I’ve gone through all the material they’ve given, and it explains the whole procedure, interjected with: “This horrific thing could happen” (Eeek!) “but it’s quite rare”… It isn’t really a pleasant read, but a couple of days later you start to understand what will happen on the day and become a little more calmer about it (or possibly just forget all the bad stuff) – if you are having the procedure, don’t leave it to the last minute to read it!

I’ve been wearing glasses for about 25 years, and it’s going to be a massive shock when I no longer need them (may as well imagine it working perfectly). I’ve been putting it off for years, as the longer you leave it the safer it would become (in theory). But now I’ve spoken to many people who’ve already had it done and it gets down to this: the procedure is risky (as is all surgury), quick, painless, not particularly pleasant, but *absolutely* worth it in the end.

I’ll probably not be able to write for a couple of days as my eyes readjust (heal) but I’ll let you know how it went.

I decided to drop the original title (“Live.Hack.Learn.Blog”) as, while I still like it, the “hack” part has different, and most likely incorrect, meanings to different people. To me it’s always meant “play around with something to see what it does and what it could be made to do”, but the meaning is often associated with gaining illegal access to a computer system – which, as you can imagine, is not the impression I’d like to give (!).

Feel free to use the image if you’d like. A link back to the blog would be great.

I’ll be voting yes for AV today because whatever way you look at it, it is Better than the current system. It’s not about which party wants AV or which person doesn’t want FPTP it’s about making the voting system in this country fairer, avoiding wasted votes and voting for the people you want.

Here’s a video that I think explains it in a fair and easy to understand way (“It’s common sense”):

It’s up to you how you vote – but I just want you to understand why this is a better system – if you still don’t agree after knowing the facts then that’s OK, but please watch it!

Here’s another explanation with cats:

Problems with First past the post:

And an explanation of who the alternative vote works:

Thanks.

I’ve been using my Kindle since September with no problems. One of my first purchases was the Independent newspaper and this gets streamed to the Kindle automatically every morning, when I wake up it’s there waiting for me. That was up until last Thursday when the download become locked in “pending”. I first tried to fix this myself by trying different wireless connections but the GPRS connection and two different wifi systems didn’t work. Neither did a hard Kindle reset (hold the power button on for about fifteen seconds) so in the end I emailed Kindle Support.

That evening I received two phone calls from unrecognised numbers and it turns out it was Amazon trying to call me (I have a rubbish signal on my mobile at home). They tried all the numbers on my account, including an old one belonging to my parents. This was all confirmed in an email I picked up the next day and by that morning both Independent papers (Thursdays and Fridays) had been downloaded.

So I assumed it was back in working order until it again failed to download on the Saturday, so I had a look back at their support. There’s a “phone me” option which I decided to try and this is what really impressed me. I clicked the button and it asked me my number. I put my home number in and clicked the submit button – almost instantly my phone began to ring and it was the support line.

A short recorded message later and I was speaking directly to support. Very impressive.

As far as the fix went: it turns out a simple reset of the Kindle fixed the Saturday download problem, the Thursday one was some other problem at their end, and with a little gentle persuasion they reimbursed my the cost of the paper (the “print” cost!).

Take note other companies! Amazon make it very easy to contact their support line, it would be nice if you all put this kind of effort in too!

“The Last Ring-bearer” is a story based in the World of “Lord of the Rings”. It is written from the point of view of the Orcs as they battle against the forces of Gandalf as he attempts to banish the arts of Science and Technology; it takes place during the last battle for the Ring and continues into the aftermath. It’s been publishes in many different languages across Europe but has so far avoided Britain due to – probably justified – fears of litigation from the Tolkein estate.

However, it has recently been translated into English (by Yisroel Markov) from it’s original Russian and is available in PDF form. Unfortunately PDF’s are an extremely poor choice for an ebook conversion (and for any conversion actually, they are only meant for printing!).

I tried several methods to convert the PDF’s. First I used Amazons conversion by email: you simply send the PDF as an email attachment and it returns a converted file back, alos via email. This works in that it converts all the text, but it doesn’t appear formatted correctly: text can be in the wrong place, footnotes, headers, page numbers, contents etc. all appear mixed up in the main text. I also tried the PDF conversion in Calibre – an ebook management system I’ve been using for some time – but the same problems occurred. PDF’s are just not compatible with ebook formats.

