More recently, I’ve had the urge to write a few food-related articles once more, but I realised that I didn’t have anywhere sensible to put them. So, last week I started up a new blog dedicated to my ongoing experiments in the kitchen. So, let me introduce to you, the one and only all-new Nothing But Onions. There are already a few posts up there, mainly dealing with a couple of recipes that a number of people have been asking for – finally I have somewhere to point them at! More good stuff will be coming soon.

This blog here at dopiaza.org will, of course remain, and I’m sure I will continue to forget to post to it for many years to come.

One of the really interesting things about Glitch is that it has an API. The API is fairly limited right now, but you can already do a fair few interesting things with it. With the help of geekybird, I’ve been putting together a bunch of useful Gltich-related tools which you can find at my new website, Startling Fecundity. Currently, there’s an inventory viewer, achievements checker, calendar converter and an auction history viewer. More things are planned, so watch this space.

I also released a new iPad app recently – Glitch Inventory for the iPad.

Glitch Inventory for iPad

It’s available on the App Store℠ store right now. Work on an iPhone version is currently under way.

Finally, the last piece of Glitch news is that I’ve just finished a series of blog posts for Tiny Speck that describe the use of the Glitch API  on iOS. They cover a variety of topics such as authentication, avatar animation, and the building of a simple Glitch-based game, Glitch Run:

Glitch Run

You can find all the posts over on the Glitch Developer Blog, and you can grab all the source code from my github page.

Well, that brings us pretty much up to date. I’ll try not to leave it so long next time…

Sourdough

As part of the move, I’ve upgraded my version of WordPress, and switched to the standard twentyeleven theme for now, just to keep life simple. I’ve been fairly lax in my posting habits again just lately, but there’s been an awful lot going on – I’ll post a general roundup later.

It all started when I wanted to display my latest Flickr photos across the top of this blog. There weren’t any ready made scripts out that that did what I wanted, so I knocked up one of my own. Over the following weeks, a couple of people asked me about doing something similar on their own sites, and so I decided to take my badge code and turn it into something a little more generic so that people could easily create their own Flickr badges.

There were a few things I wanted to achieve here:

• It should be completely straightforward for non-technical users to create a badge and embed it into their web site
• It should work ‘out of the box’ with no complicated set-up or styling needed
• It should be easy to re-style to fit pretty much any page design

So, the Badge Maker has a simple user-interface to allow you to create your badge:

Once you’ve authenticated on Flickr, you can then choose whether the badge will display photos from your photostream, from one of your sets, from one of your groups or from one of your galleries. All you do then, is set a couple of options such as the number of photos you want the badge to display, and which layout style you would like, and you’re done.

The pre-canned styles available are somewhat basic and limited - I'm a software writer, not a designer - but they should be good enough to get people started. And if you want more control, then you can write your own CSS to display the badge however you like - details on how to do this are in the FAQ.

In order to help maintain good performance and to play nice with the Flickr API, the badge contents are cached for a little while, so you won't necessarily notice any changes to the contents immediately. The badges are currently cached for twenty minutes, although I might make that longer if it grows significantly in popularity.

If you want to have a play, you can find the Badge Maker here.

but I was focusing on function, not form.

Each of these tubes contained a piece of Ilford Multigrade IV black and white photographic paper, and with a bunch of cable ties, I secured them in various locations around the garden. Then, it was all a question of waiting – I managed five weeks before I caved in and brought them back in to see the results. All in all, I’m pretty pleased:

When you retrieve the image from the camera, it’s a negative, so the paper is scanned in and then inverted in Photoshop. The levels are then adjusted to show some of the detail. It’s pretty amazing what you can do with an old bit of pipe and a sheet of paper.

The images are quite small (the paper was cut to 5″ x 3 1/2″) due to the narrow diameter of the pipe. I think I need to find some that’s a little wider, at which point I’ll try this again – a six month exposure next, think.

For the 10/10/10 project.

Hasselblad, Polaroid back, Fujifilm FP100-C.

Yesterday, I was going out in the evening to the Multipack Leamington Social and somebody there had wanted to take a look at the phone, so I fished it off the shelf and plugged it in to charge. After a little while, it gleefully announced that there was a system update available and would I like to install it? I was hopeful. Perhaps Android 2.2.1 would fix my ADB problem and allow the phone and the SDK to make friends again and once more start talking to one another. I pressed ‘Install’. The phone rebooted and commenced installation, and after a brief pause, this was the result:

And that’s it. It’s stuck there. It won’t even power down. I didn’t have time last night to deal with it, so I just left it and went out. I guess that’s yet another thing to try to sort out today then.

Oh, how I love my Android phone.

Update: So, with the help of Google, I figured out how to get out of that particular error screen. Holding down Power and Volume Up eventually gives me a menu which includes an option to reboot. That worked and I’m now back at 2.2, with my phone telling me I’m up to date. I’d still like to try getting 2.2.1 installed to see if that fixes my adb problem, but that particular adventure can wait for another day when I’m less busy.

We also have a nice new look to go with the clean sweep. I’ve de-cluttered and got rid of the sidebars, and added my latest flickr photos to the top of the page to brighten things up a little.  There’s still some tinkering to do, but it’s starting to settle down now.

And finally, a gratuitous photo: