Andrew and Lizzie

Bus lane cameras

Andrew — Sat, 05 May 2012 13:51:16 +0000

If you live to the east of Edinburgh, you’ve probably seen the new bus lane cameras on the A1 on London Road and Willowbrae Road. I was curious to see how how many drivers were caught — I cycle along the A1 both ways as part of my commute, and I always see people abusing the bus lanes — so I asked the council for their data. It turns out that they caught over 4000 drivers in the first 4 days (from 2nd April).

That would equate to a nice chunk of money, apart from that the council was nice and only sent warning letters for the first three weeks; they started sending fines on the 23rd.

Not entirely surprisingly Edinburgh council used almost all of the time available to them to reply to my Freedom of Information Act request. They still only gave me information up to the point at which I made my inquiry — I suppose the next thing for me to do is to ask again, and see whether three weeks of warning letters brought the numbers down by the time the fines were introduced.

For the curious, my request and its response can be found on What do They Know.

2011 Newsletter

Andrew — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 21:46:52 +0000

We’ve got our 2011 Newsletter online. Our printer is broken at the moment, so we won’t be sending copies with Christmas cards this year.

Food Miles

Andrew — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 16:41:28 +0000

I enjoy eating oatcakes with cheese. While we were on Mull, we stayed at a dairy farm which makes some very nice cheddar, so I got some oatcakes from the shop in Tobermory.

The cheese, then, had stayed within the farm buildings since it left the cow. The oatcakes were made about a mile from our house in Edinburgh, but I suspect they took a more round-about route to get to Mull than we did.

We then brought them home, so they’ve done a nice tour of Scotland before returning to Edinburgh.

New Toys

Andrew — Tue, 12 Apr 2011 17:50:00 +0000

My Mum and Nana got me a shiny toy for my birthday — a Canon EOS 400D. New only to me, but I’m enjoying it a lot :). Best of all, the kit lens that came with it isn’t too bad for taking pictures of flowers:

I’ve not yet worked out what my workflow is going to be to get the pictures on the website, but I am intending to get them up there soon. I’m going to have to work on resisting the temptation to buy extras for it. Anyone want to buy an Alfa 156?

This year’s pictures

This year’s pictures

Andrew — Mon, 11 Apr 2011 21:13:22 +0000

We’ve finally managed to upload some pictures for this year :). I’ve also discovered a few on our laptop that haven’t made it up yet, so I’m hoping to back-fill soon. Find them at http://www.aylett.co.uk/2011/.

2011 Newsletter

Quote of the day: Rosie

Andrew — Fri, 25 Feb 2011 22:27:08 +0000

Rosie saw me playing a logic puzzle on the computer:

Are you playing that game?
I like that game!
Why does it have numbers?

Quote of the day

Testing Vid.ly (Kirsty and Ewan sledging)

Andrew — Tue, 25 Jan 2011 13:02:46 +0000

The Mozilla hacks blog had an article on Vid.ly, a new video encoding service from encoding.com. I thought I’d try it out. This is a video that Lizzie took of Kirsty and Ewan sledging, from the first snowfall of winter, back in November:

[Edit: I've removed the video, as it takes a very long time to load.]

If that doesn’t work, try following the link: http://vid.ly/9p6f1l

The USP of the service is that it encodes everything about a dozen times, then streams the appropriate video for the device you’re using. This should mean that you can view the video on newer Firefox and Chrome builds natively using WebM, on Internet Explorer using a Flash player, on powerful mobile devices and Safari using h.264 and on other mobile devices using 3gp. It’s not very flexible — our camera makes 4:3 videos, but it seems to want to encode them as widescreen anyway. It seems to do the job it’s supposed to, though :).

Migrating contacts from S40 to Android

Andrew — Mon, 03 Jan 2011 21:04:37 +0000

Lizzie and I recently got ourselves an HTC Desire each, to replace my Nokia E71 and her Nokia 6700 Classic. It wasn’t hard to get my contacts out of my phone — S60 supports SyncML, so does Google, and they have instructions. Lizzie’s phone was harder — it doesn’t have WiFi, I’d waited until the number had been ported, so OTA wouldn’t work, and it doesn’t support user-configurable SyncML anyway. I couldn’t find any information online about how to export the contacts from S40 then import them into Android, so having got it to work I thought I should share.

What S40 does do is have an option to back up data (including contacts) onto the SD card. I did that, then used a bluetooth file browser to pull the file onto my laptop. This gave me a file called Backup003.NBF. Google’s not much help on what you can do with this type of file — there are a couple of dodgy-looking Windows applications that look like they may help, but I’m not willing to pay for them, or even to try to run them, and I don’t have a Windows machine anyway.

In desperation, I ran file on the file, just to see what it would say. In hindsight, I should have tried that first. It turns out that it’s a zip archive. Unzipping it gives you a few directories and one holds all your contacts as separate VCF files. VCF is a nice format, in that you can concatenate valid files together and end up with a new valid file, so I didn’t have to upload them all to Google Contacts separately. Once I had loaded them all into Google Contacts, they automatically synced with the phone. Job done, a lot more easily than I’d feared.

Sending email from my phone

2010 Newsletter

Andrew — Tue, 21 Dec 2010 22:04:19 +0000

As usual, we’ve written a newsletter to send with our Christmas cards. We also publish our newsletters online – you can find all of our newsletters on our main website, or go straight to our 2010 newsletter. Related posts: 2009 … Continue reading → Related posts:

A practical investigation into the cohesive and aerodynamic properties of crystalline dihydrogen monoxide

Andrew — Tue, 30 Nov 2010 17:27:48 +0000

We were due to have a brown-bag session about Visual Studio today, but unfortunately the guy who was supposed to be running it had to work from home due to the snow. As an alternative, we undertook a practical investigation into the cohesive and aerodynamic properties of crystalline dihydrogen monoxide.

No, not just a snowball fight — we also built a snowman:

Our snowman

The Team