May 20th, 2008 by Chris
Number 1 - My blog being added to random planets without me being asked.
It would seem that the entirety of the ubuntu-uk.org planet userlist has been duplicated by MooDoo for his own planet, as he doesn’t like the “members only” policy. I believe that the correct thing to do in this case is at least ask people if they wish to be added to his planet.
*Edit* As a planet like the one set up by MooDoo already exists, he has now redirected the domain to point to the existing planet, which doesn’t add people without them asking *Edit*
© cjo20.net | Chris Oattes. All Rights Reserved.
January 16th, 2008 by Chris
Find a HOW-TO here:
http://cjo20.net/remote.htm
December 3rd, 2007 by Chris
Everyone should go have a look at FreeRice.com. It is a relatively new site that claims to donate rice to the World Food Program, who then distribute it to people who need it. The way they fund this, is by providing a simple (but entertaining) word game, with a small advert on each page (I didn’t actually notice the advert until it was pointed out to me). The game is a series of multiple choice questions, where you have to choose the most similar word to a given word from a list of 4. For each correct answer, they donate 20 grams of rice.
To make the game more interesting, each word has a “difficulty” associated with it between 1 and 50. It starts by asking a few random words to get an idea of what level you are at. Once it has determined a suitable level, it ask you questions from that level. If you get 3 questions right, you go up a level, and if you get a question wrong, you go down a level. This means that it adapts to your vocabulary to give you words you have a chance at getting, but not making it so easy that it is boring.
October 17th, 2007 by Chris
A friend just sent me this link. The instructions make it much easier to read email discussions with many levels of quotes.
Note: Using ubuntu, the user preferences are in ~/.mozilla-thunderbird, not ~/.thunderbird. You will need to create the “chrome” subdirectory and the file “userContent.css” yourself.
May 22nd, 2007 by Chris
A PhD student at the University of Bath recently told me about a (relatively) new type of touchscreen, which relies on “Frustrated Total Internal Reflection”. (see here). Basically, Infra-Red light is shone down the inside of a sheet of acrylic. When something touches the acrylic, the light is reflected away from the object, where it can be picked up by a (slightly modified) webcam.
This image shows what a webcam underneath the touch screen picks up (Image from http://www.whitenoiseaudio.com/touchlib/). This image can then be processed to pick out the bright “spots”, and the coordinates on the touch screen worked out.
The big advantage of using this method to detect interactions with the screen is that you are not limited to just 1 point of interaction at a time. For example, in a paint application, each finger could be a separate pen/ paintbrush. This also means that the number of users that are able to interact at the same time is only limited by space around the touchscreen.
These touchscreens are also relatively cheap to make. The main expense is a projector (which cost around £300), but all of the other components can be obtained for < £100. Someone has blogged their attempts to make a screen.
Below is a demo of a FTIR touchscreen:
Get the Flash Player to see this player.
And a link in case the player doesn’t work.
It also seems like there aren’t too many problems getting this to work in Ubuntu, so I’m hoping that I may be able to build one myself sometime soon 
May 14th, 2007 by Chris
You should visit http://moon.google.com and zoom right in…
April 30th, 2007 by Chris
A friend at work just sent me this link: http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Ubuntu:Feisty#How_to_improve_sub-pixel_font_rendering_for_Feisty.
It tells you how to get much much smoother fonts in Feisty - I recommend that people try it out.
[Edit: As Gord pointed out, this will only applies to LCD displays]
March 19th, 2007 by Chris
I have been using irssi for a couple of months now, and I am generally pleased with it. It does almost everything I want, apart from one thing.
I have been looking for a way of getting the window list entry for the terminal to flash when a new message is received in irssi for a while now, and a recent discussion in #ubuntu-uk on irc.freenode.net has got me searching again. I have managed to find a script that uses libnotify to create popups with new messages, but I don’t want screens full of popup windows.
If anyone knows of an elegant solution, I would love to hear it.
March 19th, 2007 by Chris
This is one of the best ideas I have come across in a while - people making huge versions of normal snacks.
I think that the Custard Cream is one of the best ones
March 16th, 2007 by Chris
I really need to update this thing more often.
Ubuntu Scribes seem to have hit a bit of a slump, and I really need to start working on Mootbot a bit more. I would like to say that I have been busy, but I just don’t have the energy to code after I finish work for the day. Andrew Williams has been working hard on the bot, and has managed to get it set up on a decent server (instead of my laptop). I think we have got enough new features to warrant a “0.1″ release - I will write about the new features sometime soon, but first I need to write some documentation (which I hate…)
The activity levels in Ubuntu Scribes seem to have dropped off over the last few weeks, with the number of people in #ubuntu-scribes getting lower and lower. I think that this may be due to a lack of progress with getting people to use Mootbot in their meetings. I am going to try to set up a meeting and get people along to try to revive the enthusiasm there was at the beginning. I will post more details here shortly.
