Planet WYLUG

So I bought a cheap webcam from my local supermarket for 10 quid. Plugged it into Cadeaux, my desktop PC and .. nothing.

Noting that Hans De Goede was working on better webcam support for Fedora and Linux users in general, I thought it was worth a shot. So I emailed him.

A few emails back and forth and about 48 hours later the camera was working! A couple of weeks ago the commit went into the kernel and any distro based on 2.6.28 will get support out of the box.

Thanks Hans!

Back in August, I had earache. Otitis Media to be specific.

After I got back from having it checked out by my doctor, I wrote a Twitter about it. John was playing on his ukelele and looking over my shoulder at the time so sang the Twitter as I wrote it.

Then I went over to Wikipedia to read all about Otitis Media, and as I read, John sang. As it turned out, the Otitis Media article worked beautifully as a song.

So we made it into a song. And we put the song on a website. And a fun new project was born.

Like with ELER, after an initial flurry of action, we’ve been a bit slow on it of late - but other members of the Church of the Ukelele have been stepping up and the collection of videos is slowly growing.

If you can play the uke - or any other instrument - and fancy joining the cool kids club, there are full instructions on the site.

There are only about 2,576,419 articles to go - so hurry!

• 20 - cost, in pounds of our return train fare (each)
• 15.1 - miles walked (above the surface)
• 16 - painkillers popped by John (who hurt his back on the way to the train station in Leeds)
• 7 - cost, in pounds, of a sundae in the Haagen Das restaurant (worth it)
• 5 - drinks drunk at The Chandos pub
• 4 - doughnuts eaten (between us)
• 24 - amount of doughnuts bought by the woman behind us in the queue, stocking up for her six hour journey to Devon (she is our new hero)
• 2 - meals eaten in Chinatown
• 5 - amount of times (out of 11) that Big Ben rang while we were standing DIRECTLY underneath it before we actually realised it was ringing
• 3 - scarves bought: one pink/blue, one turquoise and one green/orange
• 7 - cost, in pounds, of a small bottle of beer and half-a-coke at the Hippodrome bar while watching La Cirque
• 10 - inches, the diameter of the tennis racket that Captain Frodo of La Clique squeezed himself through
• 1 - number of joints he had to dislocate to be able to do that
• 0 - the amount of laughs the ‘Viva Croydon’ song in La Cirque elicited from us
• 32.50 - cost, in pounds, of stalls tickets for Spamalot from the tkts booth in Leicester Square
• 2 - the amount of people who pushed in front of me in the drinks buying queue at the Spamalot interval
• 2 - museums visited
• 3.50 - cost, in pounds, of our British Museum guide book
• 2 - time, in minutes, spent looking at British Museum guide book
• 10 - tube stations visited
• 2 - maximum time, in rounded-up minutes, that we had to wait for any tube train (probably more like 90seconds)
• 6 - number of times I jokingly complained about the waiting times on British public transport when arriving on a platform exactly as a train arrived
• 3 - amusing overheards*
• 1 - potential punfolio submissions about ghee

* #1 - “Did you tell her about the death? Oh good.”
#2 - “If we all thought like that, we’d all live in poverty.”
#3 - something in Spanish which we didn’t understand but accompanied by a spanking motion

I would like to introduce you to Zach and Jeff.

Last week, I went to Liverpool for a wire-working workshop as part of a fantastic “Recycle Into Art” week, organised by the city’s Red Dot Exhibitions.

The workshop was run by Alison Bailey Smith, a wonderful artist and thoroughly lovely person who I’d already featured on Recycle This - she makes jewellery, accessories and clothes using reclaimed wire (typically from inside old televisions) and other “rubbish”, such as tomato puree tubes, sweet wrappers and ribbon from bouquets.

The workshop was billed as learning how to decorate bags - to make better use of the time, some people chose to make jewellery instead but since I needed a new nice bag, I stuck to the original remit.

We started off with Alison showing us her knotting technique but I somehow kept forgetting how to do it in the middle (don’t ask, I can’t explain it), so when Alison suggested knitting it instead, I jumped on that. Then I spent the next hour knitting a strip - which in hindsight wasn’t a terribly good use of my time but I liked the finished strip.

I’d picked out a nice simple clutch bag from the selection of charity shop bags Alison had brought along for us to use and the copper strip looked nice against the black - but I wanted to add some features as well. I played with some of the different techniques Alison had shown us - such as wrapping scrap plastic with wire then coiling it - but nothing seemed to fit as well as Zach and Jeff. (I’d previously used their kin to make earrings. These guys were going spare.) Then someone pointed out the coil I’d made out of a lime green M&S carrier bag strap looked like a meteorite, and hey presto, a handbag with a story was born.

