I just want to keep this bit of info handy that's why I have put it on my blog - I got it from Jeffrey Veen's blog. It basically tells you all the switches to download a directory (possibly music) from the command line, very simply and stably.

Here's the code, go here to find out what it all means:

wget -r -l1 -H -t1 -nd -N -np -A.mp3 -erobots=off -i ~/mp3blogs.txt

Wikilook is a great add-on for FireFox. It tells you the meaning of a word just by pressing the shift key and moving your mouse over the word. It also allows you to search for the word on wikipedia.

Ever wondered what the meaning of incunabulum, floccinaucinihilipilification, ይሉኝታ, كوردی, Bân-lâm-gú or lets say лютий?

Install this add-on and see what they mean.

I was recently introduced to Meet the Gimp which is a series of video-casts by Rolf Steinort. The Gimp stands for GNU Image Manipulation Programme and is the free as in beer, multiplatform open-source equivalent of Photoshop.

Derek Shaw of SoSLUG has agreed with Rolf to put together a DVD of the first 46 episodes and to sell them for £5 plus £1.50 P&P. I bought a copy (which helps save on bandwidth) and I am currently working my way through them and have got to episode 13. If you want to buy yourself a copy then there are more details here or click on the button at the end of this post.

The photo below was composed of 3 images that I took back in 2005, it was the composition of the triptych that I wanted to try.

We have been obsessing about the weather for next week when we go camping in Rendlesham Forest and I found this google mashup - I think it's really cool. It's called weatherbonk - take a look.

I was finally able to get my cron jobs running in Drupal 5.7 (I previously had them working in Drupal 5.2), but when I upgraded they stopped working. I previously had cron run the lynx script, but that now doesn't appear to work. I tried pretty much everything.

I thought I would change the theme - this one is called Barlow.  I think it will be simpler to maintain - what do you think?  Click on the 'Add new comment' link below this post (for authenticated users only) to let me know.

I have now upgraded drupal 5.2 to drupal 5.7 and it went really smoothly with no problems.  This is a security upgrade.  The last time I tried an upgrade it didn't work and it took a few days to get it all back - anyway the instructions upgrade.txt were really good.  I recommend following them to the letter.

This is a picture of the new racking in my garage which I bought here. I have now nearly sorted it all out - I just have to go up to Ian's over in Hatfield to pick up some more pins for the slat wall. This will mean that I can get all the tools off the floor and out of the dreaded toolbox. The toolbox was a big mistake, because it doesn't organise things - it just takes half an hour to find anything!

Soon I will be unveiling the Robotics Laboratory and as part of this I also bought a table (by the way it's rated to hold 300Kg - not that I will be putting anything like that on it). The good thing is that I can also pick up a wireless signal in the garage and that's with concrete walls, so I will be able to do the internet from my cave (and escape the kids!) - no, it's for following instructions on the internet.

After reading a lot of rss feeds after my holiday (about 200+) I came across an article about high frequency sounds and how people over 30 will not be able to hear it - so I wanted to see if I am over the hill. It is the sort of noise that some shop keepers have outside their stores to stop youths congregating.

Anyway, I generated a 12000Hz tone and I could hear it! If you want to try it just download audacity (a cross-platform audio editor) and create your own noise. Once you have audacity goto:

Generate > Tone, then waveform = Sine, Frequency=12000 or higher, amplitude=1, duration=however long you want it (in seconds).

You could make it your mobile (cell) phone's ring tone or burn it to a CD, put it on repeat, then go out and really annoy the neighbours' kids - are you reading this Ian?

You can also go here and give yourself a hearing test. If you don't want to (or can't) download audacity you could try to download the attached annoying_sound.mp3 which is stereo and has 12000Hz on the left channel and 12060 Hz on the right channel to really annoy you.

Here is a way to download media content instead of using p2p networks or bittorrent.

Just copy and paste the following into the google search:
intitle:"index.of" (mp3|mp4|avi) the.music.search -html -htm -php -asp -cf -jsp

Replace the.music.search with the name of the song or artist you require. Make sure you keep the full stops (periods) in the search term.
This is from firedragon and you can view his youtube video here.

Over the last few days I have started to play with MisterHouse. It's a home automation program (really it's a collection of perl scripts) whereby you can automate your house mainly using X10 technology. I installed it a couple of days ago (not that straightforward) and so far I have the sitting room light coming on at sunrise and then off at 8am. Then it goes on again at 2 hours before sunset. Obviously the sunset time will change throughout the year so the software needs your longitude and latitude to calculate this. MisterHouse has got a cool web interface and has spurred me on to learning how to program in perl. All this home automation is controlled by the computer. If I get hold of a couple of motion sensors I can make the lights come on when someone enters the room. I also have the sounds of Big Ben sounding on the quarter hour - luckily though you can mute it! It also makes extensive use of a text to speech program called festival. This means that you can get it to say what it is doing, eg "It is now sunset so the sitting room lights have been turned on."This morning we all went to the library and I came away with two perl programming books. It looks fairly simple, because there are a lot of existing examples within MisterHouse.