After my experiences with the Incase Power Slider, I decided to try the Mophie Juice Pack Air which has just been released.

Having used it now for over a week, I’m confident in saying that Mophie have nailed the iPhone external battery. It’s a superb product which overcomes the problems of the Incase solution. Read the rest of this entry »

The legendary Stephen Fry recently announced a competition on his twitter feed to celebrate his 50,000th follower:

L=50 in Roman. The best tweet containing exactly 50 Ls will win. All tweets to contain the tag #L and none to exceed 140 character limit SF

Well, this sounded like fun! I decided to have a go. Read the rest of this entry »

The Incase Power Slider for iPhone 3G brings a huge boost to the runtime of the iPhone. However, it’s not a perfect solution. Both Incase and Apple need to do some fixin’.

Read the rest of this entry »

SETI@Home can now take advantage of CUDA, the parallel processing engine at the heart of NVIDIA GPUs. This means that the GPU’s computations are added to those of the normal CPUs, resulting in faster processing of computation units, which is very handy for churning through the challenging Astropulse calculations.

I now have SETI@Home running on Ubuntu on my Dell XPS m1330. It’s not particularly difficult to set up, but if you want to try it yourself you may find these steps useful. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve been using Windows Mobile PDAs and phones, for many years now, ever since Palm let me down with one of their ‘enhancements’. I have now switched to the iPhone. I’ll explain here what led me to change. Read the rest of this entry »

I attended the IET Christmas lecture given by Phil Charlesworth of the UK Rocketry Association (UKRA).

I have written a brief article about it, and put up some pictures on my Galea Research site.

Amateur Rocketry Lecture article

Here is a disassembled Casio ProTrek (Pathfinder) PAW1300.

If you click on each image in the set, you’ll see some notes explaining what the various parts are.

Image set

My new website Galea Research is up and running now. I plan to use it as a repository for my investigations into emerging technology, as well as news on the subject that I come across. I’ll take a reasonably wide view of what “emerging tech” means, however.

The site is far from finished, but I’ve started it off with a couple of news stories on 3D printing.

I’ve been using CoPilot 7 for a couple of days. It’s a great application for GPS navigation on Windows Mobile devices.

One big drawback for me is that it doesn’t have the ability to silence the voice without also turning down the master system volume. If I do this, then I can’t hear any other application that needs to make a noise.

So I created my own silent voice. It consists of nothing but blank sound files for every bit of speech. This way, I can select the Silent voice in CoPilot, while leaving the system volume at its normal setting.

Just unzip the files, and copy the ‘Silent’ folder into the same directory as the other voices for your language. Then in CoPilot, you should see ‘Silent’ as one of the voice options.

silent.zip

I find the Ubuntu automated check-for-updates a bit limiting. I want it to check for updates daily, but as it uses a daily crontab to manage this, the PC has to be switched on at the time the cron job is expecting to run. If my usage pattern changes, I can end up going several days without an update check because the PC happens never to be on at the right time.

I could change it to do the check every ten minutes, but that hammers the Canonical servers unnecessarily. What I really want to do is check for updates once per day whenever the PC happens to be switched on.

So I wrote this little script that I put in /usr/bin/apt-update . It simply checks to see whether it has been run already today (by comparing the current date against the modification date of a touch file). If it has been run today, then it doesn’t perform the check. Otherwise, it performs the check, and touches the touch file to prevent further runs.

#!/bin/bash
touchfile=/root/.aptlastcheck
now=`date +%Y-%m-%d`
[[ -e $touchfile ]] && last=`date -r $touchfile +%Y-%m-%d` || last=0
[[ $now != $last ]] && apt-get update
touch -d $now $touchfile

I then added a root crontab:

1,11,21,31,41,51 * * * * apt-update

This runs the apt-update script every ten minutes, whenever the PC is on. So I get speedy updates without being nasty to the Canonical servers.