Stupid Show from Copenhagen

Present Ideas

Not particularly for Christmas.



One is to have a custom stamp made at Blade Rubber Stamps. This shop is right next to the British Museum, but you can do the whole process online now. (You can ignore all of the 'make a rubber stamp' application and just send them an image too.). I did this one year and everyone seemed really happy. One friend is still using his 'done!' stamp to mark all his paperwork and says it is very satisfying indeed.

I've just sent off a design for stamping into a notebook to copy the idea behind Muji's ChronoNotebooks, which won an award but they seem to not have bothered bringing into the UK (after emailing them, they said possibly next year).
Have tarted mine up a bit with a kanji. Would be nice to stamp it in different colours, even silver, into a notebook.



Another nice present, would be the customisable Sigg bottles from Cafepress. You can put in text, or just put in images if you like. Some of the previews are hilarious (including a cute but hairy dogs), or of course, next to one's MacBook. If anyone wants a hand doing an image, I'm happy to help. All in the service of Tap Water!

Basic Guides to Climate Change

I've just made this post so I can keep them all together, as I have been coming across some excellently written guides.

First up, we have a guide from the Met Office.


Met Office Guide (PDF 1.09M)
This is a gorgeously designed guide, laying out all the facts in simple language.

10:10 Vote in Parliament - What are they playing at?

Guardian Article on the 10:10 vote in the Commons yesterday

The fact they can't even agree to a simple motion, which would have shown amazing unity, to the world, and to the population, and in view of the fact that most front benchers have already signed up to the 10:10 target. It's a target, its non-binding and it has incredible value in signaling to the country and the world as a whole that we are serious about this, in a non-partisan way. Particularly in view of the fact Copenhagen is fast coming up.

I was particularly disappointed to see that Ed Miliband voted against it. This beggars belief.. considering he has spoken for it, asked councils to sign it, etc. We would very much like to hear his reasoning!

"I’ve been backing the 10:10 campaign - I was really pleased when the whole cabinet signed up to cut their CO2 emissions by 10% in 2010, and I know the campaign has been going from strength to strength." from EdsPledge

Some resources - The vote on Public Whip which is an awesome site for trying to make it plain and simple what is going on.

where you can have the fun of finding your MP and seeing which way they voted it!

(and they are voting on the first 'motion' not the 'amendment' which 'welcomed' it.)

So, what went wrong? Parties playing off against each other? Did our Conservative MP only vote for it because it was Anti-Labour? Do we really have a chance if big decisions get reduced to this playground level? Answers please :)

International Space Station and Shuttle

Space Shuttle and International Space Station Time Lapse from Londonlime on Vimeo.

Here is a time lapse video of the International Space Station (ISS) and the Space Shuttle going over. This is our first foray into time lapse and the opportunity just presented itself.

The Shuttle is the first streak, and the second is the ISS. The latter is much brighter than it used to be, apparently due to the extra solar panels that have been fitted.

They regularly go over our heads, but of course they don't always catch the sun.

You can find a list of sightings for London or pick a UK City

Flamenco and Dance Links

in the 'how to' vein

Flamenco Posture (particularly how not to damage your back by arching it. This isn't really a problem you encounter until a few years in!)

Flamenco Footwork

I'm taking this one to heart, and to technique class tomorrow!

Kicking the Bata de Cola Good to know, although perhaps some more basic moves need to be learnt really well first..

and finally a very general article on Learning how to Dance which makes a lot of sense

Creating a Picture Gallery

I have a terrible memory so I take a lot of pictures. I've been uploading these since about the year n. I was using Fotopic which has served me well. I pay for the premium service.

I've found that it has become a bit slow of late and also that the tedious process of uploading files the sorting them on a remote site, adding captions etc was slowing me down. I'm now over a year behind. And I'd run out of space.

So I dedicated some effort to sorting the problem. I have two virtual servers with Bytemark (who rock) so I cleared my obsessive number of backups of backups off the machines and that left me with gigs of space to store my piccies.

My initial thought was to put Gallery (or Gallery 2 ... and then it gets a bit confusing as Gallery 2 seems to have been missed in an Debian release) on the server and then get it to automatically add the photos. But this didn't really address one of my ideals which was to be able to sort and caption offline.

Plan 2, which I started to implement was to have Gallery on my lovely newish (but scratched) Acer Netbook. This was okay. There was a bit of a drain having apache/gallery2 and mysql running on it but it seemed to work. The tedious bit was all the syncing and dumping of databases etc. And for what? I gained all the cool features of Gallery but most were useless cos the remote database where people could comment etc would get wiped as I uploaded. Also I wasn't trying to create a community, I just wanted to show my friends the photos they were in.

So backpedal a bit and have a look around. Finally found llgal. It totally rules. Configurable in all ways. Just generates a static site from the pictures and a captions file. So I can write the captions in a something useful like vi, manage the pictures with gthumb, run llgal to generate it and then a simple directory traversal script finds anything that has a directory called 'Remote' in it and uploads it to the server.

I added a bit to make my own index page but I'm fussy like that.