So whilst pimping is hardly my favourite expression it seems fitting to describe the process one of my latest acquisitions – a Nokia N800 – is being subjected to. For most people these days customisation is key, and as was the case with the scooter loving Mods this holds especially true for geeks – folks [...]
As a kid I was an avid shortwave radio enthusiast, and spent many happy evenings tuning around the HF bands and listening to amongst other things numbers stations.
In the 90s London record label Irdial did a quadruple CD release of recordings of numbers stations in the form of The Conet Project. Sadly I never made any [...]
Last night I went to see Sonic Youth perform the Daydream Nation album live at Glasgow’s ABC. This was the first time I’d seen them and it’s always a worry when you go to see live a legendary band of cult status that has been around for considerable time. As if you are unlucky and [...]
On the train from Leeds back to Glasgow it wasn’t long before I tired of retuning the radio what seemed like every two minutes, as broadcast frequencies changed. A pocket shortwave receiver is all very well, when what you really need on such a trip is a good FM radio with RDS that can automagically [...]
Last week whilst back in England visiting family I managed to (much to my 11 year old niece’s dismay) engineer a trip to Manchester’s Museum of Science & Industry. Hoping to see in operation the rebuild of the world’s first stored program computer, The Small-Scale Electronic Machine – alternatively and affectionately named ‘Baby’, which is [...]
So last Sunday saw this year’s Hey You Get Off My Pavement! festival come round again, and the ChIT decided to get involved by operating a live webcast and sponsoring a Linux terminal. I arrived around 10:30AM to set up and met Magnus there, with Simon & Joe arriving later on. The first [...]
Last month the British Computer Society held a series of events at Bletchley Park and in London to celebrate their 50th year. These were organised by BCS SIG the Computer Conservation Society and focused on the British contribution to computing. With the opportunity to witness Colossus and Turing Bombe rebuilds in operation, and hear talks [...]
The BCS Glasgow committee met this evening and amongst other things we finalised venue and publicity details for a talk I’ve organised for October, which will be on mash-ups and the BT Web21C SDK. We are fortunate to have secured as a speaker BT Web21C SDK Evangelist, Tim Stevens, who will be making the journey [...]
I predict we are about to experience an exponential growth in services along the lines of Amazon’s infrastructure web services as blogged about last week. Yesterday I discovered via the Scotlug mailing list a local provider of a service similar to Amazon’s EC2. This is bound to be only the start and we are likely [...]
So along with fellow Chateau Institute of Technology (ChIT)1 cohorts Magnus & Simon, I’ve been preparing for a webcast we are operating from a wee music festival on Sunday. Easy you say? Well it should be considering that we are all pretty tech savvy and streaming is hardly new. Furthermore 3 years ago, whilst working [...]