I like to take the odd photo now and then. Last year, with the help of Lulu I put together a calendar that featured some of my favourite photos as a Christmas present for my parents and in-laws.

This year I have done the same, and as the surprise factor is no longer there, I have decided to make it available to anyone who wants to buy one. They cost £8.25 excluding postage - none of which is profit or will go to charity.

Do not mistake the title of this post as one by Robert Peston.

Today marks the end of a fairly intense period at work. As I write this, the final build is being tested ready for its release later in the year. It has been a particularly tough few months getting to this point, so much so that I have rarely touched my laptop outside of work.

The other big drain on my time has been the redecorating of our living room and dining room. Having started the work in February, and going at a somewhat leisurely pace, the new carpets finally arrive next Wednesday. With just this weekend of finishing touches to go, soon I won’t have to face any sanding, glossing, plastering, wiring, painting or building again. Until we start redoing the bathroom of course.

This means all of those projects that I’ve been badly neglecting will soon get dusted off and start moving forward.

So, although the End is Nigh, the Beginning is right around the corner.

If my last post was not intended to be a post about blogging, what did I intend for it?

Well, it was going to be a summary on the recent happenings in these here parts. Which set me off onto a train of thought as to why I hadn’t blogged about any of them already, etc etc etc. But I’m not going to make that mistake again.

So, what has been happening?

A couple weeks ago Jo and I spent a week up in Scotland. We were staying next to Loch Lomond at the Auchenheglish lodges. We drove up with no real plans for the week - which worked out very nicely. We spent a most days watching the Olympics in the mornings and then heading out to explore in the afternoons. I realise some might find it sacrilege to be in that part of the world and spend half your time sat on a sofa. But this was our holiday, and it was exactly what we needed.

At the end of the week we spent the day in Edinburgh, where we experienced a flavour of the Fringe festival, walked the Royal Mile from Edinburgh Castle down to the Scottish Parliament and learnt that city center parking is very expensive (£17 for 7 hours). All of this was despite the fairly damp weather that had followed us all week. We barely scratched the surface of what Edinburgh has to offer - especially with the Fringe on. We would happily return in the future to spend a good 3 or 4 days doing it all properly.

Afterwards, we spent the weekend with friends in Falkirk, where we took in the wonders of The Falkirk Wheel and heard all about the new stand being built by the owner of Schuh at Falkirk FC’s stadium. See, there’s my trademark wry sense of humour kicking in. To be fair, the Falkirk Wheel is an impressive feat of engineering and worth a visit if you’re in the area. We were, however, saved from experiencing the Falkirk stadium first hand.

What I found most noticeable when we got back to Southampton was how little I had missed the laptop and internet. In fact, with the prospect of returning to work, I would have happily left it all behind for another week.

Another highlight of recent times was the installation of our wood-burning stove. Although that was not entirely stress-free. Before going to Scotland, I laid some tiles in the fireplace for the stove to sit on. To my dismay, when we got back, the ready-mixed tile adhesive I had got from Wickes had not gone off and the tiles were not set. This led to a slightly frantic Bank Holiday Monday as I relaid the tiles, this time with some adhesive bought from a tiling shop. Thankfully the adhesive took and a quick bit of grouting later, the fireplace was ready for the stove guys the following Thursday.

Working from home that day, I hid away in our bedroom whilst the two guys did their thing. With the chimney breast running through that room, it was clear who was the apprentice - he spent a lot of the day on the roof trying to get the lining down the chimney, whilst having instructions shouted back up at him from the other guy.

Eventually they were done, and we were left with our Clearview Pioneer 400 ready for action. The next step is to find a suitable supply of fuel. For now, I have been saving all of the off-cuts from the renovations - there’s plenty of old skirting board to get through.

Most recently, we went to Oxford last Saturday for Megan and Ben’s wedding. It was a great day for everyone, the weather was absolutely superb - which was very lucky considering August has been one of the least sunny on record. It was certainly one of the grandest weddings I have been to - set in the surroundings of Mansfield college.

And that’s it.

I’m going to say it up front - I did not intend this to be a blog post about blogging, but I think that is the way it is going.

I don’t write as often as I would like. I think I have set the bar too high in my mind in terms of what I should and shouldn’t write here. I have all manner of ideas for posts, but they never seem to make their way onto the proverbial paper.

I get very self-critical about anything I write. In fact, its taken me about 10minutes to get this far - just over 100 words. I often ask myself why I’m like this. I think it is because I want every post to be a good one. I want anyone reading this blog to read one entry and feel like it is worth reading more.

I need to get over this. I need to find my own style and stop trying to produce the perfect post every time. I need to recognise that finding my own style does not, and will not, happen overnight. I need to not be afraid of getting it wrong.

Now, I could just delete what I have written here and carry on with my life. I could save it as a draft to keep it around as a reminder of these things. Or, I could publish it to the world and really mean it.

Publishing it means I’ve got to think of a suitable title - do I go for my favoured wry sense of humour or a more obvious statement of the content. Give me 10 minutes and I’m sure something will come to mind.

It has been a bit quiet around here recently, which is not to say I haven’t been up to stuff.

