Monday, 20 October 2014

New bike lights for myself and for Kate. Moon Mask and Comet Rear and Knog Blinders. LED and USB rechargable.

Bike lights arrived today.
I especially was in need of a front light so good to have that sorted.
Charged up and ready to go . . . road test on way home.
Moon Mask and Moon Comet Rear. 
Glowey blue and orange charging lights. Mini-USB.

Also got red knog front and back for Kate.
This is the place I got them from, good price and v. good selection AND good website where can sort lights by category: 


This morning on cycle in at the junction of Baggot St. Upper, Haddington and Lemsip road just before going over the bridge on canal there was a rear bike light on ground. Totally run over and smashed. I picked it up (compulsive rubbish picker-up) to get it out of the way. It has red duct tape on it. In case someone is wondering where their rear light has gone to! It's in the bin :-7


############################################################
Selecting bike lights . . . 
There is a very big selection out there.
LED lighting and battery tech has been improving every year.
But what are good lights to buy for bike?

We got a pair of knog blinders for Daire at start of September. 
They're so small and handy and also neat/cute/cool!
I borrowed one a couple of times.

Bike shops in Dublin have some lights but there is really a much better selection at better price on the internet.
Bike Light Database . . . compare features and look at reviews.

Lights needed for James, Kate, ?Maeve, ?Fionnuala . . . 


Knog frog, cheap - coin batteries.
€23.99
coin or AAA batteries in Halfords Knog style silicone lights . . . 
coin batteries
city cycles 1 AA 10 euros

There are alot of very simple Knog frog style lights now from generic/any manufacturers.


Cycleways on Parnell St.
€139.99

Knog Blinder 1 LED Front & Rear Twin Pack
NOW€46.99   out of stock until 17/10/xxxx

Wow. A shop that allows you to categorize on rechargable lights:



CONCLUSION:
all good! But moon meteor/comet front rear prob good for me    ?or mask(better and on sale :-P)+comet?
Knog red front & rear blinder for Kate


also looks good: moon shield rear





rathfarnham


###########################################################
Fun/prezzies:    POV.    KITS      BIKEPOV for ME?Kate?Daire?  LilyPad for Kate?  And For Maeve?    
There are some cool POVs commercially available.
- SpokePOV from adafruit industries (and its i'ble)
- Monkeylectric's m132s
- Monkeylectric's recentely announced m464q



http://www.adafruit.com/products/5     SpokePOV Kit - v1.1 $37.50  + DONGLE NEEDED 
https://www.adafruit.com/products/46   USBtinyISP AVR Programmer Kit (USB SpokePOV Dongle) - v2.0 $22.00

http://www.adafruit.com/product/535   V1.1 blue mini usbtiny dongle + magnet needed 
MiniPOV 3 Kit - V 3.0 PRODUCT ID: 20 $17.50


2 images



###############################################
wearables

LilyPad Wrist Band POV by quasiben




colouring book

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Saturday, 18 October 2014

weekend log 17 oct 2014. cycling. run. puncture fixing. clothes washing. it's windy!

fri 7:30 flight tracker EI108.  
2014-10-17New York (JFK)Dublin (DUB)A333 (EI-EAV)01:0001:1607:40Landed 07:19
 Breakfast.  Head to airport to collect mum and dad. Rav won't start. Orange jump starter does job. Moist morning. Windscreen slow to unmist. Traffic slow at our estate exit across bridge. M50 grand. Park. Wait maybe 10 mins. Two sleepy parents appear. Good form. Bring them back to our house for rest. Mum tells me lots about holiday. I leave them to breakfast.

Cycle to work 10.6k nice weather. Wind with me somewhat.

Working on clearwater enum file and dns route to IMS hub with Shaila. we get an OPTIONS to go to hub from clearwater by end of day. Also more documenting.

fri 18:20ish bike home from work. 10.6k
  Epic windy driving rain From south but soft, warm.
Cycle home fri evening epic wind, driving thankfully soft sleety rain. Great fun! :-D Windy and sunny all saturday.
Kids good watching soccer (epic conditions Bray vs Dundalk) and that 70s show. They have eaten lots of grapefruit. I drip on floor, mop, shower then cook savoury curried turkey mince with leek carrot tomato kidney beans ginger and rice. Nom. White wine w sugar!? for me.

Bedtime for girls. Wrap Maeve's finger with vinegar in cotton wool in sellotape anti wart.
Films on tv and fix puncture fionn's bike (rm failed patch, add round one, awkward spot beside valve top doesn't stick add patch around valve) and put on uniform wash. I'm reading Girl Genius cute steampunk graphic comic these days, great fun :-).