After some time looking around, I did manage to track down a webpage version of the book which I also tried to convert in Calibre. Unfortunately, the conversion relies on the HTML (the underlying code) being in a good state which wasn’t true in this case and there where again some pretty awful formatting, plus none of the extras I mentioned earlier. However, it is easy to take the text from a webpage so I decided I’d put the formatting in myself.

I use OpenOffice to write my documents so I pasted the text in to a new one. It was a fairly simple procedure to detect the chapters (they all have the word “Chapter” or “Part” in!) and add a heading style to them. Then I pasted the book cover image to the first page. Now, Amazon also have a Microsoft Word Conversion by email, so I gave that a go. It was only slightly better than the PDF conversion. How disappointing. So I turned again to Calibre.

Calibre is able to take in the Original OpenOffice format and turn it into a mobi ebook format. This worked very nicely. With a few test runs I managed to get a nice front cover, the footnotes linking, a full table of contents with links and nicely formatted text (in most cases!). Here’s what I did:

1. In OpenOffice:
   • Paste an image on the first page, this will be the Book cover (alternatively you can just add some text but an image would be nicer…!)
   • For pages with a small amount of text make sure it’s at (or very near) the top of the page then a page break immediatly after. This avoids lots of white space appearing after converting.
   • Find the Chapter headings and place a heading style on them, preferably in the same hierachy as they appear in the book, Calibre will then recognise them and create a table of contents.
   • Find the footnotes and turn them into proper footnotes by using “Insert->Footnote, EndNote” from the menu.
   • If you have the time, you could also add text-alignment, bold or italic to parts of the text that need it, this will all be preserved in the conversion.
   • You can also add a Table of Contents to the text of the book if you like, just select “Insert->Index Indexs and Tables->Indexs and Tables…”. I’d recommend using just the “entry text” wrapped in Hyperlinks for each level in the “Entries” tab, page numbers won’t mean anything once the conversion completes. (Note also that Calibre will create it’s own Table of contents embedded in the mobi format itself)
   • UPDATED: See below (Change background colors, and font colours)
2. In Calibre:
   • Now import your OpenOffice document with “Add book”, once done select “Convert book”
   • Update the Title and author fields and any others you might like.
   • Select the “Use cover from source file” if you added some kind of front page to the original document.
   • You shouldn’t need to change anything else so just click OK.

Now just copy it to your Kindle and enjoy.

Update (Feb  20)

The previous mobi version had a white background colour on the text which was causing some issues when the page color was changed from the default (such as in the “Color Mode” of the Kindle App). This seems to be an issue between OpenOffice and Calibre to do with default background-color, I’ve made a bug entry on Calibre here. (And they’ve already fixed it for the next release – nice work!).

For now, when creating a document switch between a colour background then back to “No fill”, this seems to fix it in most cases although there are still some problems. I’ve created a new file with the background changes, see below. I also changed some of the “linking” text to text color black from the default blue.

For reference :

• You can get [the PDF version of]  ”The Last Ring-Bearer” from here: http://ymarkov.livejournal.com/270570.html
• Here’s my OpenDocument version and Mobi version of the ”The Last Ring-Bearer”.
• UPDATE: Here’s my OpenDocument version and Mobi version of the ”The Last Ring-Bearer”.
• UPDATE 2 (More diachritics): Here’s my OpenDocument version and Mobi version of the ”The Last Ring-Bearer”.
• Calibre is here : http://calibre-ebook.com/

And don’t forget that you can have the original “Lord of the Rings” on your Kindle too, in just a few mouse clicks!

(Voted number one in a BBC poll of the top books of all time.)

I’d made a few changes of my own, but in the end it was a fairly easy upgrade, just back up a few files and replaced the rest. However, while I was downloading the latest version I noticed there had only been a single update in over a year – quite unusual for a popular open source project – so I did a little investigation into why that was.

It turns out that during 2010 many of the programmers left the project in protest against decisions by the US government and PhpGedView’s hosting site, Sourceforge. Specifically, SourceForge acted on a 2003 US Law that says (something along the lines of) open source code must not contain encryption technology that could be used against the US by “rogue states”. However the official wording is so vague that it could be said that source containing any kind of encryption could be breaking the law – this includes such normal valid use as encrypting user passwords!