I sewed the wiry earth, the dinos and the meteorite onto the bag with thinner, darker wire (visible in parts on the finished item) and a curved needle - my, my, that was more difficult than I thought but everything seems pretty secure now.

When I showed John the finished item, he was sad because he thought that there was an inevitably unhappy ending for Zee and Jee but I pointed out they were plastic so it was beautifully circular.

I had a thoroughly great time at the workshop, learnt so much and was really interested to see how everyone took a different approach and came out with something different. Since then, I’ve also learnt how to crochet so when I finally get my hands on an old TV of my own, I’ll be able to do all kinds of fun stuff with the wire. Plus, I have a great new bag too.

• My write-up of the workshop on How Can I Recycle This?
• A few more pictures of the finished bag

Louisa and I randomly came across this demolition in Armley back in July, 2007. I happened to have my big camera with me.

Hello. In a week’s time, my very lovely girlfriend will be dodging geordies in a monumental run around Tyneside. It’s all for a very good cause and one that is close to both our hearts.

Traidcraft has been working for a very long time to enable the poorest of the world’s population to work themselves out of poverty. They also buy in awesome coffee and other stuff as part of CafeDirect which many people buy in supermarkets around the U.K.

So yes, you’ve guessed it - this is a sponsorship request. Please visit http://www.justgiving.com/lauraglasel2008 for all the details. Enough said and thanks.

I’m getting some spam from some UK companies to a personal email address. I called and spoke to one of them and they said it won’t happen again but it continues to do so. I looked into complaining officially, under the new regulations that make the EC’s Directive on Privacy and Electronic Communications law in the UK.

Under the new law, spammers can be fined £5,000 in a magistrates court or an unlimited penalty from a jury.

Yet it appears it is really up to me to pursue charges through the courts. The Information Commissioners Office, who enforce the new regulations, appear largely neutered (as predicted):

If my complaint is upheld, will the organisation be punished?

If we think the organisation has breached the regulations, we can ask them to put things right, but we cannot punish them for breaking the law.

If my complaint is upheld, will I be entitled to compensation?

We have no powers to award compensation . If you have suffered a loss because an organisation or individual has broken the law, you may be entitled to compensation, but you must claim this through the courts.

The right to compensation applies even if you don’t report the problem to us. You can make a claim to the court whether or not we have agreed that the law has been broken.

No doubt this will cost a lot of my time and money. We should build a simple kit, with some form letters and instructions on pursuing compensation.

Or just take enforcement into our own hands and report them to something like Spamhaus.

This is our latest addition, born four and a half hours ago:

I went to Berlin with Team Brightbox last week (1st-5th September) and as much as KLM conspired to make it otherwise, I had a great time.

It took almost 24 hours to get there with the quote-unquote “Reliable Airline” because the flight between Leeds-Bradford and Amsterdam was delayed, causing us to miss the last connecting flight onto Berlin. Cue four tired, sweaty hysterical people trying to maximise our return at a “participating bar and restaurant” at the airport after being given “we’re sorry we messed up” vouchers worth 10euros a piece (we scored two glasses of champagne, a “luxury” mojito, a cola beverage and two giant slices of chocolate truffle cake). We then had an indescribable meal at the airport hotel and about three hours sleep before catching our onward flight to Paris at dawn the next morning.

Paris? Yes, because all the Amsterdam-Berlin flights were booked up so we had to go via Paris. And we found out when we finally reached Berlin that my suitcase liked it in France so much, they decided to stay there for an extra day. Sigh.

Anyway, we finally reached our hotel - me sans luggage - around 2.30pm on the Tuesday. My original - pre-airline farce - plan had been to take a bike tour of Berlin on the Tuesday morning with Fat Tire Bike Tours. I’m not usually one for tours but because I was completely on my own (John was tied up at RailsConf with Brightbox) in a strange city, I thought it might be a good way to get a lay of the land. I’d obviously missed the morning one but decided - despite the lack of clean clothes (hurrah for promotional tshirts) and sleep - I’d go on the 4pm one instead. Capsule review: awesome fun and I was so glad I went on it. Even though it was rush hour ish, there was less traffic than a normal day in Leeds and anyway, we spent most of the time on bike paths or down back-streets. It took about 4.5hours including a refreshment stop at a beer garden in Tiergarten and I got to see a few things I probably wouldn’t have found/bothered with on my own (eg the abandoned guard tower near Potsdam Platz). Well worth the 18euros.