Sat 8:15 up, hang wash, banana plus pint water, cycle gear and runners still damp, bye to kids - Maeve making loom band snakes - cycle to Marlay park. 5k.  beautiful sunny day. Breezy. I was thinking it would be wet! Stretch and join in warm up exercises. ParkRun 5k. 4:26 at 1k. Results run#82 will be up once laptop problems sorted. Mapmyrun result 24:51. Stitch on r side shortly after earlier than usual probably the banana plus water. Catch Derm at last 500m. Meet JamesCarroll and Derm & family. They're both off to IBM now factory moving from Sandyford. Cycle home 5k.

Map of route

james coleman rode 6.13 kilometers from home to Marlay Park.



james coleman ran 5.17 kilometers in 24min:51sec


james coleman rode 5.35 kilometers from Marlay park back home


Hang clothes. Put on light wash. Maeve plays a tune on piano onto google now and after a few goes and moving down an octave we find it is Beethoven's Für Elise. Breakfast straggled with kids. Daire has toastie. Maeve grapefruit. I oats currants museli. Daire off to gaa. K porridge. Cupcakes. Blog diary.

We look for Cathy's cat. Maeve and I collect dried grass, leaves, sticks, haws, blackberries and dandelion for gerbils.
Offering dandelion and blackberry. Red haws and grass seed heads.
Basket of stuff collected for gerbils. Plum woods and leaves. Whitethorn/hawthorn. Grass with seed heads. 
Maeve goes visiting. I hang light wash. Start cooking lunch. Pasta in crab soup with green beans - curried! Maeve comes back. We eat. I grab Coffee also.


Great drying out today. Windy and sunny.

Girls and I cycle to stage school. I give Maeve a backer. Kate brings ukelele. We go straight down over Bearna motorway roundabout, Kate follows us. 2.6k to school. Wind kindof with us. I meet teachers, parents and kids.

I cycle to Benildus. I act suspiciously and a very nice Polish school caretaker man opens doors and gates for me to get Daire's bike. I fix puncture at school. Rm two sharp bits of glass from tyre. Rode 4.11 km on my bike bringing Daire's bike back from Benildus after fix puncture. tough work! :-P especially up Sandyford hill. Couldn't change gears while holding other bike.

Daire and myself at home. Glance at newspaper. I go meet Kate, zoom down to school with wind. Maeve goes off on visit. Kate and I cycle home. I demonstrate front wheel wheelie and do a somersault crash! Whoops. Bounce up. Nobody saw it but Kate. Right arm got a little graze.
Map of route

james coleman rode 2.80 kilometers to St Olaf's with Maeve on backer with Kate

Map of route

james coleman rode 4.11 kilometers WITH Daire's bike AGAINST the wind
and up Sandyford Hill. Phew.


  1. Map of route

    james coleman cycle/zoomed 5.72 kilometers down to St Olaf's wit h wind and back against wind with Kate

Kate and I grab a bite to eat. Venture Scouts hike is on, Daire grabs lunch, clothing, map, money and heads off on bike. Kate & I take in clothes, do ironing, empty dishwasher. Fionn comes home. Tea. TV. Computer. Bedtimes. 

TODO star maps for cubs.

DONE orange jumpstarter not charging - found another 12V DC transformer.

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Thursday, 16 October 2014

boldly going where no man has gone before . . . perhaps . . . with Android Studio . . . and a review of Android Sensor graphing/recording/visualising apps

A nice list of resources for getting started with Android Studio by Peter/Golgi: http://blog.golgi.io/get-started-with-android-studio

 I have tried Android Studio out for a few things now. And generally found I can get an app built and working easily enough (usually after a bit of updating of SDK and libraries in the studio). As updates come out Android Studio is getting better.

 My last experiment was importing and building the cute Android Tricorder which is not available in play store for some time now. Source code here: https://code.google.com/p/moonblink/. Import code. The Tricorder depends on hermitLibrary and hermitAndroid and the import took care of each module. Build errors gave helpful clues to what was needed to be done to solve them. Update SDK versions needed. Edit build.gradle a little. Needed to find junit test libraries. Fiddle a bit. And tah dahh. We have an .apk and lovely beepy tricorder on my phone again.

 There is a-lot going on under the hood. I am gradually getting used to not knowing about every tiny detail of the build process. While it works it's all good. We can certainly work with this for a while :-). I'm sure we(the royal we) shall learn more as we use it and go under the hood when required.

 As usual with Android if you want a Tricorder-like app on phone there are a good few to choose from. It took a while to find one which would record the values. 

 The AndroSensor app wins. Very usable interface though it looks a little clunky and with ads. Perfect for recording data. You can select which sensors you are interested in.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.fivasim.androsensor
View and record data from sensors. View numeric or graph for different sensors. Record to csv. Nice and simple. I want to send this up in a bottle rocket!

