Category: General

I get loads of spam on this site in the comments. Thankfully a marvellous WordPress plug-in called Akismet filters it all out, and all I have to do is check the quarantined stuff occasionally in case there’s been a false positive. So far it’s worked perfectly, with no false results.

I’ve noticed recently that some of the spammers, instead of putting meaningless crap in the comment body, have now started putting jokes instead. Which is nice, because it gives me a chuckle when I’m clearing them out. I thought I’d share a few with you…

Continue reading “Blog Spam”

The GPS Route Planner seems to have been well received by a LOT of people… but to date I’ve had TWO donations for this… not a lot of beer, people!  If you haven’t seen it, there’s a “donate” link up in the top right of the main screen to this blog.  If you don’t feel that the GPS Route Planner is worth buying me a beer or two, at least get clicking on the Google advertisements littered around this site.  I get a few pennies each time you do.

Go on, motivate me to add the exciting new ideas I have!

I’ve been running Firefox 2 on my Macbook at home, and on Windows XP in the office (where I don’t have a choice of OS). Today I noticed something odd on the Mac – neither GMail nor Google Calendar would display…

Continue reading “Firefox and GMail / Google Calendar Blank Pages”

I recently bought an M-Audio Keystation 88es MIDI keyboard (I’ve wanted to learn to play piano for years, but strangely have always been drawn to strings – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, violin, and, for a short while, cello).

It works brilliantly with Garage Band, but the speakers in the Macbook are small and tinny.  So I plugged it through the hi-fi.  It sounds fantastic.  However, I really wanted to leave the keyboard set up in the spare room, where there’s no hi-fi.  So I started to think about getting some computer speakers…

Continue reading “Logitech V20 Notebook Speakers”

We’ve had record heatwaves here in London, apparently even beating the droughted summer of ’76. This sparked some pretty ferocious thunderstorms on Thursday evening, which caused me to get soaked to the skin on my 26km ride home from work (I was also worried about getting hit by lightning in Richmond Park). When I got home there were house alarms going off all over, and in my house half the circuits were blown. And worst of all my ADSL modem was fried. No internet! Continue reading “The Outage – and a Rant”

The feedback for the Route Planner has been very, very positive.  I’ve also had a few suggestions for additional functionality.  Here’s what will be on the cards once I get the time for the next release:

• User selectable miles/kilometers main display (although did you know if you hover over the miles figure with your mouse, you get a metric “tool tip”?)
• Configurable waypoint name length
• Ability to save the route to the web server’s database – this would give you the ability to save a route and share it with other people via a simple URL

Does anybody have any other ideas?  Please let me know here if you do.

Welcome to this new forum. I have set this up primarily to allow me to publish new updates regarding the Marengo GPS Route Planner, but I’ll be using it as a means to muse about anything else that takes my fancy. It’ll mainly be open source-related stuff.