I have decided to have a go at building and selling Add-ons for the PyroCMS Add-on store as part of my new years aim of creating a residual income source. I have been working with PyroCMS for over a year in some form or another now and in that time…

Over the past few months I have dealt with SSL website encryption on a number of ccasions and it has got me thinking about the slow adoption of SSL on websites. The Past In the past SSL was used to encrypt communications between the users browser and…

This evening I took a look at a Facebook application built for Big Yellow Self Storage called Big Yellow Competitions. I was taking a look at how it was built and what systems they had employed when I saw an odd div with an id of "theAdminEnter",…

For a while now I have been using a basic FTP system called Surreal CMS, this service connects via FTP to your web host pulls the page you want to edit down and then allows you to edit it, when you done it saves it back to the FTP server. For basic sites…

Last week I finally got around to porting the .tel Chrome extension I made to Firefox, unlike the Chrome extension this took a whole day to figure out but I can see why. Chrome extensions offer a very limited range of ways to interact with the browser…

For the past 10+ years I have been building websites and I have always built them from scratch, a few years ago I discovered javascript frameworks and have been a big fan of jQuery ever since but the main code for the website has always been coded…

I mentioned in a previous post that I am planning on pursuing a career as a freelance developer, in order to make this work I need more experience using different technologies and systems so I am currently playing around with a few simple projects including…

A few years ago when I was organising trips for the University mountaineering club and wanted a better way to collect peoples names for climbing weekends I decided to build the trip list application for Facebook. It took 2 days but I came up with a very…

Earlier in the week I went to London to apply for a UK Identity Card. I have wanted one for over a year but it was only at the beginning of the month that they opened them up to the whole population rather than a few test groups. [caption id="attachment_371"…

How much would you spend on a sign or a series of signs covering a university campus? A couple of thousand? How about £700,000? [caption id="attachment_366" align="alignright" width="200" caption="Land fenced off for new signage"][/caption] A week or…

After posting that a personal tracking device wasn't feasible because of power consumptions issues it got me thinking, is it? I haven't worked this out yet so as I write this I genuinely don't know if it is possible to construct one but I plan to…

My latest project is a GPS system for my car, thats so last you I hear you all saying, but wait its not a navigation system but a replacement for the speedometer and a tracking system. I use a regular GPS system quite a lot and a while ago I noticed…

Lately I have taken on a couple of freelance jobs, one electronic which involved designing and building a non contact counting system for exercise judging, the other project is web based, for this I have taken on the short and probably long term management…

I have finally found the solution to my camera dilemma, the Canon EOS 500D. [caption id="attachment_112" align="alignright" width="187" caption="Kodak Zi6 Pocket Video Camera"][/caption] For a while now I have been looking for something to record video,…

For the past few months I have been working on a multisite IT project, part of it involves keeping various databases synchronized between different sites. A single master database needs to be pushed out to all the remote clients and a local database…

Last week I received an iPod touch, this is going to form part of my latest project so the University paid for it and I get to use it for a couple of months before the project goes live. I have never liked the iPod range and I was never the greatest fan…

On Friday I was watching a DVD and all of a sudden the image froze and the player became unresponsive, I tried restarting the player but the system got stuck on the boot up process, it was at this point I noticed the odd smell and the smoke seeping from…

[caption id="attachment_86" align="alignleft" width="200" caption="Canon EOS 5D MkII"]    [/caption]   Canon recently announced the upcoming release of there new digital SLR, the 5D Mark 2. This sounds like an amazing camera, it has 21.1MP sensor,…

I have come up with another thing for my list of things to do before I die; work for the British Antarctic Survey. The British Antarctic Survey or BAS is something I came across a few years ago, I am not really sure what it was about the type of job…

Over the past couple of weeks I have come across a number of lists people have made identifying a number of targets people have set for there life, I quite like this idea so I have decided to create one of my own. I think by having your ambitions, dreams,…

I have tried a couple of photosynths inside today and I have got some better results. I photographed the lab I am working along with all of its mess, I took panoramas of the room in the centre and from various points around the room, I then took some…

  Yesterday I went to a National Trust property called Sissinghurst Castle Gardens, this is an amazing enclosed garden with hundreds of different type of plants where I was able to get a number of decent photos. While I was there I took almost 200 photos…

Yesterday there was yet another story in the news about the loss of sensitive data, this time records on all the prisoners in England and Wales as well as details on others with convictions were lost after a private company misplaced a memory stick.…

A wile ago I came across Microsoft's Photosynth, at the time I thought it was particularly strange; sometime after I came across it again and finally realized how amazing it was, since then I have been eagerly awating the release of the system…

Today I finally bought a decent tripod, when I say decent I mean a lot better than my previous one but sill a long way off the high end ones. For years I have been using cheap little £30 tripods, it didn't go very high and wasn't very stable but it…