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Android widget for Dragon Go Server - 19 Jun 2017 Android  Kotlin  Technology 

I’m a fan of Go, (the game, very much not the language), but I don’t ever seem to get around to having time to play it in person. Thankfully some folks made the Dragon Go Server which is a sort of ‘play by web’ server for playing games of Go over an extended period, and means I…

Pigtail: task queues with Potboiler - 28 Nov 2016 Potboiler  Rust  Technology 

Last month, I wrote about Potboiler, my AP Event Sourcing system. At the time I’d built a K/V store on top of Potboiler, mostly just as a test application. Potboiler isn’t really intended to be talked to directly by most clients, but will have some other form of service or store that sits on top…

Docket: Fun with Todoist and Beeminder APIs - 13 Jun 2016 Python  Technology 

So, I recently changed over my todo list usage to use Todoist. However, now I had a chunky amount of my phone screen chewed up with both a display of that and my existing Beeminder list, and I wondered if I could somehow merge the two. Also, because my Beeminder emergency days are one of the significant sources…

Pyrexia: IoT office temperature monitoring - 29 Nov 2015 Clojure  RabbitMQ  Rant  Technology 

Most of the projects I write about here are pretty much complete, or at least good enough. This one is a little bit more of a work in progress for reasons that will become clear fairly soon… One of the ongoing conversations in LShift over the years has been regarding the temperature in the office. It…

Automatic scheduling of people and rooms - 14 Jul 2015 Case Studies  Technology 

So we’ve recently been doing some work for a large public-facing organisation regarding some of their issues with scheduling. They’ve got a large number of staff (tens of thousands) and a lot of locations (hundreds), and they need to do good scheduling for when/where members of the public should come in and talk to them. Now,…

On considering switching to OS X… - 30 Sep 2012 Technology 

As this is a bit of a controversial topic, let me first note that all operating systems (including OS X) suck. The how and the why can be debated elsewhere, but in conclusion it’s a matter of finding one who’s bits that suck don’t annoy you too much such that you can gain the benefits…

Using Debian Multiarch for cross-compiling - 17 Jun 2012 Debian  Technology  Tools 

I’ve recently acquired a Raspberry Pi, and was considering using it for SNES emulation. However, as it turns out that Zsnes is x86-only, and that Snes9x got kicked out of Debian a while back for having an annoying “no-commercial use” license, so we’re into the compile-it-yourself options. As Snes9x is a configure/makefile-type project, I should in…

Visualising your web browsing history - 11 May 2012 Technology 

I’ve been doing a bit more data visualisation work, with a focus this time on my web browsing. If you’re using Firefox or Chrome (not Opera, as they don’t provide this data), then it turns out that your local history also contains referrer data i.e. you have a history record of not just where you’ve…

NAntScript, now with added functions - 27 Mar 2012 C#  Technology 

When we’re doing C# work, we’re fairly big fans of NAnt, as it’s a very good build system for .Net. However, it’s got a few small flaws, the main one of which is that you often end up repeating yourself a fair few times, and applying any sort of DRY thinking in it is quite…

Making panel applets for Gnome 2 and 3 - 29 Feb 2012 Technology 

In recent times, there’s been a lot of changes to the Gnome environment with the 3.x releases, including the introduction of the Gnome Shell and things like the GObject introspection stuff going on in the background. However, the Shell is a bit on the unstable side (even if you’ve got a good graphics card), and…

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