All posts of Ian

Big pile of technic Lego for sale

Linc Smith of Sussex Uni departs our shores in a week to return to Canada.  He has pictures of the very big pile of technic lego to sell, contact him if you’re interested. Linc is a keen robot builder, helps at the Robot Brighton nights and has been a presenter and helper at our £5 […]
16 years ago

Hand-carved spinning tops

At likemind on Friday I met a Thomas Forsyth, a recent graduate from Brighton Uni’s design dept. who hand-carves wooden spinning tops.  You push a pencil through the rubber grommet and spin it in your hands, it wanders over a sheet of paper making lovely pictures: His business cards are lovely – they’re cut from […]
16 years ago

Does a PhotoBin exist? (a PasteBin for photos)

From the ‘I want something like this…’ dept:  Whilst working in my log-book for my long-running science/physic client I sketched a ‘Win32 Console App -> DLL/COM interface -> Matlab -> (wicked pointer casts) DLL/COM interface -> fn in Console app’ diagram. You don’t need to know what the above does, just imagine three big boxes […]
16 years ago

ProCasts’ third open-src advocacy video – AdBlockPlus

I’m rather chuffed to say that Wladimir Palant, the chap behind the excellent AdBlockPlus.org ad-filter for Firefox, has added our advocacy video to his frontpage – it shows you in just over a minute how and why to install AdBlockPlus.  As Wladimir says: Ian and Richard […] offered me to create a screencast for Adblock […]
16 years ago

ShowMeDo server move + Python 3 videos

We’ve spent the last few weeks migrating ShowMeDo to its own server after 3 years operating out of a shared box.  Moving the site was a pain as I’m not a low-level Apache hacker but all in everything seems fine now and we have extra capacity to grow. Kyran has skinned the blog so it […]
16 years ago

Screencast Interviews with Open-Source teachers

Recently I’ve interviewed four experienced open-source screencasters, three from ShowMeDo (all of which are Pythonistas) and Remy, a Brighton local, who teaches jQuery to designers: Horst Jens of ShowMeDo (Linux) Gasto of ShowMeDo (Windows) Lucas Holland of ShowMeDo (Mac) Remy Sharp of jQueryForDesigners (Mac) Each screencaster uses different techniques and platforms and all have learned […]
16 years ago

Informatics Update (invited post from Sussex University’s Computer Science dept.)

I asked Andy Philippides of Sussex University (Research Fellow and liaison for MSc projects) to start feeding me some news from the Informatics dept. after my presentation there before Christmas. Here’s his first post – they’re especially interested in chatting to anyone who has an MSc or undergrad project to submit.  They’ll be along at […]
16 years ago

Brighton Python meetup – Weds 18th Feb, Farm Tavern (near Hove)

We’re having the 3rd in our intermittent series of Brighton Python meetups, next week we join 40+ local geek freelancers of Brighton Farm to help them celebrate their 6th anniversary. Please come along on Wednesday 18th Feb at the Farm Tavern for Python discussion, celebrating our new mail list and the odd beer or three.  […]
16 years ago

PayPal refunds between Pounds (GBP) and Dollars (USD)

I’ve just spent 20 minutes trying to figure out how to refund a USD deposit payment to one of my PayPal accounts back to the originator.  When receiving the money I’d converted the payment to GBP and so that PayPal account only had a single (GBP) currency. When trying to refund the chap’s USD payment […]
16 years ago

Review: Expert Python Programming by Packt (2008)

Before Christmas I was asked if I’d like to review Packt’s new Expert Python Programming (at Packt). I’ve always recommended Beginning Python – From Novice to Professional to Python first-timers (new 2nd ed) along with Python in a Nutshell for those who want a thorough reference guide. I sat on the review for a while […]
16 years ago