Orange–Mobile

Orange and T-Mobile merged a while back although they've kept the branding. One result of the merger is that last week they enabled roaming between the networks. So if you're on Orange and you're somewhere there's no Orange signal but there is a T-Mobile signal, your phone will automatically use T-Mobile without incuring extra charges. It works the other way too. It needs a SIM update to make it work so you have to get your network to send you that.

If you're on Orange go to http://orange.co.uk/share if you're on T-Mobile go to http://t-mobile.co.uk/share

It seems to work. The Orange signal at my desk isn't great and earlier on I noticed my phone said it was using 'T-Mobile UK Orange'.

Mike Willis : 12 Oct 2010 13:05 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Where am I?

Writing about web page http://go.warwick.ac.uk/vpn

If you are one of those people who might be able to tell where I was when I posted this by looking at logs, you'd think I was on campus because of the IP address. Except I'm not. I'm at home. Magic? No, it is of course merely sufficiently advanced technology in the form of a VPN.

The System Requirements for Linux machines for some reason single out two distributions, presumably those known to meet the requirements listed afterword. I'm using openSUSE 11.3 which isn't on the list but it seems to work fine. The only glitch I've seen is that when the client install finished it told me "If you have GTK 2.10.0 or later, look for the icon in the notification area:" and there was no such icon, even though a quick visit to whatismyip showed the connection had worked. Selecting the Cisco client from the Application Browser resulted in the icon appearing as expected though.

One very minor gripe I have is that the client installation process doesn't bother to tell you what it's installing or where it's installing it. A quick bit of detective work reveals it puts stuff in /opt/cisco (and a .desktop file in /usr/share/applications) and there's a script called vpn_uninstall.sh in there.

Mike Willis : 07 Oct 2010 20:54 |  Tags: Linux Vpn |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Blitz: The Bombing of Coventry

Writing about web page http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00n7xky/Blitz_The_Bombing_of_Coventry/

An interesting programme about the bombing of Coventry on the night of 14th November 1940. Available until the 9th of this month.

The raid destroyed half of the homes in the city, one third of the factories and three quarters of the buildings in the city centre. In one night.

Only a couple of years ago a World War 2 bomb was unexpectedly dug up in the city centre. (BBC News)

Mike Willis : 03 Oct 2010 19:32 |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Need a bigger square

Because Maths related humour seems to be a trend at the moment

Calvin and Hobbes

Mike Willis : 23 Sep 2010 12:28 |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Apple Aiport Base Station Light

I recently discovered an old Apple Airport Snow (a.k.a. Dual Ethernet) Base Station sat on a high shelf at home. I don't recall when I acquired it. It doesn't appear to work and even if it did, it's obsolete technology. So...

This is an LED light.

This is the back of the light.

This is the switch after I've cut the wires and reattached it via a plug/socket connector that I liberated from a PC case fan adaptor

Not a great photo as the flash washed part of it out. The switch has five pins on it and five wires coming out but the plug socket is wired for three. Of the five wires on the switch four of them go to only two locations on the light circuit board. So I just paired them together on one of the plug/socket wires.

The plug/socket arrangement serves two purposes. One is to increase the distance between the switch and the circuits to a sufficient length and the other is so that it can be unplugged and the wires threaded through a hole in the Airport case so it is accessible from the outside.

Drop the LED light in the gutted Airport case, do up the screws, and et voilà.

The light has two rings of LEDs and the switch toggles between the outer ring being lit, the inner ring being lit, both being lit and neither being lit. The photo is taken with only one ring lit and it's brighter than it looks in the photo.

The green, yellow and red shiny bits are where the original indicator LEDs were. On this model they're actually three white LEDs. I coloured them just for the heck of it. I believe the original Graphite model Airport Base Station has green/yellow/red LEDs, but I don't know if the order matches mine. The colours were achieved by using tiny bits of photo flash filter (originally purchased for this) stuck on the inside using double sided tape.

Mike Willis : 08 Sep 2010 20:15 |  Tags: Airport Apple Light Mod |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

What appears to be 'hole' in a webpage that scrolls with the content and exposes a static background

Writing about web page http://go.warwick.ac.uk/mikewillis/bits/holeinpage

So a few days ago, for reasons I don't recall and probably aren't important, an idea appeared in my head that it might be sort of neat if it were possible to create a webpage that had, well, read the title of this post again. I can't recall seeing this effect anywhere though I think have seen sort of the opposite. The opposite being a PNG containing a transparent portion that has the CSS rule position:fixed applied to it, (which hence remains static as the rest of the content is scrolled), and exposes a a background applied to the body element that scrolls with the content.

