will.pimblett

Working out the best way to attach a block of brass to a small...

Tue, 14 Feb 2012 00:42:07 +0000

Working out the best way to attach a block of brass to a small cart powered by a spring. Fun huh

Ghosted on Flickr.mucking around ages ago, this was way before i...

Sat, 14 Jan 2012 00:34:29 +0000

Ghosted on Flickr.

mucking around ages ago, this was way before i tripoded up.. I used an old hifi speaker and some cardboard to balance the camera right

Crimbo

Tue, 20 Dec 2011 01:59:51 +0000

Evening,

As 2011 draws to a close I start to think of all the stuff I intended to do… but never really got round to doing. On the resolutions list from last year (lovingly dredged from my iphone notes backup):

1. Get that bloody balloon up - NOPE
This was my near-space ballon project, did some planning but never got near designs… maybe I’ll find some peeps with interest at uni :P

2. Web app / iPhone app - SORTA I’m working on a project that will feature at least one of these, so sorta! :D

3. Go to bed earlier - HAHAHAH
Lets not go into this, I’m writing this at 2am…

4. Get out more - YEP
I went to uni, that covers it I think, wouldn’t want to be doing more.

5. Less junk food - SORTA
I ran out of money :)

So I did some things, but I don’t quite think I lived up to the year (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-16089232 - BBC News - 2011: The year when a lot happened :)

One last ting: would you mind spending 30 seconds filling in this survey goo.gl/iu31K thanks!!

Uni & A New Project

Tue, 18 Oct 2011 22:54:20 +0100

Three weeks of Nottingham down, quite a few more to go… But anyways a new project is in the works! Very very early days now but this could be be fun. Essentially it’s a modern (audio (mainly)) podcast directory, designed for discovering and exploring new content. Lots of bells and whistles involved… so ‘watch this space’!

Also I was supposed to start looking for freelance work at some point… (and do a engineering degree)

Guard Tower on The Great Wall

Mon, 19 Sep 2011 00:31:06 +0100

Guard Tower on The Great Wall

DSC_0454

Tue, 13 Sep 2011 09:58:35 +0100

DSC_0454

Photo

Sun, 11 Sep 2011 08:06:06 +0100

Rural around Datong

Mon, 05 Sep 2011 04:30:53 +0100

Rural around Datong

China (Pre photos)

Sat, 03 Sep 2011 15:33:26 +0100

I’ve been in north China for the past week (beijing, datong, pingyao) with Joe and Garrood. and have loads of awesome photos. Will post in the next few days when I have proper wifi. Currently waiting for the night train to pingyao.

Ubuntu - get your act together!

Tue, 23 Aug 2011 15:09:00 +0100

I like Linux, I like Ubuntu. I’ve used Ubuntu on servers and the odd low power laptop for years now and with little hiccups. I’ve almost come to trust it, that is until this week.

We’ve got an old Dell desktop at home (XP generation so ~ 8 years), runs Win 7 near perfectly out the box. It’s been doing so for while now and is starting to get a bit slugish - so I thought we’d kick out Windows and stick Ubuntu 11.04 on, i’d be easy I thought!

Installing was painless, almost enjoyable. It magically fits into any space on your hard drive, leaving Windows still working - which I thought would be an idea before I got this up and running. The install finished and all was well.

Rebooted, GRUB loaded, Ubuntu started up. I’d opted for auto login so nothing came up it just started loading the desktop. Except there was no desktop, several reboots confirmed this. The ‘new and amazing’ unity thingy was not loading and was not falling back to something else and there wasn’t the option to load something else on the login screen because there was no login screen. Gah!

This got solved with a google or two into how to re-enable the login screen from the terminal… so now we’re in Ubuntu classic yet it feels very choppy and sluggish. I fire up the closest thing that Ubuntu seams to have to a driver manager: the additional 3rd party driver manager tool that promptly informs me that the Nvidia driver that will make things work is ‘installed but not currently activated’. There is NO WAY to activate this, I’ve set the Xorg config, I’ve reinstalled the Nvidia stuff, fiddled with compiz, everything. Why is such a fundamental part of an OS missing in ubuntu, there is no GUI tool to tell me what drivers are loading and what are being used. Nothing.

I hate this, I’d really like to like Ubuntu but by god they’re making it hard. The main problem is to take from this is that Windows (in the Mac sense) does just work! Ubuntu makes setting up an Hackintosh build look easy (my main machine).

I may try 10.10, might work better.

UPDATE: Seams to be Ubuntu theme for quite some years, from 06: http://joyeur.com/2006/11/03/official-i-am-leaving-ubuntu-for-windows-vista/

Credit XKCD

Tue, 16 Aug 2011 00:26:05 +0100

Credit XKCD

Ed Sheeran is awesome, new song

Sun, 14 Aug 2011 00:24:00 +0100

Ed Sheeran is awesome, new song

Just Finished Season 2 of Dexter

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:15:27 +0100

Very good TV show, definitely recommend this. Luckily I’ve got 3 more seasons to go.

For anyone who doesn’t know, he’s a serial killer… a nice serial killer.

And Now Broken Completely

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 13:08:52 +0100

I had to make a lot of changes to DNS late last night to facilitate this server move, unfortunately that involved accidently overwriting the record for my blog… doh!

This was only my blog and no-one else’s DNS that I host was affected (a la specialtones.com, who will be listening). Should all be back up in 1 to 48 hours depending on your connection. Toodle pip…

Naked Blogging

Mon, 08 Aug 2011 00:02:08 +0100

No, not like that! All resources (style sheets, images and the like) that are hosted on my servers are down for the next day or so, this means that my blog is without styling or images (“naked”).

So sit back and enjoy how semantic my HTML is…

In case you don’t understand the .tar.gz compression...

Sun, 07 Aug 2011 23:58:43 +0100

In case you don’t understand the .tar.gz compression format here’s a cool picture that explains it quite well. Very simple diagram, but very effective. The brain almost animates the circles as you digest it.

South Green

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 05:25:49 +0100

South Green

It's been a while

Mon, 01 Aug 2011 02:01:17 +0100

It has indeed, not much is happening over here. I’m working at the moment and should probably go to bed as it starts all over again in the morning.

On the nerdier side of things I’ve just got a solid state drive and more ram, my computer is now disgustingly fast. That + lion is awesome, photo processing is much much more fun.

Also, iTunes U is cool, and you should look at my photos.

FP2 lulz (Taken with instagram)

Wed, 22 Jun 2011 17:58:44 +0100

FP2 lulz (Taken with instagram)

New boagworld episodes, v interesting...

Tue, 14 Jun 2011 17:16:41 +0100

New boagworld episodes, v interesting...