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=imoblife.androidsensorbox
Sensor Box - Nice visual widgets 

 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=de.onyxbits.sensorreadout
https://github.com/onyxbits/sensorreadout
Open source, Apache licence - Clunky but simple and ready for hacking. Graph sensors one at a time. Zoom/scrollable graph after stop sampling.

 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.innoventions.sensorkinetics
Display data and graphs for sensors. Log and share files. Interactive graph while sampling. $ for file sharing and data but good app without it.

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mtorres.phonetester
Shows values for Sensors WiFi Telephony GPS Battery Multi-Touch-Test-Graph System-Info


https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tomplesko.app.esensor
Just a couple of sensors work without $$. Nice interface. but UNINSTALL

 https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=tom.plesko.apps.audio
An Audio Spectrum Analyzer grand . . . but :-P UNINSTALL

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.calintat.sensors
Sensors - text values shown from sensors. Can take a snapshot of values. Neat. But UNINSTALL

https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.danms.LCARSScanner&hl=en  SciScanner
$$ Very Nice GUI, Solar, Geo, Weather, Audio, Magnetics, GPS(free), Gyro(free), Device(free), Camera
$$ looks nice
https://sites.google.com/site/neotechni/system/app/pages/subPages?path=/Home/lcars
LCARS star trek next generation various apps

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Friday, 26 September 2014

How to add references / edit formatting on stackoverflow/segfault/...

I had to go looking for this today and couldn't find it immediately so I'm putting it here so I might find it faster next time. http://meta.stackoverflow.com/editing-help

How to add references:
Here's a link to [a blog on Linux networking namespaces][nsblog]. And here's another link to the same thing: [opencloudblog.com: Linux networking namespaces shiny and more beautiful].


  [opencloudblog.com: Linux networking namespaces shiny and more beautiful]:http://www.opencloudblog.com/?p=42

   [blog]: http://www.opencloudblog.com/?p=42
From
http://superuser.com/questions/428694/creating-a-new-network-namespace-on-linux
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/25641630/virtual-networking-devices-in-linux/26058531#26058531

See also introduction to linux virtual networking: [blog.scottlowe.org: Linux networking namespaces intro], [opencloudblog.com: Linux networking namespaces shiny and more beautiful] and [opencloudblog.com: Linux networking namespaces shiny and even more detailed with beautiful diagrams]

[man ip netns]: http://man7.org/linux/man-pages/man8/ip-netns.8.html
[LWN article on network namespaces]: http://lwn.net/Articles/580893/
[blog.scottlowe.org: Linux networking namespaces intro]: http://blog.scottlowe.org/2013/09/04/introducing-linux-network-namespaces/
[opencloudblog.com: Linux networking namespaces shiny and more beautiful]: http://www.opencloudblog.com/?p=42
[opencloudblog.com: Linux networking namespaces shiny and even more detailed with beautiful diagrams]: http://www.opencloudblog.com/?p=66



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Friday, 2 May 2014

Why _does_ a full hard disk result in slow or badly behaved OS? And does defragmentation help with SSD disks?

Answer:
* More disk i/o done due to fragmented files in the small disk area.
* ALSO more cpu+memory work managing more seperate pointers in the fragmented file-allocation table.
* Defragmentation doesn't help and doesn't make sense with SSD disks.

In Windows and Linux as well as other OSs a full main disk will result in OS behaving slowly/badly in my experience. 

 It makes sense that when your main disk has limited space then things flail around a bit more. But I had not ever thought _why_ _PROPERLY_. It seems obvious that all processes have to do more work and file fragmentation causes things to go slow and this causes bottlenecks on disk as well as memory/bus and cpu load. What I realised today after a brief google + think was that with increased disk fragmentation comes more memory usage (a bit but in important part where disk drivers manage disk file-allocation-table) and more cpu work managing pointers to each fragment and more disk work (more (but smaller) i/o operations) writing smaller file fragments to disk.

Laptop and computer at home sometimes go without maintenance until there is a noticable problem. So have encountered and recovered from this problem several times on linux+windows. 

 Thoughts about this triggered by this question.

http://superuser.com/questions/747528/why-is-my-disk-at-99-usage-here/748892?noredirect=1#comment966699_748892

Why? Fragmentation on disk (and resulting increase of processing fragments in memory as well as number of disk read/writes). The remaining small area will be fragmented on disk, probably spread over different areas on disk. There is no space spare so de-fragmentation will not be able to help much until more space is freed up. All processes need to write temporary files (e.g. internet browser cache). These files will be fragmented. For magnetic disks the disk heads have to travel further which means slower file read/writes. For SSD disks I was not sure, this is a little bit boring but explains it well:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VfYkJoqfG-k "Why Fragmentation is Still a Problem with SSDs". In memory (in file-allocation-table in memory) fragmented files take up more space and result in more cpu and bus activity dealing with different fragments. On the video he ends up with a sell for diskkeeper which is claims to improve the problem for SSDs. BUT allowing enough spare space on disk would probably be the best strategy.

