Saturday, August 30, 2014

My Weather Station comes back on-line

My old weather station equipment suffered damage and so no data has been reported for the last few months. Luckily I got a birthday present of a new weather station and so my weather site is back online again. Unfortunately the twitter feed is not being updated, but I will fix that soon.

As I was setting up the new station I realised that the clock on my Tonido plug was seriously wrong. For some reason the date skipped forward from 2nd of December 2013 to 16th of April  2030. This means that the forecast data I have been collecting was incorrectly dated. When I get a chance I will write a script to fix up all of the data.

Thursday, August 28, 2014

KDE Remote Desktop Client (KRDC)

I recently switched my work laptop from Ubuntu to RedHat. Since Remmina is not in the default repositories that came with my new client I decided to use KRDC instead.

Overall I must say I am quite impressed with KRDC, it is easy and intutive to use. Its tabbed UI and storing of bookmarked sessions remind me very much of Remmina.

The one problem I have with KRDC is that it refuses to remember the passwords for each of my saved sessions. A dialog comes up prompting for the password with a check-box "remember this password" - I select this check-box but I still get prompted for a password the next time I connect. I assume this is a bug which will be fixed soon, but it is only a minor nuisance (I have a lot of passwords to remember).

A feature from Remmina I miss is the ability to automatically configure sharing between the local and remote machine, but again this is a feature I can live without for now.

Tuesday, August 26, 2014

The Race to Truth

The most recent book I read about cycling is The Race to Truth by Emma O'Reilly. It tells the story of how Lance Armstrong's soigneur changed from being a big Lance fan into a Lance hater and finally back to a balanced view of him. In the last chapter she outlines how she made peace with Lance and she even argues that his lifetime ban from sport is too severe. Overall I think it is a very interesting and well written book (apparently she had no ghost writer).

It is an interesting contrast to Seven Deadly Sins by David Walshe which I read earlier this year. David Walshe clearly views Lance Armstrong as cycling's enemy number one and he shows no sympathy with the view that Lance was simply part of a cycling culture which almost required doping.

Sunday, August 24, 2014

New cycle route beside Royal Canal

The towpath of the Royal Canal between Castleknock and Finglas has recently been upgraded to form a beautiful cycling route. I cycled along there one day recently and was delighted to see four separate families of swans with cygnets. All credit is due to whoever was behind this project.

Sunday, August 17, 2014

Rejoining the Gym

My friends know that I am very keen on staying fit and active so they would be surprised to know that I let my gym membership lapse at the start of this year. I found that I rarely visited the gym in the last year because I have a cross trainer at home and I prefer cycling laps of the Phoenix Park to cycling on a stationary bike.

However, I have changed my mind again and decided to rejoin my local gym. My resolution for the new academic year is to attend classes.  I will be regularly checking-in with Swarm/Foursquare and expect to regain the mayorship soon.

Friday, August 15, 2014

Swarm v Foursquare

I have been using Foursquare for a number of years. In general I find this to be a useful and fun application for letting my friends know where I am, although many friends express puzzlement about why I would willingly disclose my location.

Recently Foursquare started encouraging me to try out their new Swarm application. Initially I was reluctant and stuck with the app that I already knew. However,they finally disabled check-ins with Foursquare and so I was forced to install swarm.

My first impressions of Swarm are quite positive - it looks like a nice upgraded version of the Foursquare app. However, I don't see why they had to split off check-ins into a new app. It seems that mashable agree with me.