CygnusAlpha

Each year on Fathers day the Newbury and District Amateur Radio Society organise their rally which has been at the Newbury Showground for the last few years. For anyone not familiar, radio rallies or hamfests as they are sometimes known are a show organised by an amateur radio society. They usually take the form of a field with trade stands, a club stand and a car boot section. There is often a very varied mix of things on sale from old wartime radios, military surplus, old broadcast equipment, telecom equipment, components to computers and all manner of bits and pieces.   This has always been one of the nicest rallies and one which has been on my list of favourites since about 1993, so I thought I'd share a few photos of the day. We got there a little late, but it was still a good day. I picked up a few bits for the DATV station I'm planning on building, an NDS CSR820 MPEG2 IRD and some L-Band filters and splitters. I also met an old friend which was nice. It wa...

  Maker Faire Newcastle, UK 2011 Last week Makers and Hackers from all over the world converged on the Centre for Life in Newcastle-Upon-Tyne for the UK's third Maker Faire.  Maker Faire is an event organised by O'Reilly's Make magazine to bring together art, crafts, technology, engineering and science projects and to celebrate and encourage the Do it Yourself mindset. The BBC's Research and Development and Television Platforms groups were there meeting the public and making friends with other Makers. We had several exhibits ranging from the fun Blink-o-tron with its trapped Weeping Angel, Conduct your own orchestra to the more serious Universal Control which allows subtitles to be sent to mobile devices.  The Maestro demonstrates in an entertaining way our ability to interface to the Microsoft Kinect and to use thedata provided to control video playback. Basically you use the baton and move your hands in the manner of an orchestral conductor and you ca...

Getting the Wayback Machine ready for Maker Faire. Since the last update the radio has gone through some drastic hardware changes.  There is still an Arduino driving the LCD and user interface but the backend has been replaced by a Beagleboard running Angstrom Linux.  This has enabled the radio to stream and play MP3 files and also allows the use of Wifi or 3G data dongle. BBC R&D North visited Maker Faire in Newcastle on the 12th and 13th of March 2011. http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/researchanddevelopment/2011/03/bbc-rd-at-the-big-bang-science.shtml http://makerfaireuk.com/

Been using Git lately.  Much goodness to be had, but some commands are a little unfamiliar if coming from Subversion. So, here's my crib sheet of handy Git recipes I think will be useful. Configure your Git bash-3.2$ git config --global  user.name  "CustardCat" bash-3.2$ git config --global user.email " custard@cpan.org " bash-3.2$ git config --global -l user.name =CustardCat user.email= custard@cpan.org Create a new project and commit your code... # Create a project and cd into it.. cd my_project # Make the project a git project git init # Add all the files in the project to git git add . # Commit your local files git commit Get status, logs & diffs # Status of changes git status # Diffs git diffs # Add more files git add file1 file2 etc.. # See what's been happening git log git log --stat --summary git log --pretty=oneline # See diffs between versions. nb. only need first few chars of version git diff 16f8..8bd2 g...