Author Archive

Having your own printer is so last century: online printing services

Friday, July 15th, 2011

We needed to send a couple of small documents by post and realised - while we are in the 'No Fixed Abode' phase of our Keep-It-Simple-Stupid plan to move back to the UK - that another thing we don't have in our luggage is a printer. We're currently using a ...

Trying out JBullet: IntBuffer is not direct

Saturday, May 14th, 2011

[caption id="attachment_1271" align="alignright" width="150" caption="JBullet Basic Demo"][/caption] I've been simulating the movement of a line-following robot in plain old Java recently, but wanted to try a few problems that need physics, so I downloaded JBullet - a Java port of the Bullet  Physics Library. It needs LWJGL - the Lightweight Java ...

LEGO Mindstorms RCX cable rot / decay

Tuesday, May 10th, 2011

Some of the LEGO I have in the house must be 30 years old. It's as good as the day it was first unwrapped. I have to admit to being disappointed when one of my two RCXes stopped responding to the IR tower. I was pleased the other one was ...

BrickOS on Ubuntu 10.10 Maverick Meerkat

Wednesday, April 27th, 2011

BrickOS was an integral part of some work I did many years ago and I've been trying to dig the code up recently. It seems as though it fell out of the Ubuntu repositories some time ago (in as legos before the name change), so I'm currently installing the source ...

Wind power in Malaysia – the missing map

Monday, March 28th, 2011

[caption id="attachment_1252" align="alignright" width="150" caption="TNB's wind power in Malaysia map"][/caption] Just a quick note to myself really - many, many times online I'd replied to people saying "why doesn't Malaysia use wind power?" with my belief that it doesn't have any. I couldn't find a good source for that  before today, ...