Origa.me

I have one of those cheap desk lamps which I use as a bedside reading light. The problem with it is that the bulb keeps blowing and it always seems to take me ages to buy a replacement. As LEDs can be pretty bright nowadays and have a much longer life expectancy (when subjected to the recommended current levels) as well as lower power consumption, I decided to convert the lamp to use LEDs.

As a reminder for myself, and in case anyone happens to find it useful: if you run into problems making IIS send mail with CDOSYS from within a .asp file (VBScript) like I did today - this may help: First, put this at the very top of your script (before the language declaration, etc)

Any Mac users out there who want a free Office Suite? I thoroughly recommend NeoOffice - the Mac native version of OpenOffice.org . I'd been using version 1 for a while on OSX 10.3 and, while better than running OpenOffice.org in X11, it was still somewhat lacking. A few months ago NeoOffice 2 Alpha was released which was based on OpenOffice.org 2 and was generally a major improvement. That said, it took rather a long time to open -...

Wow, I cannot believe I've been doing version management manually as long as I have. This whole subversion thing has really opened my eyes in the past 48 hours. I've actually migrated all of my active code to it already - it's so easy!

First ever Subversion checkin (directory structure) seemed to go smoothly enough. Thank goodness for the Subvervion book (and Plucker so I could read it on my PDA rather than lugging the laptop to bed every night). I did forget to add a comment, which is a bit of a faux pas - must remember never to forget again! Next step is to actually upload some code. I'm also seriously considering using Subversion for some of my work projects -...

Just heard about this today: http://www.ibegin.com/ibox/ibox-test.html Had a play with it and it looks the business. Certainly when combined with AJAX it makes handling dialogues in administration interfaces that bit simpler and more user friendly. Into the toolbox it goes!

My Binary Clock is finally finished having chased out the last of the show-stopping bugs last night. It now shows the correct time and looks very cool. The ultimate in "Geek Chic" - a binary clock I made myself!

I think I've discovered a future project once I've got the workshop and welding requirements sorted: http://blog.modernmechanix.com/2006/04/03/build-your-own-street-legal-kart/ If it could be made road-legal in the UK, and possibly run on an electric motor it would be an absolutely awesome method of transport. Also, it would make passing the MOT a breeze - there's nothing to go wrong with it! (Via MAKE: Blog .)

What should be a relatively simple procedure turns into a bit of a nightmarish hack! I wonder why it is that, although possible to use the "Open File" alarm option and point it at an AppleScript to get a Growl notification, Apple chose not to send any event variables with it? This means it's perfectly feasible to announce "This is a reminder" but it's impossible to discover what the reminder was for without opening...