Matt Daubneys Blog

Having seen other peoples success of growing chillis from seed (specifically theopensourcerer) I thought this year I’d have a go. So in what could possibly be said to be a familiar style…..

Packets of Chilli Seeds

I’m only attempting three types of chillis this year, cayenne long hot, navaho and scotch bonnet. In the interest of science I’m trying theopensourcers method of germinating the seeds, and tomorrow evening will be attempting some in plain pots with compost in a heated propagator. This may mean I end up with an absolutley enormous glut of chillis, but I’ll burn that bridge when I come to it.

Here are the seeds ready for the airing cupboard.

Seeds Ready for the airing cupboard

I’m also in the process of building an automated watering system for these once they’re in the greenhouse using arduinos, and hopefully connecting to a server in the house using an easy radio link to report the conditions in the greenhouse Many thanks to theopensourcerer for the information he’s posted on his blog.

In a fit of overwhelming generosity, popey lent me a couple of books, The Code Book by Simon Singh and a python book, which is downstairs so I don’t have the title to hand. Ignoring the python book for the moment, I’ll concentrate on The Code Book.

The Code Book is an overview of the history of codes, ciphers and code cracking. Encryption in all its forms is incredibly interesting to me, simply because some of the methods involved are incredibly clever and very subtle. The book goes through the evolution of codemakers and codebreakers from it’s very beginnings  with Ceasers’ cipher through to some predictions on quantum computing and the effects of this.

The book starts with the story of Mary Queen of Scots. She was put on trial for Treason, but her cousin, Queen Elizabeth I, would only convict and execute her if it could be proven without doubt. This story of how code-breaking had been a life or death situation is continued through out the book. These stories in themselves are intriguing for the huge effect codes and code-breaking have had in our history. The constant creation of new codes and the subsequent breaking of them changed various events in our history.

The author leads us through history, story by story, cipher by cipher, talking about various famous cryptogrophers including Turing, Vignere, Zimmerman and many others.

The book is very easy to read and incredibly insightful. It’s certainly made me a bit more paranoid about security of my various machines!

Thanks again to Popey for lending me this book, and also allowing me to pass it on if anybody else would like to delve through it! Just drop me an email and let me know you’re interested

I finally got one of those mobile broadband dongle thingies in the post this week, and I’m impressed. Admittedly I don’t get any 3 signal at home, so it’s a bit useless there, but once I’m out and about its fantastic. I’m sat in
starucks writing this on my eee and it’s really quite quick. Much quicker than hanging the eee of my mobile, whic
h I used to do previously.

The dongle I’ve got is a ZTE MF627, which was a bit of a fiddle to set up on chruncheee, but I’ll do a screencast
later on showing how to do it. Anyway, my coffee is getting cold!

I’ve been playing with a velleman k8055 USB experimentation boad and think I’ve finally come up with a use for this first board. I’m going to attempt to automate a few things in my room using a Linksys NSLU2.

The first thing to attempt is a nice simple one and does not involve touching any household electrics. A simple motor arrangement on the curtain rail to open the curtains in the morning and force me to get the hell out of bed!

The second thing I intend to do with it is a little more complex and will require some more research. I intend to somehow replace the dimmer switch in my room using the analgue output from the board. If anyone has any good references on what I need to read up to do this, let me know!

your workspace look like? Just because I’m interested really, heres the mess that is mine.

My Workspace

I generally use the laptop to show notes and slides I’m working from, and do my work on the desktop.

So what does yours look like?

Today I started the first fact finding mission for my new project. The Mrs and I went for a walk from Langland Bay,long the cliff tops to Mumbles.

This walk was in the end about 3 miles in length. The start was on the route of the number 12 bus from the Quadrant Station in Swansea town center. We got off the bus near Caswell Avenue and walked along the Langland Golf course, avoiding the occasional golf ball and made it down to the bay.

A Panorama of Langland Bay

This is quite a nice little place for rockpooling at low tide, and the rock formation on the east side of the beach are very interesting to say the least.

We walked across the bay, wandering through the various rockpools and taking a gander around before heading up the cliffs along the footpath. One thing we really didn’t expect to find was a toy fire engine wedged between two rocks. Wonder if it was a native one or was lost at sea.

The path along this cliff top was edged with gorse, some of which had already started to flower, and the views from the top where amazing. Pick a nice day to go this way and the views will literally knock your socks off. This path splits into two half way along, one goes up along the top, and the other skims along the base of the cliffs. We started on the top one, then half way along that dropped down to the bottom one to watch the coast guard doing exercises.

Helicopter Rescue

After this we wandered along the cliff tops to Mumbles, stopping at the cafe near the pier for a mug of hot chocolate and some lunch. Then we pottered along to Verdis for a breathtakingly tasty icecream to munch on while we walked around the Bay to Oystermouth, where we caught the bus back to the bus station.

A nice short walk, with some breathtaking views.

Just had a really nice weekend at home, away from the noisy, horrid traffc. Just the lovely smell of clean air and the sound of the wind, the birds and , on occasion, the church bells.

Did start recording walking tacks today. Went for a short walk up and around Coombe Gibbet, got a lovely picture of the landscape on the way up. Will have to get a wiggle on and build the walking site now. Hopefully get a nice walk around the gower this weekend too.

I’m sat writing this on the train back to Swansea, with my phone on charge through my freeloader. Technology is wonderful!

Back to work when I get back to Swansea. Finish off my report and print it off this evening, and then comment my code ready for it to be submitted for assessment. Hopefully I’ll get my laptop hard drive back relativley soon, but I’m not sure I will after the bizzare packaging standards of Western Digital!

Picture to come later……..

Since I went to the doctor the other day with a dodgy knee and was diagnosed as being unfit, I have decided to start walking again.  This is good as I can fit it in with an old hobby and a new one too, by going geocaching and by improving my landscape photography.

Having had a potter around the interwebs, there don’t seem to be many resources for walking routes in the Gower.  Since it’s currently on my doorstep, I thought I’d generate a few maps using the open street map, walk them and then publish them for others to use. Initially these are only going to be short walking routes, but I’m hoping to do a couple of long ones over the easter holidays, and maybe do one or two in Berkshire as well.

While on these walks I can take a few photos and go find a few geocaches. My first walk is going to take me from Mumbles Head to Langland Bay along the cliff tops, there’s three caches on the route, and hopefully the weather will be good for some nice piccies. I’ll attempt to use these to illustrate the walks and make them look nice Might need to raid the local library for some history snippets too.

It’s all getting a bit exciting!

Well, a new year and a few changes. Having just moved house, my broken laptop-server machine is at the end of it’s life.  With rent having gone down after the move I’ve decided to get the wallet out and ordered a shiny new VPS from those lovely people at bitfolk.com.

A couple of hours this morning got all the files transferred up, Apache 2, MySQL and PHP 5 installed and set up as well as Postfix, Dovecot, Fetchmail and Procmail. I’ve got Procmail to call SpamAssassin using bitfolks dedicated spam assassin server and it all seems to be working nicely now Shall just have to try and keep this place updated!

I went wandering this evening after being a bit restless, so decided to try out my new camera (a canon EOS 1000D) on some nice landscapes. Not being very good at photography in general I was quite pleased with the results.

I think in this one the sun was a bit too bright, there maybe someway to filter this out, but I’m unsure.

This one is my favourite. The nice warm glow from the clouds and in the wet sand is amazing. Might have another go if we get another dry evening before christmas