Last week I was involved with an event at work for ’showing off’ interesting things around linux. I was signed up to demo the N800 internet tablet, but I stretched the definition a bit and had my arduinos out as well. Ian took some photos of the event. Here you can see talking to someone about the arduino’s whilst James plays with the Wiimote paired with my N800 and here you can see my rather hastily built custom Wii Sensor bar. I’m glad I had my box of arduino bits with that morning, otherwise I would have been stuck! For more on what else was going on, check out Graham’s write-up of the event.

A couple weekends ago, we finally got the veg beds planted. Click through to flickr for a very well annotated list of what we planted. Sadly, last night the neighbour’s blasted cat dug up half our carrot seedlings. I’ve laid out some temporary netting and this weekend I’ll be building a better cat trap defense.

The third thing I wanted to mention was the Super Secret Side project that Roo and I have been hacking on for the last week: shewentofherownaccord.com.

This is an idea that has been bouncing around between us for years - but only now have we done something about it. It is essentially a (growing) collection of the most pun-tastic jokes out there for all to share. After a fairly frantic week of hacking in the evenings, we managed to coax together enough of a site to reveal it today. We still have plenty of features to add, so keep an eye out for updates.

A couple weeks ago I bought an Ethernet shield for my arduino with a plan to get it connecting to the world directly. The stripped down TCP implementation that comes with it is much more geared towards making the board act as a web-server rather than client. This means you have to poll for information rather than have the arduino send it out. Unfortunately, it is this second case that I am most interested in.

Julian Bleecker’s paper “Why Things Matter” introduced the term “blogjects” - objects that blog. A natural extension of which are “tweetjects” - objects that twitter. A good example being Tower Bridge which twitters whenever the bridge opens or closes and announces which ship is passing by. (Roo has written more on this stuff here.)

I see an ethernet-enabled arduino as a perfect platform for building such objects from. But to do this, it needs to establish the outgoing connection itself.

There is another shield that provides a much more powerful option based on the Lantronix XPort ethernet hardware. It even has a demo sketch that will post to twitter. The advantage of this shield is that it provides a serial interface to run the connection - putting much less strain on the arduino. However, this power comes at a cost - the XPort itself is around $50, whereas the Nuelectronics shield is £12.99 already assembled.

So for now, I am persevering with the cheaper board and have been learning far more about TCP packets than I ever thought necessary. So far, I have got my board doing an ARP request to map IP to MAC address, establishing a TCP connection and then sending a single blob of data (naturally, “HELLO WORLD”). This is all a couple layers lower down in the OSI model than I am used to working with in my day job.

It is still a bit too hard-coded to be easily reused and attempts to re-factor what I’ve done has broken it all; so I still have lots to do.

One thing I have discovered whilst playing with this all is Wireshark - a superb tool for sniffing packets on the network and examining their content. This has helped a lot in working out which bits and bytes are going awry in my packets.

DIY and decorating allowing, I hope to make progress on this over the next couple weeks.

As a part of the “CurrentCost craze” that is rife at Hursley these days, I’ve had mine up and running for a few days and am very excited by the possibilities.

The CurrentCost meter gives you a real-time display of how much electricity your house is using. On its own, this would be interesting, but hard to relate to anything. One of its cool features is its awareness of how much electricity actually costs - being told your usage costs £17 per month is much more effective than saying you’re using 1.23kw.

I’m not the only one who has got this meter setup and then obsessively gone around the house to reduce how much is being wasted.

What is great about this particular device, and what appeals to the Hursley crowd, is the ability to plug it into a PC and capture the information it produces. It doesn’t take much plumbing to get the data being graphed online - something which does raise an interesting issue.

I can now see when Jo has got home from work as I see the spike of the kettle being used, but equally, anyone can get a pretty good idea if we’re in the house. Is that a genuine concern? There are certainly easier ways of working out if we’re in or not.

That aside, the graph it produces definitely does give food for thought. Here’s a snapshot of the graph from today (click through for a fully annotated version on flickr):

This graph has left me intrigued to find out what the 100watt-ish blip is that happens every 2 hours; there is a PC running all the time, which has the meter connected - I wonder what cron tasks are configured.

The meter has definitely left me feeling slightly guilty for the 600watts of halogen spot-lights we put in the new kitchen.

For a long time there hasn’t been a viable option for linux users to buy main-stream DRM-free music in the UK. I have looked at the various independent stores out there, but they simply don’t have the music I want. I have been eagerly waiting for Amazon to launch its MP3 store - something they recently confirmed would happen at some point this year.

But today, out of nowhere, play.com have just launched their own music store. That’s right - I didn’t say ‘announced’ or ‘promised’; they have actually launched it today and I have bought my very first MP3 album (for the record, Adele’s 19).

Their FAQ have all the gory details; music is availble at either 192Kbit/s or 320Kbit/s depending on the recording, can be redownloaded a (limited) number of times and are unencumbered of any DRM. They only have content from EMI and some independent labels at the moment, but this is certainly a good start.

According to The Register, where I first heard the news, all tracks will be 320Kbit/s eventually, with the average price being 70p/track or £6.99/album.

All considered, play have won the race as far as I am concerned. Amazon will have to do something pretty special to make me look their way.

Ben, a 7-year old: What do you call Darth Vader kissing Luke Skywalker?
Me: I have no idea.
Ben: Luke Darth Vader
Me: What?
Ben: in complete hysterics
Me: What?!
Ben’s Dad: Don’t ask. It only gets more random from here.
Me: What?!!