Brett Hutley's Blog

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!”

Yesterday my XYZ Da Vinci 3D Printer arrived. I had a really fun day setting it up and doing some test prints. The first print I made was the "key chain" print that is on the firmware. This created a rather lame "XYZ" logo that I assume you can attach to your keyring. The CD that came with the printer only has Windows versions of the XYZ Printer software, despite proclaiming Mac versions as well. Fortunately, the software is downloadable from their website. Next, Helen created a model in XSI of an egg cup that looks like a bird's nest. She exported it to Blender and then we created an STL file which we then imported into the XYZ Printer software. The print for this took about 3 hours, and the results were less than perfect. The egg cup still looks pretty cool though. This morning I printed a 3D printed shell and ordered an Arduino so I could reset my filament cartridge as described here. So far I'm pretty happy with the printer. It was pretty cheap at £500, and I've really enjoyed playing around with it. I'm keen learn a lot more about 3D printing, and I think that this printer is a great one to start with.

I received 5 iBeacon transmitter units from ibeaconmodules.us today. They arrived unassembled, so I put them together and configured their local names with my iPhone.

The first hurdle I found in setting them up was getting the battery in the right way around. Each unit comes with a watch battery, and you need to have the side with the plus sign facing away from the circuitry.

Continue reading “Configuring a Jaalee iBeacon Transmitter”