My attempt at creating what the aforereferenced title of this post describes is linked underneath said title. If you haven't understood a word thus far take a look at it and scroll up and down. (You will of course need to ensure that your web browser window is sized such that vertical scrolling is necessary to see all the content. I stuck lots of text on here to make that easy.) It turned out to be quite a bit harder than I thought it would be, though this may possibly be a reflection of my CSS skills as much as the difficulty of the task.

I'm quite pleased with the result, although:

• It doesn't work in Opera. At least not the latest version of Opera for Mac OS X. I've put a little effort in to trying to make it work but didn't get anywhere useful.
  
• It doesn't work in Internet Explorer. (But then, what does...) I've put no effort in to trying to make it work because I just can't be bothered. If I was using it in production I'd probably just use IE's conditional statements around some more CSS to completely disable the effect.
  
• It's a bit, well, odd in places. If you look at the source you'll see that one value used in the CSS is used used because that was as large as I could make it without the whole thing falling apart for reason(s) I don't understand.
• It will only work for pages over which you have total control. For example it won't work on a Sitebuilder page because numerous page elements are imposed by Sitebuilder. I couldn't embed the effect in a blog post for the same reason.
• I can't imagine a circumstance under which one would want to use such an effect in a webpage.
  

Mike Willis : 09 Aug 2010 13:18 |  Tags: CSS HTML |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

18 degrees celcius and rainy

Follow-up to 9 degrees celcius from Mike's blag

Looks like the new owners of Coventry Airport have found the switch that turns the weather data feed back on.

Mike Willis : 04 Aug 2010 17:17 |  Tags: Coventry Gnome Linux Weather |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Red to green.

Follow-up to Not the first, won't be the last from Mike's blag

Time for a change.

The reflection is Jenson Button on the TV.

Mike Willis : 01 Aug 2010 16:25 |  Tags: Apple Ibook Mod |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Milking a meme – sad Keanu comes to www2

This Greasemonkey script here adds a depiction of sad Keanu to web pages hosted at www2.warwick.ac.uk (or perhaps more accurately, webpages created using Sitebuilder hosted at www2).

For example, here he is surveying http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/insite/

Special bonus script for GNOME users: Python script to display sad Keanu in GTK window

Displays a sad Keanu image in a transparent GTK window that you can position where you wish. E.g.

To move him hold down Alt and then click and drag. I was going to sit him on the bottom GNOME panel, but sadly it seems windows can't be set to be above the panel, so his legs aren't visible.

Mike Willis : 29 Jul 2010 13:04 |  Tags: Gnome Greasemonkey Gtk Keanu Python |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

adding and removing items from gconf lists

So the other day I found myself wanting to add and remove items from a gconf key of type list. Reading and writing the whole list is easy, but I couldn't find a method for adding or removing an item from the list, nor a helpful blog or forum post describing someone else's method. So I wrote a script. It could probably be more efficient and there's at least one circumstance under which it won't work that I've already thought of and subsequently forgotten. But here it is anyway.

#!/bin/bash

# adds or removes an item from a gconf list

# N.B if you specify add, then the item will be added regardless of whether it
# is already in the list. if you only want to add the item but only if it's not
# already in the list, then call the script once with remove and then again with add

name=$(basename $0)

if [ $# -lt 3 ];then
   echo "Usage: ${name} gconf_key item add|remove";
   echo "E.g.:"
   echo "${name} /apps/cheese/selected_effects vertical-flip add";
   exit 1;
fi 

if [ ! "$3" = "add" -a ! "$3" = "remove" ];then
   echo "${name}: third argument must be either 'add' or 'remove'.";
   exit 1;
fi

key=$1

item=$2

current_value=$(gconftool-2 --get ${key});

current_value=${current_value/[/}
current_value=${current_value/]/}

if [ "$3" = "remove" ];then

   new_value=$(echo $current_value | tr ',' '\n' | grep -v ^${item}$ |tr '\n' ',' | sed 's/,$//');
   # note removal of trailing , if present
elif [ "$3" = "add" ];then

   # only want a , in front of ${item} if there's something in the list already
   if [ -n "${current_value}" ];then
      new_value="${current_value},";
   fi
   new_value="${new_value}${item}";
fi

new_value="[${new_value}]";
#echo $new_value

gconftool-2 --set $key --type list  --list-type=string "${new_value}";

Mike Willis : 19 Jul 2010 12:50 |  Tags: Gconf Gnome List Ponies Whatever |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem