Welcome to the personal website of Robert Meerman.

And we're back! Server upgrade is complete, sorry about the downtime!

The gallery is gone, sorry. I upgraded my web-server and did a full reinstall while I was at it to clean up all the mistakes I made as I was learning. One of those mistakes, it seems, was not backing up my SQL database, so the gallery is a bit useless without it. Of course I still have all the images and so on. Eventually I'll find a gallery system I actually like!

• Site map
• Gallery (Photos, Videos etc)
• Oratory Hell 2 Still very much incomplete… Will be coming back, some day.

The two links above are dead because I'm an idiot - I upgraded my webserver a while ago and forgot to backup the SQL databases which the gallery relied on. All the content is still there, it's just not presented nicely. It's too depressing to think about re-adding it all manually. I'll find an alternative eventually…

• Wall Timer project: I took apart a digital mains wall-timer and hooked it up to my PC's parallel port with nothing but a couple of wires, and coded a windows application to turn the thing off for a few seconds if my ADSL router stops responding; I even got it to run as a windows service. Areas of note: WinXP direct I/O access, Windows services
• File renamer script — Designed for renaming anime series by using AniDB.net as a source of info, and matching it up with existing episode numbers in the current files names. Eg [K-F]_One_Piece_137_[28EF4A99].avi –> One Piece 137 - It profits and is the ambition of moneylender Zenii!.avi. Now also handles TVtorrents.com websites and generic TV series, with the ability to be easily (modularly) extended to support other sites. Past v2.0, so it's mature and well tested.
• Superfluous Cycling Computer — My project for the Super Happy Dev Club¹⁾ where I intend to hack together a load of sensors on my bike; because I can. It should also allow me to play with visualization of some real-world data which is actually of interest to me. As a starting point I'll get ground and air-speed, and later I hope to add accelerometers, GPS and if I can think of a good excuse: RFID. All this ought to get tied into something with a screen, perhaps my old GBA:SP²⁾? Once the basics are in place I'll be playing with connectivity to my desktop and all sorts of silly visual representations of the data and reconstruction of my trips.

• Final Year Project — I created a USB ↔ Nintendo Game Boy Advance connection, and documented everything about.

• Links
• Windows Start Menu — How to change the default browser & mail client in the WinXP start menu, handy if you want to use “G-Mail to” or make a portable application you're default (as I did)
• Using Unison with DokuWiki — Problems I overcame to get this site to automatically synchronise with my home PC
• Webmastering — Tricks I've used in the past that might prove useful again.
• Radio — You can listen to my Last.FM radio station using a little embedded flash-player, I use it for when I'm away from my MP3 player or my harddrives crash

I got the new version of infoRSS, a really handy and unobtrusive RSS/Atom feed reader extension for Firefox, and noticed that I'm mentioned first in the contributors. Which is awesome.

Read the mouse-tip to see what it's from.

• Fiddle with scripting the sending of a Skype chat-message from BASH. Would be very handy for work!
• Oratory Hell 2
  • Harry Coade's videos of leavers pranks!
• Bad Design podcast
• Driving License
• Media Player Classic audio stream auto-selector (i.e. use DVD language preferences in multi-audio non-DVD files)
  • Taz seems to have made some progress on this, better ask him about it
• Play with PXE booting (emboot.zip et al)
• Explore OpenGL (using Computer Graphics book)
  • GUI Ideas (see tablet PC notes)
  • Work, D'oh!
  • Animate and script a bead-sort (in Flash?)
• Code button-lights on laptop (E-Mail / WiFi buttons) - does my new laptop even have these lights?
• http://masscat.afraid.org/ninds/hacking.php
• www.dslinux.org
• http://www.fs-driver.org/faq.html
• http://www.inference.phy.cam.ac.uk/dasher/DasherSummary.html
• http://www.sfbags.com/services.htm
• Gothic shoutcast radio: http://81.169.162.168:8066
• Acer UK thread
• OpenGL X UI:
  • Ability to peel back windows to peek under them like you do with paper on a table. With pretty curl and shadow of course.
  • Window destruction ought to be animated. Perhaps a cigarette burn?
• Python binary packagers: http://effbot.org/pyfaq/how-can-i-create-a-stand-alone-binary-from-a-python-script.htm
• VNC
  • Flash-based control app: http://osflash.org/fvnc
  • Screen recorder that produces Flash video: http://www.linux.com/articles/113764 or http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/
• Photoshop on Ubuntu? http://luiscosio.com/how-to-adobe-photoshop-cs2-on-ubuntu-10-steps
• Slick Java-applet for browsing SVG files generated by GraphViz - may be very useful for browsing call-chains generated by ncc
• Folding plugin for Compiz, see this video
• Check out FlashBlock addon for Firefox - blocks all Flash until you press Play
• Video4Linux drivers for Sumvision Panther GT 4.0 webcam

If you have any requests or feedback, please let me know!

Robert.Meerman@gmail.com