live action, they should give you an idea of current traffic congestion. Click on the purple camera icons, currently they are all working except for one.
• There’s another webcam page for the M4 motorway cameras between junctions 5 and 13.
• There’s a page showing town centre car park information. Interestingly, it has a facility for forecasting car park usage at a given date / time in the future. As an experiment, I asked for figures for midday on 23rd Dec and it told me there were close to 2,000 spaces available. I’m highly sceptical about that, to say the least!
• Perhaps more importantly, there’s also a document explaining the current proposal for knocking down the flyover near the Oracle and making the IDR a one-way traffic system - Horizons: The future of the IDR [pdf]. If you’re quick, there’s still time to get yourself along to one of the public consultations. The last one will be held in Reading Town Hall on this Friday 25th Nov, 10:00 - 19:00. I might take a wander down there myself.

Tags: transport announcements Reading travel

Edit: It seems the same webcams are available on the BBC Berks website.

A day after it was announced that London won the 2012 Olympic bid, the city is plunged into chaos by a series of explosions. Reports are still coming in, but it appears the London Underground was rocked by a series of explosions which caused the whole network to be closed down. There was also at least one explosion on a packed London bus. Two are feared dead, many more seriously injured.
The disruption is massive; roads are closed, the underground is paralysed, mobile phone networks saturated, mainline stations shut, even the Reuters UK site is down due to being overwhelmed by traffic. People at work in London are being told to stay in their buildings and await further instructions, but it’s unclear at this stage whether the incident is fully under control. Hospitals in the capital have been put on alert.
Technorati tags: London

Technorati Profile

In the early hours of Sunday 6 March, thieves used a stolen JCB digger to drive into the front of the Goring branch of HSBC, in a successful attempt to steal cash from the ATM. Have a look at how they turned the front of the bank into a pile of rubble as they made off with “a substantial amount” of cash.
Apparently there have been a number of similar incidents recently in South Oxfordshire and Police are appealing for information. I also hear that the local Somerfield shop suffered a similar raid as they had one of those “we’ll charge you £1.50 just for taking your money out”-type ATMs. And who said nothing ever happens here?!
If you do know anything, you should contact Det Con Harrison at Didcot CID via 0845 850 5505, or Crimestoppers.

Flash, eh? Don’t you hate overlong, pointless site intros or when an entire site is made using Flash? Worse than that are those hugely irritating adverts that appear all over the page, obscuring what you’re reading. Bleah!

That said, I do enjoy a good bit of flash. There’s only a couple of games worthy of a mention IMO - A Case Of The Crabs and the Hitchikers Guide To The Galaxy. Of more interest to me are the Flash music-making toys, of which there are many. Here’s some of my favourites:

• Weird horsey noise maker. Click on the horses to make music (well, sort of)
• I Know Where Bruce Lee Lives - yes, you can use all those awesome Kung Fu sounds against music from Bruce Lee films. Complete with it’s own sequencer!
• Turntables.de is a nod to old school hip hop (complete with MC!)
• But, out of all of them, Dub Selector 8 takes the top prize. Click on ‘play selector’ at the top when loaded then move your mouse around and click things for a truly interactive dubby experience.
  Awesome
  There are some more at the same site, but number 8 is definitely my favourite.

BTW, if you hate Flash adverts as much as me, you should download the Firefox Flashblock extension. And Firefox, of course

I’ve been the proud owner of a TiVo for 2-3 years now - it’s a great example of how home technology should be done, whilst at the same time it’s a source of great frustration to me because TiVo have kind of abandoned it - in the UK at least (and the company seems to have lost the plot, to boot). I picked mine up for £99 just before TiVo effectively disappeared from UK shop shelves when Thomson stopped making the set-top boxes. Murdoch’s SKY+ has been cleaning up ever since, even though it’s far from perfect and only works with a SKY subscription (you can’t use it with Cable, for example).
Well it looks like the old comparison of TiVo vs. SKY+ discussion is becoming a moot point, as the recent insurgance of media centre (or ‘center’, if you prefer) computer systems shows no signs of slowing. Choice and functionality is blossoming and prices start very low indeed. If you have an old Xbox lying around, you could opt for the open source (GPL) XBMC (Xbox Media Center), or the recently-released Microsoft Media Center Extender For Xbox. Bear in mind that you can pick up a brand-new Xbox for under £100.
Failing that, if you have a spare PC, you could either go for XP Media Center Edition 2005 or something a little more exotic. There are quite a few options available - ShowShifter (currently £29, down from £99), Freevo and Media Portal (both Open Source), or you could just ‘roll your own’ using Windows XP, Linux or even splash out on a dinky Mac Mini.
But looking at what enterprising PC users have done over at Mini-itx.com, it struck me that an ideal media centre project for me would be to take my old, broken, unloved VHS VCR and build a PC into it. The case is black and looks quite smart (gloss black metal, not grey plastic) and could easily house even quite a large PC motherboard. I’d have to think quite carefully about the cooling (don’t want it making too much noise in the living room) but if I do it right, the DVD drive could pop right out of the cassette slot! With the addition of the Quintessential media player and the WinLIRC plugin, I could even use the original remote control. (Thanks to Will for that suggestion, BTW)
It’s seriously tempting….all I need now is a Dremel!

Now this is undeniably cool in a retro-chic way - an olde worlde Gramophone is available in kit form from Japan. It records on any soft(ish) surface, they’ve used old CDs in the photos. I also really, really like the idea of recycling old coffee cups for use in an Edison phonograph. Could make piracy more interesting! “Pssst - wanna buy the latest Oasis plastic cup?”