-
Latest Discussions
Find Me
Powered by Vanilla 1.1.5a.
Installed add-ons.
at Maplin.
at Oyyy.co.uk.
Buy iPad online
at PC World.-
-
My Christmas Song - Snow Man
- bySpode on26th December, 2011 inGeneral
-
So I had this amazing (!) idea of doing a Christmas Album this year, but thanks to excessive drinking, Skyrim and a cold this never really happened. I managed to record two Christmas classics (which were essentially Karaoke) and a reading of "The Owl and the Pussy Cat" in a stupid voice.
Possibly the best thing I managed to do (and that says a lot) is do a cover version of "Rocket Man" by Elton John, but using alternative lyrics to become "Snow Man". It's chilled out and done on acoustic guitar. My lovely house mate James Looney did the guitar work.
The lyrics, for those want to be spared of my ever diminishing vocal skills, are as follows:
Got packed from snow last night, pretty tight
A bunch of kids, maybe twelve or ten
And I came to life, thanks to them
A carrot for a nose and a bowler hat
A scarf not... 
-
-
-
Thank You Boris - Barclays Bikes Rock!
- bySpode on1st December, 2011 inGeneral
-
Being single since May, I've been trying to get myself looking nice and trim as I parade myself back on the market (form an orderly queue please ladies!). Over the past 3 years I've slowly put a few pounds on (not excessive amounts - but enough that I notice) and I've realised part of that reason for that is that I now drive. I used to ride my bike for so many tiny journeys that I no longer do. Trials riding is good exercise but doesn't give as much of a cardio work out as you'd expect.
I've been lecturing part-time at Ravensbourne College and being on the O2 - you have to use their O2's car park facilities. At £10 a day, I've started parking a 10 minute cycle away and flinging a bike in the back of the car. I managed to build myself a fixie out of spare...
-
-
-
When Will My Central Heating Go on?
- bySpode on5th November, 2011 inGeneral
-
Living in Gravesend (for my sins) does have the benefit of being the warmest place in the UK - or so they say. Only living here since May I've not exactly taken full advantage of that. Although I have taken full advantage of the excellent trials riding, the pretty good wooden skate park and the lovely views of the Thames. We'll just ignore the 24 hour McDonalds and the night life.
It is now November and I still don't have my central heating turned on. This is the first time I've lived in a flat - and a poorly converted one at that (although very nice, and very big). Right now I'm getting enough heat from the flat below, and in some ways the flat above (think about it) that my flat is at a rather comfortable temperature. In fact - I'm actually getting a little too warm at night!
Granted -...
-
-
-
Headphone Repair Using Sugru
- bySpode on1st November, 2011 inGeneral
-
So I've had my Shure E4C headphones for nearly 6 years now - and I have no intention of buying a new set any time soon. The sound quality is still great and I just don't think I could go back to sub £200 headphones. Equally, I don't want to spend £200 on headphones.
So the right piece finally started cutting in and out often enough that I had to do something about it. Anyone with a keen memory will remember me repairing these previously by attacking them with a scalpel, resoldering and then gluing together. It really wasn't the neatest of mods and as it turns out - could have been avoided because the unit can actually be opened up.
I apologise now for taking these photos on my phone. They looked fine on screen, but...
For those who own a pair of E4Cs - don't do it this way - instead...
-
-
-
Ubuntu 11.10 - to Unity and Beyond!
- bySpode on24th October, 2011 inGeneral
-
The Upgrade
So Ubuntu 11.10 came out this month and figured I'd have a play as I'd heard that Unity was seriously improved.
I was previously running 11.04 and the upgrade wouldn't work for me. Not only that, but it gave me an error message that didn't help me at all - merely that it couldn't find an upgrade path. No "see this log" or "these packages are causing the issues", instead "E:Error, pkgProblemResolver::Resolve generated breaks". Mats Lindh offered up a solution to his problem which didn't work for me.
So I decided I may as well do a reinstall. One of the nice things about keeping most of my important stuff on my file server, and the rest in the cloud is that doing a reinstall is usually pretty painless.
However, like all good boys I did make a backup. I booted up to the Ubuntu USB stick, mounted my file server and...
-
-
-
Yet More Spodelling
- bySpode on6th April, 2011 inGeneral
-
I'm filming a whole series of videos for Halfords at the moment as a Think Bikes project. I've been looking for an excuse to buy one of those XLR -> USB adapters for a while and this was it. Maplin has a ProSound unit for £20 - very reasonable if you ask me.
The sound quality is very good, but the biggest disappointment is the delay - I can't listen to myself through the headphones whilst I'm singing because there is around a 240ms delay - by my trial and error calculations.
Another project I've been working on, was talking about doing a viral song - using the Avenue Q "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" as a base for the parody. So, whilst slightly bored with doing voiceover and wanting to test out the adapter - I did the first verse of the song in a couple of takes. The hardest...
-
-
-
Fixing a Laptop's GPU with a Heat Gun
- bySpode on24th January, 2011 inGeneral
-
My good friend Karl's laptop broke a few years back - leaving a garbled mess on the screen. We pin-pointed it down to the GPU itself, but didn't have a clue how to fix it.
A couple of weeks ago I was reading about reflow soldering, and was putting an order into Farnell. I picked a 1500W heat gun up for around £11 thinking that at some point I'd get to use it. I mentioned this Karl and as it turned out - he still had his laptop, so bought it around.
In hind sight - I probably should have watched more YouTube videos in advance - but I knew the principle and just went at it alone. I had a spare graphics card that was broken and decided to use this to experiment on - after all - we had no idea how long it would take for the solder to...
-
-
-
Laser Eye Surgery with Optical Express
- bySpode on24th December, 2010 inGeneral
-
Well, it's been 6 days now with the new glasses and there has been a dramatic improvement. My eyes definitely feel less strained, less tired. The head aches have almost all disappeared and even night time driving is no longer a problem. The computer screen has never looked so clear. In fact, as a whole - I'm feeling less stressed and tired because of this.
The biggest downside, is that now when I take my glasses off - my vision is the worst it's ever been! I can only assume, the past couple of years my brain and eyes have been compensating quite a bit, which they are no longer having to do (in fact - the first 2 days were hard work as my eyes adjusted).
The downside to that, is I'm finding riding quite tricky (not impossible) without my glasses, so I'm going to have to consider some contacts for...
-
-
-
Merry Christmas
- bySpode on17th December, 2010 inGeneral
-
I think Max speaks for all of us, when he says "Ho Ho Ho - Merry Christmas".
-
-
-
Laser Eye Surgery with Optical Express
- bySpode on30th November, 2010 inGeneral
-
As many of you will know - I've been suffering pretty badly with eye strain the past few years. My GP has been little or no use, and I've tried every piece of advice possible from the internet to very little avail. It's dramatically affected my work ability and I'm frankly fed up with it
After hearing about my friend Rich Trenholm's surgery going so well, I started wondering if it might be for me. Somehow, I saw an advert for Optical Express, and put my details in for them to get in touch. I must admit, they went a little overboard - I got a *lot* of phone calls and being an 0870 number, when I missed the call, I wasn't exactly motivated to call them back, so I just waited for the next call, which thankfully wasn't too long.
Optical Express offered me a free consultation, and I thought...
-