This blog is mainly about incidental things, like food, and books. I'm also planning on putting my link feed from delicious.com here. I'll be putting anything more serious over on Kothar.net from now on.

Recent Articles

31 Mar 09

Set Building - Day 2

The second day of setbuilding, and a concrete result - we built a workbench.

29 Mar 09

Set Building - Day 1

For the next show Gilbert and Sullivan Society are performing, I've been chosen as Technical Director (TD).

We don't know which show it is, or where it is being performed, but we do know we need a new set, the old one having mostly fallen apart or been dismantled.

11 Jan 09

Fixing Gear Slip on an ABC Mini Copter

I got an ABC Mini Copter for Christmas (thanks James!) which is damn cool. I've been trying to get the hang of flying it, but I was having real difficulty with the take-off. Apart from my ineptitude, the gears were slipping as the rotor started, making a nasty grating noise, so I decided to fix it.

19 Jun 08

Uploading videos to Facebook

This week I uploaded some videos from my mobile phone to Facebook, but my friends complained that the audio got out of sync with the video.

After a few experiments I tracked this down to Facebook's re-encoding process, since the source videos are fine.

05 Jun 08

Printing charts in SWT with JFreeChart and Paperclips

The new RapiTime GUI uses the Paperclips library to generate printed reports. Integrating charts into the reports can be accomplished using JFreeChart, but there are some extra tweaks needed to make it work.

More...