I geeked hard last night - coding on BikePimp. Got some cool new features done, although the niftiest was completed just now - similar searches. Search for Shimano and you’ll see what I mean…
My head must have been somewhat addled… I was lying in bed, feeling sleepy and fuzzy but not yet fully in that near-sleep state where all goes muffled, when an Escher-style infinity staircase popped into my head. It was seedy, like something out of The Million Dollar Hotel, and running down one aspect of the stairs was Prunella Scales in full Sybil Fawlty mode. Running up the other was Su Pollard as Peggy from Hi-de-Hi. They were squawking / screeching respectively. It was terrifying yet enthralling but quickly popped from my head, leaving me fighting to remember who the two harpies were.
My buddy Andy has been working on his comparative search site, BikePimp. Although I dun know nothin about bikes, it made me feel strangely in-touch when I searched for Sturmey-Archer stuff and found 62 entries! They have 3-speed gear hubs!
Feel the power.
7ish this morning, after a sleepless insomniac night, watching BBC breakfast show with subtitles on, whilst listening to some music, marvelling at the thought that there’s a real person on the other end typing those subtitles. There doesn’t seem to be a delete facility either, judging by the spelling mistakes. The presenters were rabbiting on about an item they had coming up about tea and biscuits and the poor subtitle bugger was getting in a right pickle, typing the wrong word “zrbts” three or four times, getting further and further behind. The next item up was the weather and the weatherwoman made some linking comment about tea and biscuits, which I think was supposed to be “I’m a ginger biscuit dunker”. Unfortunately the flustered subtitler typed “I’m a ginger bitch” by mistake. Made my day.
BikePimp has had a few upgrades this week. The searching has been improved, plus you can now sort search results and bargains by product name, shop or price.
One of the most popular recent searches has been - understandably - for CatEye lights - the ABS range features well on the site.
I spent yesterday trying to get an old ATI Rage 128 Pro 32MB PCI card running on my Gentoo box, in the hope of perhaps turning it into a PVR. I have come to the conclusion that it’s not going to happen, at least not in the way I want it to. Despite the excellent GATOS project, it seems that command-line access to the necessary devices when no X-server is available is not possible.
If you know better, drop me a line. It’s a shame, as the card has some great features, and in theory - at least - could do everything I need.
I suppose you think this is a blog, don’t you? Well, you’re wrong. Think of it as more of a log. A log of stuff. A web log of stuff. Stuff for me, not you. Because I’m always discovering stuff: how to do stuff, how to fix stuff, how to make stuff more fun, and then forgetting about all those interactions with stuff. So I’m going to record it all here.
It’s public because people reading about this stuff might introduce me to more cool stuff.
I’m a bit annoyed with myself. As usual, the design I’ve come up with is fairly colour-free. Am I scared to choose colours, or do I actually prefer grey? I’m not sure which case would bother me more.