Recent Posts

• 3 January 2019

  Google Home So Far

  I’ve been playing with Google Home quite a bit recently, with mixed success to say the least.

• 13 May 2018

  New Site (Again)

  This isn’t the first time I’ve moved my personal site; the first post I still have was after I lost some old blog posts, and I moved to WordPress in 2012 to avoid supporting a separate blog and page builder. However, it was still running on my VPS, and I’ve been trying to remove all production content from there for a while.

• 27 May 2015

  My Rubik’s Cube Solution

  A number of people have been solving Rubik’s cubes at work recently, and although there are numerous guides out there I can’t seem to find one that matches my approach for every step.

• 16 February 2014

  UltraViolet Universal is Terrible

  My Oblivion DVD came with a digital download copy from UltraViolet. I headed over to the UltraViolet Web site to download it. My experience went something like this:

• 1 June 2013

  An Analogy of DNS Resolution

  Imagine that you own a store in the high street. Now, for people to find your store, they can’t just look it up, or walk down the street or anything. They have to rely on some guy (an “informer”) who stands outside their house and says, “The Widget Shop? Yes, it’s on the high street.” People will be able to get to your store, and they’ll remember what the informer told them, but only for a week or so. After that they’ll be like, “Where’s The Widget Shop again?” and have to ask the informer.

• 26 February 2013

  Why Nick Grimshaw Is My Latest Excuse for Being Lazy

  Okay, I’ll admit it. I’m pretty terrible at getting up in the morning. (Actually, it’s probably that I’m terrible at going to bed in the evening, but that’s semantics.)

• 12 September 2012

  Computer Names

  dirac Home desktop (decommissioned)

• 26 June 2012

  Facebook Events in Google (Apps) Calendar

  I subscribe to a number of third-party calendars in my own Google Calendar, one of which being my Facebook events. However, there are a couple of issues to work around to get everything working perfectly.

• 21 June 2012

  How I Use Smart Playlists to Manage My iTunes Library

  I have a fair amount of music in my library, and because I’m a massive nerd I like to keep it in some sort of order. (My pre-iTunes library has some 20,000 tracks, half of which are utter garbage. I’m slowly moving over the good stuff.)

• 8 June 2012

  Using Ant and Phing in the same repository

  Here’s the scenario: you use Apache Ant for some of your automated build process, but you also have some tools in Phing. You run both ant and phing from your repository root. Because you use Ant most, the Ant targets are in build.xml, and Phing has to use phing.xml. Sure, you can run phing -f phing.xml ..., but where’s the fun in that? Enter the following build file: