Author Archives: dopiaza

Flickr Badge Maker

A couple of weeks ago, I opened up my latest Flickr project to the world. Quietly announced with just a single post to Twitter, my Flickr Badge Maker was made available. I planned to follow that announcement up with a blog post, but real life intervened and slowed things down a little. Still, here we are, at last. A couple of weeks later than I’d expected, but so it goes.

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.
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Solargraphy

Five weeks ago, I whiled away a Saturday afternoon cutting a piece of black plastic drainpipe into sections, drilling holes and sealing the ends to make three pinhole cameras. Now, I realise these may not be quite the most elegant cameras I’ve ever owned:

Three Cameras

but I was focusing on function, not form.
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Nexus Fail

I have a Nexus One phone that I bought to use for development. A little while ago, I installed Android 2.2 on it, only to discover that I could no longer get it talk to the Android SDK. ADB completely failed to recognise the device. It seems I wasn’t the only person with the problem, but there was no sign of a solution. As a development device, it was now effectively useless. Luckily, the development work I had bought it for was now complete, and so the Nexus One sat on a shelf gathering dust for a while.

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:

Nexus One Fail

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.