Now it’s pretty hard to think of a way that an application for creating family trees could ever compromise national security but as it was hosted at SourceForge who themselves are located in the US, it was automatically under the same laws, and so SourceForge blocked all access from people from such places as Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria and any other place the US “don’t like”. However, very soon SourceForge where forced to make changes as many of the users became outraged with the blocking. So now its the project owners who have the responsibility to comply with US law. They are asked if they’d like to unblock their project by making a claim to the US government but if they are deemed to have broken the – as I mentioned earlier “vague” – law they’d risk imprisonment.

This kind of program impacts a hell of a lot of projects and at many hosting sites (e.g. GoogleCode) who host in the US. The only option in many cases is to close the project and move or abandon the 170 million users who have been blocked. Thankfully the phpgedview developers didn’t want to let their users down (from any country) so they instead forked the project in to a new one called webtrees and hosted the website at one outside the US – LaunchPad – hosting by Canonical right here in the UK. (Lets always keep our laws in perspective!).

So, would I stay with a crippled PhpGedView or do a (possibly) difficult switch to webtrees and support there protest? Obviously, there was no choice, I moved to webtrees. And thankfully it turned out to be very easy to switch by using their “import from PhpGedView” option which went through smoothly. I now have a guilt free, UK hosted open source project very happily running on my server. Take a look here.

Thanks webtrees and thanks UK hosting! (Might have to think about moving my own projects from SourceForge…)

More information can be found here:

• Webtrees: http://www.webtrees.net/
• LaunchPad: https://launchpad.net/
• SourceForge blocking: http://www.bis.doc.gov/dpl/default.shtm
• PhpGedView move: http://sourceforge.net/projects/phpgedview/forums/forum/185165/topic/3549640

There’s lots of reports on this news story (here for instance) but the basic idea is that the publicly owned forests of England are to be sold off to the private sector so the government can make a quick buck.  In other words currently protected ancient forests could be sold to the highest timber bidders. Even with so called safe guards this is a bad idea, so I decided to get hold of the Forestry Commissions’ current data.

Unfortunately I couldn’t find any download for the type of data I wanted, mainly map data, so I resorted to a technique called Report Mining which in this case meant essentially extracting the information from their webpages. I think if you are going to do report mining then you have to be responsible with it, make sure you are not overloading the other parties servers. In reality one machine isn’t going to crash another, but it can certainly slow response times down for others.

I used a fairly simple bit of python code using the httplib2 library to access the pages, then collected all this data together in a CSV file. My miner had lots of sleeps (Python: <pre>time.sleep()</pre> )  – in fact it was mostly sleeping – and it ran over night to limit it’s impact, I’d recommend you do something similar. I’d estimate it took me about ten hours to write the code, collect the information together and process it into a usable form.

Next was the mapping. I’ve known  about Ordnance Survey’s open data for a while but hadn’t had the right opportunity to look into it – but now was perfect. I’ve been very impressed with what they’ve written. Their API is a breeze to use, within something like 15 minutes I was up and running with my very own map and data.

If you are thinking of playing with Ordnance Survey then I’d recommend your first port of call is the Examples page. The one’s which were of most use to me, and probable starting positions for most, were:

• How to draw the map
• Create your markers
• Use your own icons for the markers
• Create a pop-up for each marker.

And the map? Well you can see it here: http://www.akademy.co.uk/software/forests/forests.php . It’s all interactive so scroll and zoom with the mouse as you would expect. Click on the markers for a little bit of info and a link to the detailed page in the Forestry Commission. You can also download some of the information for yourself from there.

Here’s hoping the 84% of the population who don’t want these sales to go through won’t be ignored. And don’t forget to sign the petition at 38degrees .

Ubuntu is an open source and free Operating System full of all the best open source software around, things like Open Office and Firefox. This is all very usable stuff and sticks with Ubuntu’s philosophy of creating an open and free operating system,  unfortunately there are many applications which are proprietary closed source but prevalent enough to be needed for daily use – such as Adobe Flash or video encoders.

However, finally Ubuntu has decided to let the user decide if they want to install these extras. All you have to do is tick the box when the option pops up during installation. This makes the whole switch to Ubuntu far easier for all, far easier than ever before – after installation you have a fully configured system to use, play and work with.

