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(Re-)adding a tray icon to Rhythmbox - 16 Jan 2012 Technology 

One of the features I used to particularly like about Rhythmbox was it’s ability to minimise to tray. This meant with a simple click of an icon I could briefly bring it up on my current workspace to play/pause and then hide it again. However, in the new 2.90.x releases, the upstream has decided to…

Finding new albums by old bands - 29 Dec 2011 Technology 

I’m once again visting music-related problems, with a look at a different aspect of the “discovering new music” problem. Now, the LShift jukebox is very good at introducing me to new and weird artists, and it also occasionally tells me about other work by artists I’m already aware of, but this is all rather haphazard.…

8-bit style acrylic sculpture - 6 Nov 2011 Technology 

A while back I did a post talking about working with MDF and a laser cutter. In that, I was using a program to generate the design for a sculpture and feeding the design to a laser cutter. This time around, the design is fairly simple and doesn’t need much computer help to build it,…

Generating Kindle collections - 17 Oct 2011 Technology 

Continuing on from my post a few months ago about playing with my Kindle, I’ve now amassed a fair number of books, and managing it is starting to be a bit of an issue. The main way to do this is with collections of books. However, Amazon in their infinite wisdom have decided not to…

The real world behind Glee - 4 Jul 2011 Diegesis 

WARNING: Spoiler alert. I'm specifically spoiling about things in 2x22 ("New York"), but may well jump around elsewhere. I'm not specifically intending on spoiling other earlier episodes, or touching on big plot items, but I'm also making no effort to not do so if it serves my point. You have been warned!

So, I've been curious for a while about the notion of the real world behind Glee. Or, in other words, what actually happens, away from all of the flights of fancy.

Automagic Phone-to-Kindle with Calibre - 29 Jun 2011 Technology 

I’ve recently acquired a Kindle, and although it’s major use-case is for reading books, it’s also pretty good for reading long articles. This is particularly useful when I find out about said article via my phone (e.g. on Twitter) as my phone isn’t exactly good for reading anything really big. I started using the Send…

Don’t use IEnumerable for table references in C# - 23 May 2011 C# 

We have a C# project that recently started to run into a few scaling issues. That search can slow down a little when you get a lot more records isn’t so surprising, but when your basic individual item retrieval starts getting sluggish, it’s time to worry. We were using Entity Framework as the ORM layer,…

Solving the sticky badge problem - 22 May 2011

Solving the sticky badge problem

Modular, laser-cut MDF sculpture with Python and DXF - 27 Mar 2011 Technology 

This month’s post is something a little bit different to the usual LShift posts. Don’t worry, there’s still plenty of software and algorithms in there, but I’m also creating an actual physical object as well (shock horror). I’ve recently acquired access to a laser-cutter, and I’ve been going through a bit of a learning process…

Data visualisation: How weird is our jukebox? - 28 Feb 2011 Technology 

One of the perennial unanswered questions among LShift hackers is “How weird is our jukebox?”. Not in the sense that it’s written in Erlang, but in the sense that we do play an awful lot of rather weird stuff on there. The usual answer to this is “very”, but I’ve been thinking for a while…

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