I decided to give up caffeine the other day. I haven't been sleeping that well, and my caffeine intake has been steadily increasing over the last few months, so I thought I'd better get it under control. Yesterday was a nightmare! I was feeling really zonked. Today I an feeling pretty good though, so I think I am over the worst. I am interested in measuring two things now - my quality of sleep and my blood pressure. It will be interesting to see if giving up caffeine has any impact.
I've been listening to some great podcasts recently. I've long been a fan of the Economist podcast, and I've recently started to listen to the
FT Alphaville podcast. They had an episode in which they talked about podcasts, and they mentioned a podcast called
"Serial", which is a true story about a journalist investigating a murder. It is completely absorbing!
Continue reading “Podcasts”
Well, despite resolving to blog more, it's been another long period between blog posts. It's not like I haven't been thinking deep thoughts, or pursuing interesting projects. It's that I've been worried that my thoughts have been too nascent to post. It's silly really. I should be using the "Lean Startup" philosophy of releasing early and often. Still, at least there's a lot of room for improvement!
If there's one other casualty of the current crisis in Greece, its my Euro-optimism. Over the past couple of weeks I've transformed from being optimistic about the Euro, to being totally pessimistic about it.
Continue reading “Greece and the EU”
I've just spent about 20 minutes trying to authenticate with Twitter using the Python OAuth2 module. I kept on getting an X509 error, specifically:
ssl.SSLError: [Errno 185090050] _ssl.c:343: error:0B084002:x509 certificate routines:X509_load_cert_crl_file:system lib
The solution to this is that the
cacerts.txt file in the Python installation is only readable to the root user / wheel group. In order to fix that up, first find the cacerts.txt file:
find /Library/Python/ -name cacerts.txt
Then modify the permissions on the file:
sudo chmod 644 /Library/Python//2.7/site-packages/httplib2-0.7.7-py2.7.egg/httplib2/cacerts.txt
Note that the URL endpoints for twitter on the python-oauth2 Github page are currently wrong. To use the "Twitter Three-legged OAuth Example" change http://twitter.com/oauth/request_token to https://api.twitter.com/oauth/request_token, etc.
The Raspberry Pi 2 was announced a week ago, and I decided to get one to use as a
media centre. Mine arrived yesterday.
Well, it's been a loooonnng time since my last blog entry. One of my resolutions for the new year was to do more blogging. Despite this, I haven't blogged anything for the whole of January. OK, so this stops now. As of today I am starting to blog again. Even if it's just a short and almost meaningless entry about how I'm going to start blogging again.
Last Monday we bought a house in Brighton. I wasn't sure it was going to happen. Genetically I'm predisposed to worry about stuff, and right until the last moment I was thinking of disaster possibilities. We were supposed to exchange contracts and settle at 2pm. We spoke to the vendors and they were saying that they couldn't possibly be out of the place before 2pm, so we decided to travel down by train and get there around 3pm. We got final confirmation from our solicitor that the settlement had happened at 3pm, while we were still on the train. We got to the house, and the vendors were still in the process of moving out. We grabbed some keys and went and grabbed something to eat. By the time we came back, the vendors had left and the place was ours!
Here is a talk about machine learning given by Jeremy Howard which is part of the Exponential Finance Conference series which is well worth watching:
The Data Science Revolution (Jeremy Howard) - Exponential Finance 2014 from
Exponential Conference Series on
Vimeo.
Last night I was trying to print a
camera lens clip that allows you to clip your camera lens to your camera strap. Unfortunately the clip for the strap wasn't wide enough. Fortunately the
OpenSCAD files were included, and all the settings were in the file. It was simply a matter of changing the appropriate variables in the OpenSCAD file and then exporting the model.
Continue reading “OpenSCAD rocks the house!”