Randomilia

Building a Robot Arm

rich — Sun, 13 May 2012 12:35:50 +0000

Maplin had a robot arm kit going cheap so I thought I’d give it a go. I succeeded in building it within a few hours, and it works brilliantly when connected to the USB port. Next step is to get my Arduino to control it.

Half an rm

Diablo 3 – Stuck on “Updating setup files”

rich — Sun, 13 May 2012 11:15:22 +0000

If you are trying to install Diablo 3 in advance of the big launch on Tuesday you might come across the common problem of the installer getting stuck at about the 30% mark as it tries in vain to update setup files.

I tried all of the online soultions to this – replacing agent.db etc, and nothing worked. Eventually I tried exiting from Malwarebytes Antimalware temporarily during the installation and it flew by like a dream.

Give that a go if you are stuck.

IFTT

rich — Wed, 16 Nov 2011 18:47:20 +0000

Playing around with IFTTT (If this then that).

Just trying something else

rich — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:46:09 +0000

Profile picture, taken at MCEscher museum:

Taken at Escher Museum, Den Haag

Short URLs

rich — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:35:27 +0000

For ages I’ve been meaning to create my own link shortener, a bit like tinyurl or bit.ly, which allow you to map a long URL to a nice short one. The concept is dead easy. What’s been hard up until now is finding a reasonably priced domain name that is really short.

Luckily .cc domains are now available, which apparently belongs to the Cocos Islands in Australia. So I bought rjp.cc (my initials) and stuck my link think on there. I’m quite pleased – the single small script makes notable use of:

mod_rewrite rules for avoiding ugly “?” GET variables
header relocation
MYSQL prepared statements
PHP and Javascript in an award-winning combination
Conversion to and from base-62. It should get to nearly a quarter of a million links submitted before the entire returned URL string is more than 10 characters long.

Restarting

rich — Mon, 14 Nov 2011 09:26:43 +0000

I’m going to kick off regular notes again, but with no pressure. Just as and when I want to post something.