Knott in Botswana » Engineering and Technology

Runner’s World – Printing SmartCoach Plans

michael — Sat, 16 Apr 2011 10:10:22 +0000

Strange first post under the health and fitness category, but I want to record this before I forget.

Runner’s World has a script that generates training plans online, called SmartCoach, but trying to print the results is a problem (for me, at least). Luckily I have a little knowledge of URL construction and am pleased to [...]

Helicopter, photos, GPS, geotags and a copper mine

michael — Sat, 19 Feb 2011 19:51:20 +0000

Some time ago the construction manager on my current project told me about some software that would automatically geotag photographs by matching their date/time with a GPS track. He used to work for BHP Billiton, so the software was hideously expensive.

Experience has taught me that there are free versions of most clever or useful [...]

Atahiccup

michael — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 19:30:49 +0000

Seems like something is broken in my Atahualpa theme setup: getting a FastCGI error or something similar.

Normal service (which, at present consists solely of Twitter digests) will be resumed when I have time to go to the engine room and root around.

UPDATE #1: It broke when did an autoupdate (i.e. within WordPress) to the 3.6.4 [...]

WordPress and Joomla MySQL Problems

michael — Sat, 10 Oct 2009 22:02:30 +0000

Almost since I started using php and MySQL based website development tools I have been having a recurring problem. When editing posts or content lists of items would fail to appear.

In Joomla Content Management System the lists of articles, sections, categories and users would fail to appear, but not in any consistent manner.

In WordPress the categories and [...]

Tyres and wheel alignment in Maun

admin — Tue, 28 Apr 2009 17:40:40 +0000

A few weeks ago I hit a largish, and quite hard, anthill with the passenger-side front wheel – hard enough to pinch the sidewall against the rim. On inspection I could see a small bulge, suggesting that there was hidden damage under the intact rubber. As I was only running at low speeds around town [...]

New Camera – Fuji Finepix S2000HD

admin — Mon, 06 Apr 2009 08:44:59 +0000

I received my new camera this morning – a Fuji Finepix S2000HD.

Main criteria for choosing this model was that it has a 15x optical zoom (looking for 10x minimum), and was available at Incredible Connection, Gaborone, Botswana. I had been waiting for a similar camera to come on special at Game in Francistown, but it [...]

A test of the spiffy Shashin plugin integrating Picasa images into WordPress

admin — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 15:12:17 +0000

See how it displays a selected album from Picasa:

Moremi – December 2008 A drive through Moremi National Park with the kids during rainy season, with some concrete action thrown in. What can you see? (Look the other way, in the bushes.) What can you see? (In the bushes.) Typical housekeeping. Is he coming this way? Elephant strolling past Moremi, South [...]

NextGEN or Picasa for image galleries.

admin — Sat, 04 Apr 2009 11:34:57 +0000

I am trying to decide what to use for managing pictures on this blog.

I have installed NextGEN gallery and put up a trial album – nice and easy to make captions, tags and so on. It even makes thumbnails automatically. The only problem is that I have to resize the original images manually (well, using [...]

Self-Sanitising

admin — Wed, 25 Mar 2009 12:30:31 +0000

A few days ago I had a request from a friend who suspected her computer was infected with a virus.

She had Symantec installed, and apparently up-to-date, I was curious, so I suggested she go to myNetWatchman to download this useful little utility and run it on her system before running the Symantec scan.

A couple of [...]

Entry into the blogosphere

admin — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 07:59:06 +0000

After a few months working on Joomla and starting up a few websites I thought it was time to broaden my horizons and try WordPress.

Rather than rolling it out on a commercial site and having to ride the learning curve whilst keeping a client happy I have decided to use it for my own blog. [...]