There is still a slight annoyance in that proprietary drivers have to be selected after logging in to the system, although this is pretty much entirely automated. You don’t have to install these, but generally it is a good idea, to get the best out of your hardware – for instance I installed a Nvidia driver to get the best out of my graphics card, but all that really meant was I selected “yes” to install it.

I did have one many problem in that the driver had a little problem picking up my two monitors – not something I expect most people to have. If you do have multiple monitors and an nvidia card the best idea is to launch the “NVIDA X Server Settings” from the System->Administration then select “X Server Display Configuration”. It will likely show all monitors but some will be disabled; turn them on by setting the resolution to “Auto”, then click “Save to X Configuration File”, it will ask you for a password (incidentally, that’s another improvement from earlier versions), now logout and log back in. It should use all your monitors and it’s much safer to change the other settings from this point.

Once set up you can then decide to add even more applications to your taste, the easiest way is to click “Applications” -> “Ubuntu Software Centre” and have a look through, alternatively you can open the browser and download that way – the software you install will appear in the same Ubuntu Software Centre.

Once you are a little more comfortable have a look at personalizing some of the bit - the entire interface is configurable. A good starting place is “System”->”Preferences”->”Appearance”. Don’t forget to turn on the “extra” effects in the “Visual Effects” tab!

If your still not sure, you can always give it a try without any changes to your computer. Just download the ISO image, place it on a CD and leave it in the drive as you restart your compluter – it will actually boot from there so you can have a play without any changes. You can also install it “next to” your existing Operating system, so you can run them side by side.

Check out more information and download here: http://www.ubuntu.com/desktop

Well, it was close… depending on how you calculate it… although in another sense I totally failed.

Electricity

First of all it’s worth saying I’ve always tried to have a low Carbon Footprint so I was starting from a fairly low base – well I’d like to think so, must of my electrical hardware has a high energy rating and they are switched off when not in use. However, one area I thought I’d be able to make some progress on was lighting. Low-energy bulbs should be an easy way to cut back so I replaced all but two bulbs in my house with these.

It was not quite as simple as a “replaced” makes it sound. I had to find the right size (which living in a old country house was difficult) and replace them with similar light outputs. I managed to find most good replacements (Tesco was the star here), and even some low-energy spot lights for the Kitchen. Unfortunately these spotlights proved to be a poor substitution, with very slow warm up times causing low illumination. I would have swapped them back if they hadn’t been so high wattages (150 watts on each of 4 bulbs), so instead I left them in. Now, a year later, they still haven’t improved but I have become accustomed to them so it’s worth hanging on for a bit.

I also got hold of the Wattson Energy Meter which allows you to keep an eye on exactly how much electricity is being used at that moment. A very clever but useful device, in an instant I could tell if anything had been left on by accident, and seeing the cost of electricity immediately in front of you really encourages you to use it less. The one other thing I did was to install a couple of timers for the devices I’d like to be on when I’m usually at home and off at other times, my wireless router was ideal for this.

So the electrical results:

These are taken from my electricity bill, which as you can see isn’t updated very frequently, the units per day column was an attempt to compare years fairly. If we take last years numbers we have a reduction of 9.1%. Close but no cigar – although if I was to take an average of the last two years it does get more than 10%… cheating?

Gas

I use gas (and by that I mean “Natural Gas”) for heating and hot water. I didn’t make any improvements to my house to conserve gas, mostly because I only rent. It’s an incredibly draughty house without insulation or double glazing so uses a lot of fuel to heat up. I do however switch on “Economy Mode” on the heater – this stops hot water being instantly available in the taps. So what was the results for Gas?

Yep, that’s right I had a 9.2% INCREASE in gas usage. So how can that be? Well, you know why we are trying to cut the amount we use? Well, climate change has been rearing it’s angry little head lately. 2009 was one of the hottest years on record but the following year, 2010, was one of the coldest on record. This is interesting to note, as 2010 was colder than 2008 but I managed to use much less gas… now I could take that year instead… but again, is that cheating?

Travel

Well this one’s even worse. My international travel remained the same, just one return flight, but what really caused a problem was work. In November 2009 I left my previous job and started a new one in January 2010. My previous job was about 1.5 miles down the road, and I frequently cycled into work, my new job is much further away so I’ve resorted to driving the car in. I haven’t got numbers for this but look at it this way – lets assume I drove into work every day at my previous job instead of cycled:

That’s (a frightening) 1000 per cent increase in petrol usage – how the heck am I paying for that. There’s no way to cheat those values I’m afraid. But, I could have reduced this impact by using public transport or by car sharing and a few other ways besides.

Conclusion

I didn’t make my 10% target but the real idea of 10:10 was always to raise awareness of climate change and the reductions we can all make. I was impressed by my electricity reduction even if it wasn’t 10%, simply changing my light bulbs over to energy saving ones took a large chuck of my power usage away – a simple change anyone could do.

Now to this year. It’s 2011 now, and I’ve decided to specifically target my travel for reduction, mainly by using my bike to cycle at least some of the way to work. I’ll also try to convince my landlord that it would be a good investment to install insulation, but I’m not very hopeful of that, might be easier to move house.

Maybe I’ll have an update in a years time.

During these space travels we often meet other species of the Star Trek universe and I’ve often been curious about the way they’ve been written. It seems that some part of the human psyche is chosen as the basis for that species. So for example, for Klingons it’s anger and for vulcans its logic. Of course if this was all there was it would not make for interesting stories so usually a species will be developed over time producing a more rounded character profile. This led me to an interesting question:

Out of all the different species in the Star Trek universe – including humans – which of the species is the one that mankind is currently most like?

So first, Humans. They are usually kind, generous, brave, always work towards what they believe is right and usually put there own life after the life of others. They do all this without any financial incentive and basically live together in perfect harmony. Obviously, this isn’t any species (however regrettable) that I recognise. I’d like to think there are many selfless soles in the world, indeed I do believe there are some, but as a species it isn’t something that seems to come naturally. 4/10

Next, Klingons. A race that first seems full of blood thirsty people who live for only battle. But it is in fact honour which they stand by, and proving their worth to their comrades. They are not frightened by death but revere those who have fought and lost the lives in battle, the only thing they fear is being branding dishonourable. And when they go to war they do so to test themselves, not for gain nor profit. I am sure we are not a species that enjoys war, and would prefer to live in peace avoiding battle as much as possible, and yet right now, somewhere in this world, we are at war and in past years have always been at war at one place or another –  it seems that there is always something we need to take from others. 5/10

Vulcans. Those who use pure logic and suppress all emotions. They have managed to control their great anger and live a life dedicated to the pursuit of pure logical thinking. We seem to be the least like the Vulcans, we always have out emotions right at the surface and it is our ability to think non-logically that means we can make great leaps in reasoning that would otherwise be impossible. 3/10

Now, Cardassians. A arrogant race always suspicious of others. They always seem to be hiding something from someone, never trusting anyone and sometimes not even their own friends and family. To some degree this certainly rings bells. We are often suspicious of other countries, other cultures and many people are under the delusion that they are somehow better than others. However, I think by default we are generally a trusting people, and this is probably way it is generally easy for us to be manipulated into being suspicious of others. Still, the cardassian seem a little to close for comfort. 6/10

The Bajorans. A religious, peaceful people who believe their lives follow a pre-destined route set by the Gods. There are many religous people in our world each with there own views, therefore must be many with similar persuasions. However, unlike the Bajorans, when faced with ever more scientific discoveries religion seems to be fading to ever smaller minorities. 5/10

And finally, the Ferengi. A race that lives for to make profit, and by any means. Becoming richer is the aim in life for every Ferengi, at least the male ones, females take no part nor do they wear any clothes. Well, I think the sexes are much more equal than this, but the really question is are we motivated by profit? And, unfortunately, I think that’s a big resounding Yes. Money, profits and becoming rich seem to be the goals of many, certainly the goals of nations, and we often do this even at the cost of our own species. This is rather depressing, but it seems like we are more like the Ferengi than any others, all we need now is those outrageously large ears…  7/10

So, in summary, we are least like the Vulcans and even the Humans but most like the greedy profiteering Ferengi and suspicious Cardassians. Still, in terms of becoming “more human” we still have about 500 years to catch up with the TV show…