> writing
Posts, notes, and technical writeups.
> post
I spent quite a while reading Reddit posts, forum posts and various suggested fixes for this and none of them actually solved it for me, so I'm posting the fix here. One of the main reasons I wanted Logi Options+ with the MX Master 3S for…
> post
A little while ago Milo (Figure 1) signed up for a science experiment. He wore an accelerometer for around 2 weeks as part of the Feline Activity Study at the University of Bristol. This interesting study is being run by Dr Evelyn Maniaki…
> post
This occasionally comes up in conversation and I can never remember so I'm just going to store it here for future reference. The median Erdos number is 5; the mean is 4.69, and the standard deviation is 1.27. My Erdos number is 4…
> post
Recently the University of Bristol made the switch from the Google to Microsoft platform for email, calendar etc. As a user of mutt the impact was somewhat minimal for me but I did have to figure out the new settings to get offlineimap to…
> post
I have a lot of data and I would like to keep this data safe. For example, I have way too many pictures going back way too long, and I would like to keep these forever ! That means I need a good data backup strategy, and for this I have…
> post
You can use the Inkscape extension Tex Text to insert and render LaTeX within your Inkscape graphics. You can find the latest version here . I'll include all the commands I ran below to get this up and running with the current latest…
> post
So QUB have begun rolling out a new WiFi solution across the campus, deprecating qub_sec. The settings for _QUB_WIFI have changed, so for convenience sake I'll list them here. EAP Method (Authentication): PEAP Phase 2 Authentication…
> post
While I do have off-site backups for linkiepie.com, why not take the safety of your data into your own hands? Here I will quickly document a simple method of backing up all your link data stored in LinkiePie using the API. As mentioned in…
> post
Newsbeuter is an open source RSS feed reader for terminals. It's great for quickly consuming lots of information from websites. One nice feature is that it allows you to 'bookmark' specific links, and that's where LinkiePie comes in…
> post
Using dbus and ConsoleKit it's easy to power off your computer from the terminal. This is useful when you're not using a desktop like GNOME or Unity and you want to shutdown without superuser privileges. dbus-send --system --print-reply…
> post
I wanted to use the key combination 'Fn+F2' to lock my computer with xscreensaver, but wasn't sure how to represent this key combination in the awesome wm rc.lua configuration file. Unfortunately you can't just insert combinations using…
> post
A quick and easy way get a readable version of a webpage directly from your terminal is to use the dump argument of the lynx text based web browser. This is great for times when you are working from your terminal and want to view a…
> post
Sometimes I am running experiments on a remote computer but doing the analysis of the experiments on a local computer. Rather than manually copying or periodically syncing the results data for analysis, it's easier to mount the remote…
> post
EDIT: qub_sec has been deprecated and replaced by _QUB_WiFi. You can find the settings for _QUB_WiFi here . The settings for the Queen's University Belfast wireless network can be hard to find (for me at least) and when actually found the…
> post
If you prefer Debian over Ubuntu (and Ubuntu derivatives) but like the appearance of Xubuntu, then here’s some steps for making Xfce on Debian Wheezy look a lot more like Xubuntu. These steps are far from complete, but they make it look…
> post
The default setting on many SSH servers is to disconnect clients who have been inactive for a set period of time. If you ever left an SSH client running without interacting with it for a while, only to find a message such as Connection…
> post
On the 24th of April 2012, I published an Android application, that I developed over the course of a week, onto the Android store. I initially developed it for my own use as I thought it would be cool to see the daily featured Wikipedia…
> post
I was thinking about how the Bing Desktop application manages to retrieve the Bing image each day, so I used Wireshark to monitor the application as it runs. I noticed that it retrieves an XML document from…
> post
As part of my research I tend to be working with relatively large files. One 150GB file I work with particularly often involves moving an updated version of it from one directory to another. On my Ubuntu desktop this causes everything to…
> post
When working with an SQLite3 database I occasionally forget a column name that I need to know. This tends to be followed by being unable to remember how to find out column names (and other information) for a table. Future me, here's how to…
> post
Continuing in my effort to create blog posts of old bits of code I can find lying around on my computer and internal git server, I decided to post this small C++ project. It logs the percentage of battery left at specific intervals into a…
> post
A few years ago, when learning Python, I wrote a little script that will retrieve and save to disk the current bing.com background image. The directory where the image is saved is the first argument. You can run it via cron if you use a…
> post
Last week my Queen's University Belfast (QUB) IMAP settings stopped working. After tracking down that this was the reason I wasn't receiving new emails, I discovered the following IMAP and SMTP settings which now work. I have tested these…
> post
Here is a copy of my PGP public key. If you don't know what that is and would like to learn more then I suggest reading this . This website is currently served over HTTPS so it should be reasonably secure method of sharing the key. You can…
> post
Recently I got an Acer C720 Chromebook and wanted to write a little bit about what I think of it. Basically, it's a small 11.6 inch screen laptop but instead of running a more typical operating system such as Windows 7 or Debian/Ubuntu…
> post
So as a follow up to my previous post, I decided that it would be a good idea to write a little bit about a project that I spent some of my free time working on. Now that I have started my PhD I have less time for working on side projects…
> post
https://www.facebook.com/notes/facebook-engineering/scaling-apache-giraph-to-a-trillion-edges/10151617006153920 http://haxit.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/hacking-transcend-wifi-sd-cards.html…
> post
http://www.denbeste.nu/essays/futurecs.shtml http://www.devttys0.com/2013/06/differentiate-encryption-from-compression-using-math/…
> post
Hello, this is my first blog post! I'm not sure how often I'll update this blog as I am just building this for fun and also as an opportunity to build more software with Python. Although I figured I should at least make a hello world post!…