Posts by jochta
Plugin Writer
0Fed up of the available gallery WordPress plugins for Flickr. They are either rubbish, crippled or needed so much rewriting that I might as well have written them myself. So I have. And it’s rather spiffing. It takes the JSON feed from Flickr and does some jQuery jiggery pokery to show a rather nice gallery. Look out for it soon.
Behind the Scenes
1OK, I know it looks like I’ve done nothing here for aaaaages. I’ve been busy doing some backend stuff. I’ve decided to move from Picasa to Flickr so I have a whole new set of gallery pages ready to be launched. Expect to see them very soon.
I need to keep my astrodiary up to date
Partial Eclipse
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We had some fun trying to spot the partial eclipse. The forecast was absolutely awful so I didn’t hold out much hope of seeing it, despite this I gathered together all the equipment we were going to need for the morning.
I was somewhat surprised when the alarm woke me to find that the skies were pretty clear, I could see Venus through some thin mist and several stars. Looked good for the eclipse. So I raised the family (some were more reluctant than others) and packed my solar scope, binoculars, camera, tripod etc. into the car.
The plan was to drive to Wittenham Clumps to watch the sunrise. However, about 0.5mile north of home we drove into thick fog. Undeterred we continued in fog right to the car park at the clumps. Hopeless. So we drove all the way home again and back into partly clear skies! We parked and ran up the footpath nearby into the field behind our estate and setup with just a couple of minutes to spare.
The Sun rose, partly obscured by thin cloud but I could get some photos, everyone had a look using the telescope and solar specs. Even a couple of passing dog walkers had a look! Shortly afterwards the Sun moved into thicker cloud and was lost from view.
Very pleased to have seen the eclipse, it was worth the panic! I’ve only missed one of the last six eclipses visible from home now which is a remarkable record for the UK!
Pretoria
0Arrived today in Pretoria for my mini work trip to Botswana. Being a Sunday and having suffered a night flight from London we’re not up to much! Walked the dogs this morning around the Sunnyside suburbs and past the Loftus World Cup venue.
Then we went to the one and only sight in Pretoria, the Voortrekker Monument. Erected in the 1930s/40s to commemorate the pioneers who participated in a migration between 1835 and 1854 called the Great Trek. This being a rather controversial aspect of African history the current displays are much more moderate than they used to be. It’s a huge slab of stone the main highlight being the amazing views from the top, even in cloud and rain! I’ve added some photos in the Botswana 2010 album on the photos page.
We’re being amazingly looked after by our hosts, had Italian for lunch and we’re having a braai (barbeque) this evening.
Train Conductor
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I’m hopelessly addicted. I managed to pick this little gem of a game up completely free from the app store when it was on special offer (now 59p). It’s a puzzler with a hugely simple mechanic. Direct the trains entering from stage left and right onto the correct tracks as indicated by numbers by their cabs without crashing. You direct the trains by creating tracks for them to use between the main lines using a swipe of your finger. Each train delivered scores you points, the more you deliver the higher the multiplier and the more points you get. One crash and it’s all over.
It starts off simple enough, three tracks and trains slowly chuffing onto the screen. But soon chucks in new gameplay mechanics, longer trains, broken tracks etc., to up the stakes. Each level takes place on a single day indicated by a Sun moving across a dial at the bottom of the screen. The length of day is fixed but there is a speed up button which will increase the speed of the trains so you can theoretically deliver more trains in a day. The problem is they move so fast you need to be quick to prevent crashes! If you deliver any trains to the wrong depot you will lose points so it’s not the end of the world. You will probably be doing this a lot at full speed on the harder levels.
Your total points tot up to unlock new levels. There are only five levels, with an Australian theme, in the game but you will need to play each one several times to unlock the next. There is a twist though. You can play the levels in the day or night and the night levels play completely differently as you have ghost trains to deliver that cannot crash, it’s faster and you again have gameplay tweaks as you progress through the levels. So effectively ten levels for nothing. There is a USA themed sequel also available (also 59p).
It’s a shame it doesn’t support Game Center (it does support Plus+) as it would make a good high score game to challenge your friends. Once you’ve completed all ten levels (which will only take a couple of hours) there’s not much else to draw you back to it apart from trying to beat your own high scores. There are ‘achievements’ as well, but without Game Center support they are pretty pointless. You can’t check which ones you have got without having a Plus+ account either.
Sonically and graphically it is very good indeed. Very apt little ditties play for each level, the graphics are crisp and the game controls perfectly. The game is brilliant for a quick blast as levels only take a couple of minutes and you will soon find yourself restarting again and again and before you know it tens of minutes have passed!
Give it a try, you might end up hopelessly addicted too!
Baby Guinea Pig
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We had a bit of a surprise last week when one of our newly acquired Guinea Pigs gave birth! The cutest thing ever!
We got the pair of female GPs at the beginning of October after our oldest ever GP passed away aged 7. One of them must have been pregnant as they have a long gestation period of 63 days and give birth to one or two mature young. Unlike most rodents baby GPs have open eyes, fur and are fully formed. They eat solid food almost straight away.
