B and I have been making up an Angry Kittens Calendar for 2011!

Gallery of jpegs:

or as a printable PDF (to fit square paper 28x28cm)

Ok, to be fair most of the time my internet connection is great – it’s nice and fast. But periodically it will go all wonky for a few days and then I want to ‘keep an eye’ on it. A bit tricky… However there are two good things: there’s a fairly simple web page on the router that gives me all its stats, and Be (my ISP) has an excellent forum with lots of helpful technical people & Be staff to give tips on what to do. So if I can gather useful info for them, I’m sure I’ll be able to fix it.

What I decided to do is only use Python to ‘scrape’ the data I wanted from the Router’s web page and the stuff it into some data store and give me a nice graph out of it. I did look at cacti/rrdtool but I would have had to install and configure lots of other things (as I’m on a Mac) and I just wanted to use Python ideally, because Mac OS X comes with Python pre-installed.

So instead, I’ve knocked up a simple script that reads the Router status once a minute and writes a row of data out to a sqlite database (which is very simple to knock up). Then I have another script that reads out of that database and produces a html page with a graph or two. I’ve used the Google Visualisation API to draw the graphs, because they have a simple python API for it and a nice timeline graph that I can use.

I’ve a little Mac mini that I can leave on running my little ‘monitor.py’ script and Mac OS X has ‘web sharing’ (using Apache web server) that I can use to invoke ‘report.py’ to produce some nice interactive graphs of the history of my router. (a quick link on how to set this up)

So now I will leave this running for a while and see what data it produces. When I have a LOT of data I should probably summarise per hour and/or per day, and not keep every single minute’s worth of data. I don’t need to worry about that too much yet.

I might even be able to use this approach at work, although we do have Cacti set up there, so that may be a better option, but it is very complicated to configure and this might be a simpler/more flexible solution – especially with lots of good graphing solutions now out there.

The scripts are here: speedtouch_monitor.zip (41 KB)
They should work with a Speedtouch 585 Modem set to it’s default IP address (eg any Be customer).
You will probably need to enter your router’s password in the monitor.py file.

Also here is an example report from report.py.

If you’ve ever had to scale an image down for the web – or especially to make an icon – you might have noticed that the image actually gets a bit blurrier sometimes. This is surprising! We all know when you scale images up they get blurrier, but you would think when you scale down they’d get sharper, right? Well, no. Scaling down means taking a mathematical average between neighboring pixels and this will make fine details get softer as the colors of the background ‘bleed’ into them.

To help show this I’ve made up some example images.

Continue reading why images get blurry when they get smaller…

After hearing about Dizzee Rascal’s appearance on Newsnight and hearing his new track, I just had to combine the two. With apologies to all involved, I give you “BonkersNight featuring J-Pax”!

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direct link for download

A brilliant modification of a Wall-E toy to make a robot that explores and is generally amazing!

Even better, there are Instructions for building your own…

I love it! Robots, hacking stuff, all put together in the one post – whoohoo!

So, now that I’ve (hopefully) sold my old home and bought a shiny new one (fingers crossed on the paperwork all going smoothly) I clearly need a new project to keep me busy!

Well, not really, but I certainly need a solution to the age old question of “where is all the tech going in the new flat”.

My current solution of 19 inch rackmount equiment in a DIY box on wheels is actually rather good, although very ugly and only suitable for hiding in a cupboard – which is what I’ve currently done [I'll find some pictures later]. However the nice lounge in the new Victorian flat does not have such a handy location that I can box in. Also, I wanted to do something a bit more… interesting. Also quiet, and not the “I will overheat your Xbox 360″ kind of quiet that I currently have… I have open the door to the cupboard to stop the 360 basically melting, and as that is far and away the loudest thing ever it pretty much defeats the whole point. So, some kind of sound proofing AND ventilation is required there.

You can get some great professional silent rack mount boxes from people like Kell Systems. They look and sound great, and for an office I would absolutely buy one, because (a) I would’t be paying for it and (b) it does look like OFFICE furniture, rather than home furniture.

So, my plan is to buy a nice old cabinet or set of drawers, fit rack motunts to it, stuff it with sound dampening boards/foam and then add some quiet fans to it to ensure nothing melts.

I did think finding an appropriate old cabinet would take a while, but fortunately my lovely other half Bobble is an eBay genius and found an excellent one! Even better was that no-one else had spotted it so I snapped it up for a mere ten pounds. Yay! Ok, so its going to cost 70 pounds to transport it back home, but its still a bargain to me.

Take a look – a lovely retro 50s or 60s (not sure when) TV cabinet. Excellent wood panelling and importantly, plenty of space and already has some ventilation holes! Perfect!

So, once I get this baby home I’ll measure up and no doubt make some SketchUp designs of what will go inside… hee hee!