On the Wednesday, I had to work in the morning (John did too) and just as we were leaving the hotel for our respective afternoon pursuits, my suitcase finally arrived and I just about hugged it. I then got a taxi with John to the RailsConf hotel near Friedrichstraße station and took a pleasant (burning, melting hot) stroll down Unter den Linden to Alexanderplatz. From there, I took the UBahn to Magdalenenstraße at the former Stasi Headquarters. My my, that was a surreal experience (when I finally found it). Because it was a random Wednesday afternoon, there weren’t many people in there and it felt like I was trepassing in some governmental offices from the 1970s - which I guess I was. Away from the offices, the exhibitions are all in German (an English guidebook is available for 3euros) but even without knowing the language, I was moved by a lot of the displays and intrigued by all the former Stasi spying devices.

After I was done (and bratwursted up), I headed back into the city and to the exhibition underneath the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe (as fascinating and upsetting as expected). After that, I got on the third wrong train of the day and ended up at Friedrichstraße so decided to take donuts to the Brightboxers at RailsConf. We all hung out in that hotel’s lobby for a few hours while John & Baz finished up some work then headed out for dinner with Deb & Rob, Paul & Charmaine. There was an irony travelling all that way and hanging out with Leeds people but it was a good night.

On Thursday, I went to the Sachsenhausen Concentration Camp Memorial. I had originally intended to take a tour with the non-profit group Mosaic Tours because it’s out in the sticks and given my train issues the previous day, I wanted some help getting out there - but when the tour was cancelled due to low numbers, I took some directions and went anyway. It wasn’t that hard to get to in the end - a train out to Oranienburg then a bus from the station to the memorial - but Oranienburg station was surreal: a beautiful picturesque station, complete with a McDonalds, a live DJ playing 1970s German disco, dancing drunks and someone dressed up as a cartoon Viking. Perfect mood setting.

When I got to the Memorial, I was glad I wasn’t on an organised tour - I realised I could more concentrate on the things that interested me and also I wouldn’t have to be constantly be apologising for my sometimes inappropriate sense of humour. I took the audio tour instead and found it thoroughly absorbing - I just wish I could have a recording of it to keep and listen to again because there was so much to take in. The museum exhibitions are equally thorough and this is where the “concentrating on things I wanted to learn about” thing was the most important - I spent a lot of time in some of the areas but barely any in others. I spent just over three hours there in total - all I could take in a single sitting - but I’d go back on another trip to the city and spend even more time there, absorbing more, learning more…

Thursday night, John & Jeremy had to meet some clients so I found a Thai place for food near the hotel - yummy tom yam gung followed by mussaman gai - then we all had dessert together in the hotel’s bar before contemplating the journey home on Friday morning. The Berlin-Amsterdam leg went ok but when we got to Amsterdam, they told us we wouldn’t all fit on the connecting flight and one of us would have to wait for the later flight. In normal circumstances that would have been fine - annoying but fine - but after the 24hour journey there and lost luggage issues, we weren’t particularly impressed at the idea - plus John had a gig later that evening and we didn’t think he’d be able to text/phone in his drum beats. Eventually, after having to wait for seat allocation at the gate, we were all allowed on together and got upgraded too (which doesn’t mean much on those cityhopper planes - we were just grateful to have seats).

I certainly do think we’ll go back to Berlin again - if only so John can see something other than the taxi ride from airport-hotel & hotel-conference. I’m surprised we hadn’t gone sooner to be honest given my 20 year long interest in the last century of German history. There is so much to see and think about with all the Nazis stuff and all the DDR stuff - but history aside, it is a great city anyway. Despite my repeated errors on it, the public transport system makes it super easy to get around (Potsdamer Platz = haaaaate) and I loved how bike friendly (and flat!) it was. While it’s big, it didn’t feel scary-big like Moscow and maybe it was just the people I met but there seemed to be a really laid-back vibe to it too. We’ll return - just not on KLM.

>> Some of my photos

I have recently returned from Edinburgh, I caught the tail end of the Fringe festival. It was a good trip, and the first time I have had more than a day off work since February. I saw quite a few acts in the final 3 day.It’s been ages since I blogged and I’m out of the habit so I’ll just post loads of vids.
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