pikuorguk

• Apollo 11 audio recorded at Honeysuckle
  (tags: audio space science apollo moon)

Today’s Internet Meme comes to you from the front page of Wikipedia…

Wikipedia main page today

You can go and look at Milton Street through the magic of Google Maps.

You may also like to visit Twatt on Orkney, and this long list from the Rude Britain book.

Went to the dentist, had a missing filling repaired. I think this video illustrates the situation nicely

To be fair though, my dentist is great and only spends five minutes digging around in my face with the needle while calmly saying “try to relax”. I’ll relax once you’ve finished prodding my brain with that six inch nail, since that’s what it feels like he’s doing with the needle.

Why is it that the most painful and unpleasant part of dentistry is having the anaesthetic injection? That, Alanis is ironic.

Made some more progress on my DS coding. Po_Ng now has two bats and a ball. The ball bounces around the screen using this absurdly simple bit of code:

if (xpos < 0 || xpos >= 256) xv *= -1;
if (ypos < 0 || ypos >= 192) yv *= -1;

xpos += xv;
ypos += yv;

Yeah, making stuff bounce around the screen is that simple So simple I had to use Google to find out how…

Tomorrow I make it bounce off the bats too.

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

Just a week and a half left at school before the end of this year. We are on week 38 of 39… The timetable is starting to fall apart as various groups of students go off on different school trips, work experience and badly timed holidays.

We’re introducing a new course next year for the GCSE kids, so have been up to our armpits in devising a whole new scheme of work, plus I’m making a website for my A-Level students to use next year. Gone are the printed sheets I used this year, it’s all been put into a website. If I’ve done this correctly, they should soon get into the habit of loading it up, finding today’s lesson and then getting on with it.

My aim is to get all the planning for next year done before we break up so that I don’t have to do any during the holidays. Plan B is to get enough planning done to last me until Christmas.

So a week and a half and then seven weeks of my own time.

• Atari ST cartridge port 64k r/w port
  The Atari ST's 128 Kbyte read-only cartridge port can be transformed into a 64 Kbyte read/write port by using this circuit.
  (tags: atari hardware hacking)
• Test Kit ATARI ST
  (tags: atari hardware hacking electronics)
• Atari-Forum • View topic – Atari ST cartridge port
  (tags: atari hardware)
• ST Cartridge Port Interface
  (tags: hardware atari hacking electronics)

• Source Code of Several Atari 7800 Games Released!
  (tags: programming atari games code)

Here’s a bit of a fun entry to the YakYak photo competition. This week it’s “Transparency”.

A fresh out the oven pizza I’ve just made from scratch. Tomatoes, garlic, herbs, onion, stilton, mozzarella and chorizzo.

• Thread // Message Board // Lambgoat
  It was Aw-some,
  Mike Strata.
  (tags: crackpots writing forum)

• U R A TWETARD
  (tags: twitter iran election)

I have no idea what’s going on with this, but it’s interesting to watch. It reminds me of those bizarre art films that Channel 4 used to play late night in the 80s. I’d often fall asleep with my TV on and wake up to some random cartoon that made zero sense, and had no explanation as to why it was even on.

From Digital Tools.

• IP Tracer, IP Tracker, IP Locator and other DNS tools
  (tags: tools network security internet)

Over on my photo blog I have a template that uses Wordpress’ meta tags to store images, rather than requiring me to insert them in the usual way. This is great because it means the image can be displayed separately to the post’s text, but also means the RSS feed and LiveJournal cross-post (LJXP) views contain just the post’s text and no image. The RSS feed and LJXP parts of Wordpress use The Loop and the_content() to extract data from Wordpress, totally ignoring any meta tags in the post.

This makes it somewhat useless for a photo blog.

I have hacked both the RSS feed mechanism of Wordpress, and the LJXP plugin so that they show the contents of a meta-tag called ‘image’ as part of the page content. These are fairly dirty hacks which are specific to the template I’m using, but others may find the information useful (and so will I when I next upgrade Wordpress and wonder why everything has broken )

Modifying the RSS feed

This is the simplest hack. Simply open up wp-includes/feed-rss2.php and find the line

<?php if ( strlen( $post->post_content ) > 0 ) : ?>
<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content() ?>]]></content:encoded>

Modify the second line to be like this

<content:encoded><![CDATA[<?php the_content() ?><br/><img src="<?php echo
get_post_meta ($post->ID, 'image', true);?>" />]]>
</content:encoded>

And then save and refresh the RSS feed in your reader (this may take a while with something like Google Reader. You can force it by editing one of your posts and subtly altering the post date by a second or so).

Modifying the Livejournal Crosspost Plugin

This requires a bit more trickery. We’re going to hack the plugin so that it understands a new custom header/footer ‘tag’ and also define a custom footer with our new tag inside. I chose this because it will be easier to repair when the LJXP plugin next gets updated and my changes wiped out.

Edit the file wp-content/plugins/lj-xp/lj-xp.php

Find these two lines

$find = array('[blog_name]', '[blog_link]', '[permalink]',
'[comments_link]', '[comments_count]', '[tags]', '[categories]');
$replace = array($blogName, get_settings('home'),
get_permalink($post_id), get_permalink($post_id).'#comments',
lj_comments($post_id), $htags, $hcats);

And just modify them like this

$find = array('[blog_name]', '[blog_link]', '[permalink]',
'[comments_link]', '[comments_count]', '[tags]', '[categories]',
'[image]');
$replace = array($blogName, get_settings('home'),
get_permalink($post_id), get_permalink($post_id).'#comments',
lj_comments($post_id), $htags, $hcats,
get_post_meta($post_id, 'image', true));

• Now go into the Wordpress dashboard, and click on “Livejournal” under Settings.
• Toggle the “Bottom of Post” radio button in the Set blog name for crosspost header/footer section
• In the Custom crosspost header/footer box put something similar to this

<a href="[permalink]"><img src="[image]" alt="Gallery image" /></a>
<br/>
Originally posted from <a href="[blog_link]">[blog_name]</a>.
Please leave comments <a href="[comments_link]">over there</a>.

And then press Update Options. You may see an error message, it doesn’t appear to be a fatal one. Make a test post to your blog to test things, or edit and republish an existing post to see if it works.

Originally published at Error_Success. Please leave any comments there.

• Super Mario World Flash
  (tags: flash games)
• Stepper Motor Controller
  (tags: circuit control diy driver electronics hardware)

I went to a BBQ yesterday, and predictably it rained quite a lot. Between showers the sun came out and I took this picture of a nice pink flower with some raindrops on it. I like the way the bold colours on the flower contrast with the darker colours of the background. I also like the gentle blurring of the background.

I’ve started cropping my images down to 6in x 4in proportions and then resizing the longest side to be 640 pixels (the original is still at full size). This should produce more normal looking photos. I might try and modify the Livejournal Crossposter and the RSS feed code so that the image is shown in the post too. Currently the template has an ‘image’ field for the picture which I use, but which isn’t present in the RSS or LJ crosspost pages.

This is a red port channel marker on the banks of the Humber at Burton upon Stather, outside Scunthorpe. The day was warm but overcast which fitted well with the worn look of this light.

Never managed to successfully photograph rainbows before. I think this image is a fair attempt at doing so. I like the way the rainbow shoots out the trees like a laser beam.

Well it was fun while it lasted. Even if it survived less than a week. Think i’ll get a metal beaker next.

Thinkgeek, if you read this, make the glass thicker or from something more shock resistant like Pyrex.

Any scientists got a spare conical flask or 500ml beaker they don’t want?

From Digital Tools

BIRDY NAM NAM – THE PARACHUTE ENDING from Steve Scott on Vimeo.