The video here shows baby following Mum around with Aunty chasing it from the house! They are all getting on fine though. We need to sex the baby soon to see if it’s a he or a she. We will then need to think about housing them as there’s no way we’ll get rid of it. Either a separate cage for a male and maybe a companion or a bigger cage if it’s female.
And we’d better give it a name!
Star Camp – Autumn 2010
0It was time for the regular Reading AS Star Camp in deepest darkest mid-Wales. We’ve been running these for 3 years now and we’ve had mixed success with the weather. One camp we had snow, one camp we drowned. But a few have been amazingly clear.
We stay on a farm that has B&B and camping. It does breakfasts and evening meals so ideal for not having to be too self-reliant. When it’s clear it is fantastically dark but when it isn’t we have a bit of a social with several bottles of red wine.
This autumn it was the latter! I just went for Saturday night as the forecast was promising and when I arrived mid-afternoon it was pretty clear. But during dinner the heavens opened and it rained on and off until around 11pm. It stayed stubbornly cloudy thereafter.
We retired to our rooms/tents. I happened to awake at 4.15am and stuck my head out of the flap of my tent and it was clear! Orion was right in front of me and of course I was already fully dark adapted. The Milky Way stretched overhead and the Pleiades blazed. I spent about 20mins taking in the sights but 4.15am is not a sensible time to be setting up telescopes and it was cold, the outside of my tent crackled with ice.
The morning was uniform grey so I must have been lucky to see a brief clear spot, the ground was white with frost. Disappointing that I didn’t get any observing/imaging done but still a good sociable occasion.
Fighting Fantasy
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Why did nobody tell me the Fighting Fantasy books were available on iOS? I used to love these books written by Steve Jackson and Ian Livingstone in the 1980s.
Maybe you remember them (of course you do!). The books were simple role-playing affairs where each page was a small part of the adventure and the reader takes control of the story. Reader choices control the path of the story by going to different pages depending upon various actions and outcomes. You used two dice to determine outcomes of battles and tests of luck, but of course everyone cheated by making sure they never died. They could actually be quite laborious to play as you needed to keep tabs on your stats and it was quite easy to die and have to start again.
I still have a good number of the original 59 books in the series including the first, The Warlock of Firetop Mountain, which is the one I have bought for my iPod for the princely sum of £1.79 which is quite expensive for an iOS game..
The app is basically an OCR scan of the original text and images with action buttons to take you to battles, new pages etc. The original line drawings zoom into full colour versions which are really very pretty and set the scene nicely. Die rolls are done by shaking the device or touching the screen, they might be slightly loaded though so that you don’t die within 5 minutes which often happened in the books.
The app keeps tabs of your stamina, skill and luck levels which saves having to have paper and pencil as you did with the books. It would be nice if it drew a map of the dungeon for you as you went but it doesn’t appear to, it’s quite easy to get lost as to where you are and where you’ve been as you come across numerous T-junctions and dead ends in your adventures. It has an auto-save feature so you can switch off at any time.
A nice touch is being able to have your own music playing which can be quite atmospheric. Certain albums still remind me of playing D&D with my brother as we often used to have tapes playing as we explored dungeons.
You can alter text size and font but I notice that the line wrapping goes a bit wrong at some of the smaller fonts. There’s usually not much text per page so it’s not too bad to stick with the default size. There is a visual and audible page flicking effect as you move between pages which might be hiding some loading time, it’s pretty quick so it’s not too irritating but page turns aren’t instantaneous. I’ve hit one page bug where successfully fighting a rope failed to light up the next page button, luckily going back to the autosave fixed it, hopefully there aren’t any game breaking bugs.
I’m not sure of the longevity as it’s not going to take more than a couple of hours to play through a book. There will be some replay value if you wish to find parts of the dungeon you missed first time around. However the app is quite expensive considering the amount of content how much some 59p apps cram in. Purchases would be much more impulsive at the lower price point.
Several of the books have been converted to iOS so once I’ve beaten Zagor and nicked his treasure I might be buying some more!
Picasa v Flickr
0I’ve been umming and arring over whether to use Flickr or Picasa for my photo storage. Pros for Flickr are it has better album/set support and allows photo titles. Pros for Picasa are it’s easier to upload stuff from the PC, has more free storage and the Shashin plugin for WordPress is excellent.
The lack of titles was the main problem I was facing but a quick edit of the ShashinPhoto.php file in the plugin and I now have titles as captions under the thumbnails in the album views. This allows me to have the full caption when the user clicks on the image to see the full version.
Basically all I’ve done is added a new title variable which takes a substring of the caption up to the first occurrence of a newline character. So to add a title to a photo in Picasa I just add it at the beginning of the caption followed by a newline. I can even not have a title if I don’t want to by not including a newline character anywhere in the caption.
If anyone finds this and would like to do it (and so I remember how I did it!) all you need do is edit ShashinPhoto.php in the shashin plugin folder and add the following two lines before line 680
$title = $this->data['description'];
$title = substr($title,0,strpos($title,10));
Edit line 684 to
$opt_caption = $title;
New Blog
I’m in the process of moving everything to a new WordPress blog. ExpressionEngine is great and all that but it’s too slow and image handling is a bit rubbish. You can find the new site at http://www.buttonsofmymind.co.uk/.
I’ll probably leave this site alone for a bit but direct people to the new site.