Brett Hutley's Blog

Python's IMAPv4 client library imaplib is a really light-weight wrapper over the IMAP4 protocol. As such, it isn't that intuitive to use. The best reference I've found on it is a cheat-sheet over here.

Continue reading “IMAP4 and Python”

I have just been importing some music into iTunes from an external drive. Sometimes iTunes doesn't recognise songs as belonging to the same album, even if they have the same Album name. (Bad iTunes!)

Continue reading “Getting iTunes to recognise tracks as belonging to one Album”

I just picked up my Jawbone UP from the Post Office last night, so thought I'd post my first impressions.

Continue reading “Bio-Monitoring and the Jawbone UP”

Bryan Morris has a post about how he has set up Emacs using org-mode to implement a Kanban board. He uses table mode within org-mode, and hyper-linking to link items within the table, to actual org-mode tasks. To me, this setup seems a little clunky, so I thought I'd describe my current system.

Continue reading “Emacs and Kanban”

This morning I was researching a fast yoga workout when I came across the Five Tibetan Rites. These exercises supposedly came from a retired British Army Colonel who was stationed in Tibet, and written up in the book "The Eye of Revelation" by Peter Kelder in 1939. Apparently the colonel stayed at a monastery populated by extremely long-lived monks who practiced these exercises every day.

Continue reading “The Five Tibetans”

There is an absolutely awesome bit of Neal Stephenson's book Reamde, that goes like this: The brain "was sort of like the electrical system of Mogadishu. A whole lot was going on in Mogadishu that required copper wire for conveyance of power and information, but there was only so much copper to go around, and so what wasn't being actively used tended to get pulled down by militias and taken crosstown to beef up some power-hungry warlord's private, improvised power network. As with copper in Mogadishu, so with neurons in the brain. The brains of people who did unbelievably boring shit for a living showed dark patches in the zones responsible for job-related processes, since all those almost-never-exercised neurons got pulled down and trucked somewhere else and used to beef up the circuits used to keep track of NCAA tournament brackets and celebrity makeovers."

Continue reading “Rewiring the Brain”

Equity markets constantly surprise me. It's looking increasingly likely that the Eurozone will disintegrate - leading to potential bank failures, stagnant economic growth and increased unemployment - and the equity markets here in Europe are pretty much shrugging it off today. The FTSE100 is up over half-a-percent at pixel time.

Continue reading “The Weirdness of Equity Markets”

I just read this fascinating article from Food Safety News about honey. I had no idea that honey was such a dirty business!

Apparently over 75% of honey sold in US grocery stores isn't strictly "honey". It's been "ultra-filtered", a process that removes the natural pollen from the honey. A process whose only purpose appears to be to disguise the origin of the honey.

Continue reading “What's in your honey, honey?”

I was browsing a list of tools and services for a lean startup a couple of days ago, when I noticed that many of tools implement a Kanban methodology. I had never heard of Kanban, so I took a quite trip over to Wikipedia.

Continue reading “Kanban”

The list of the top 50 bars in the world have been announced by Drinks International.

London is represented very well, with 5 of the top 10 bars. 12 of the top 50 bars are based over here. For comparison, 8 of the top 50 are based in New York, and 3 of the top 50 are based in Paris. 69 Colebrooke Row came 7th, which is about 2 blocks from our flat.

Continue reading “World's Best Bars 2011”