This is good: Investigation into effect of de-fragging SSD.http://www.pcworld.com/article/2047513/fragging-wonderful-the-truth-about-defragging-your-ssd.htmlConclusion: There is no point in running a de-frag tool with SSD.

 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solid-state_drive
"There is limited benefit to reading data sequentially (beyond typical FS block sizes, say 4kB), making fragmentation negligible for SSDs.[100] Defragmentation would cause wear by making additional writes of the NAND flash cells, which have a limited cycle life.[101][102]"

 http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/inside-the-ssd-revolution-how-solid-state-disks-really-work/

NOR and NAND Flash Memory Floating Gate
http://www.cse.scu.edu/~tschwarz/coen180/LN/flash.html


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Friday, 4 April 2014

Route card for Balally Cubs Larch Hill to Hellfire and back (back via Cruagh wood and Tibradden probably)



Route/Objective: Balally Cubs Larch Hill to Hellfire and back (back via Cruagh wood and Tibradden probably)
UPDATE/report: Band of rain moving up across the country. Fell on far side of Wicklow hills from us. We saw a little mist. Warm throughout hike. Beautiful sun and blue skys at end of hike. 20 cubs and 3 scouters. Started walking @10:30. Made good time to Hellfire. Single file on road watching for cars at start. Then onto quieter roads and wood walk. Short breaks to take on water and take off coats/jumpers/leggings - cubs overheating once we started climbing. At turn to Lamberts lane we overshot a little. It's an entrance to horse stud/farm. We were sheltered all the way until the top. A bit windy and misty rain. We had lunch in the trees. Visited the Hellfire club. It was about 12:30? so we went back shorter route (same route we took over). Back at Larch Hill just before 2:30. All kids collected by 12:45.  


Date/Time: Meet 10am Sun Apr 6 2014 Larch Hill

















Leg Time of Day Distance Duration Turn/go Bearing Location/Highway Lat Long

1 10:20 0.0 km 0 min START NW Larch Hill 53.254024 -6.284129

2
1.6 km 24 min L SSW Edmondstown Road (R116) (HAIRPIN) 53.261682 -6.297802

3
2.1 km 31 min R SW Cruagh Lane 53.257534 -6.300464

4
2.4 km 35 min R SW Lamberts Lane 53.255478 -6.303564

5
2.7 km 41 min R W Old Military Road (in Massey Woods) 53.254901 -6.308754

6 11:30 3.7 km 56 min L/up road S Killakee Road (R115) 53.253172 -6.320981

7
3.9 km 58 min R W service road - Hellfire car park 53.252107 -6.320708

8 11:45 4.5 km 68 min LUNCH LUNCH DMW Hellfire Club 53.252012 -6.330374
9









10 12:15 4.5 km 68 min START E DMW Hellfire Club



11
5.2 km 78 min L/down rd N Killakee Road (R115) 53.252107 -6.320708

12
5.3 km 80 min R SE DMW into Massey Wood 53.253172 -6.320981
13 13:00 7.2 km 108 min L cross rd S Cruagh Road (L8124) 53.239283 -6.31428

14 13:35 9.4 km 141 min cross road NE Pine Forest Road (R116) 53.242701 -6.295077

15 13:55 10.5 km 157 min L down rd NNW Tibradden Lane 53.2487 -6.285514

16 14:30 12.5 km 187 min FINISH FINISH Finish in Larch Hill 53.254024 -6.284129













Time with some short breaks and time for lunch.
Total Hiking time (not incl. time for breaks)

















Escapes/Alternates

7,8 Go up Hellfire on longer but less steep forest tracks.

10,11,12 Go from Hellfire back to Larch hill by the way we came (Down, Through Massey wood, on road by fruit farm Cruagh Lane, Mutton Lane to Larch Hill) 4.5k

13 Go back through Massey wood and then back by way we came





Group Traveling by

Hike/walk






Number in Party

___ leaders, ___ cubs






Emergency Contact









Phone Number of Contact









Address of Contact









Vehicles will be left at

Larch Hill






Notes












Route card spreadsheet calc hyperlink:
=CONCATENATE("http://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=14/",H5,"/",I5,"&layers=cn")
deploy hyperlink:
=HYPERLINK(J5,J5)


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