Olivers Place

Random stuff I do...

  • Exploit Bounty for my stuff!

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    US$ 1000 reward if you can break into my stuff. I have a mostly patched laptop, phone, and various other devices.

  • Julius Caesars Salad

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    Once upon a time in the ancient city of Rome, Julius Caesar was a mighty ruler with an insatiable hunger for power. He was ambitious, cunning, and ruthless, but he also had a weakness - he loved food. Caesar’s chef, a man named Brutus, was known for his culinary expertise and his ability to create the most delicious, mouth-watering dishes that Rome had ever seen.

  • External Wall Insulation Fixings

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    [draft]

  • Gym Power

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    I always wondered… where does the energy from all the people in a gym go? Do gyms use it to power the lighting? Is it enough to sell and have an effect on the business bottom line? Might a really strong cyclist be paid to cycle all day?

  • Appliancegate: The energy efficiency fraud

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    When consumers buy a product, a key question is “how much does it cost?”. For washing machines, fridges, tumble driers, etc, the cost consists of the purchase price, and ongoing energy use. Eg. “$800 + $0.50 per wash/dry cycle”.

  • Visit this page to waste some bandwidth

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    Just sit on this page to waste bandwidth.

  • My Tesco clubcard

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    I think that tesco requiring a clubcard to get basic offers is silly. I therefore present to you the universal Tesco Clubcard:

  • How much memory does a Linux system waste?

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    How much RAM on your laptop is sitting unused? How much is empty? How much is redundant?

  • Ebike Chain motion sensor with a broken inductor

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    Making an ebike is easy enough, but controlling the motor speed is tricky. You want a bit of regen for braking (so a sensor on the brake lever?), and power when pedalling (A crank rotation sensor?), and it would be nice if the bike was only putting a lot of effort in when you were, which is really the product of the speed the pedals are turning times the force on them (A force sensor on the pedals?).

  • Arduino on a rechargable battery - how to self-switch off.

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    Battery powered things with a lithium battery are always a little complex. You have to handle not draining the battery when your device isn’t in use, not overdischarging the battery, and still being able to do whatever you wanted to do. A lot of usecases can be handled by a sensor turning the circuit on, and the circuit turning itself off again when it’s done doing whatever needs doing.

  • Dead Mans Switch

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    Sometimes dark forces are out and about, and I wouldn’t want them doing nasty things to me. This is notice that if anything untoward were to happen to me, a set of automated systems will take a set of predetermined actions which hopefully will be to the detriment of those who are being nasty!

  • Bcache - Awesome and terrible at the same time

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    Should I shell out thousands of dollars for a decently big SSD, suffer terrible hard drive performance, or have to live with both and manually moving data between them?

  • Messing with Machine Learning

    - I started from Karpathy's really good post about RNN's for text generation and thought I'd extend it.

  • Yuilop is pretty cool

    - It's basicly Google Voice, but for the UK.

  • This page is evil

    - You will never know what I did...

  • My phone number

    - I'll publish it here on the web. That may or may not be stupid... I shall find out!

  • FM - Improved

    - You can find the new version of the PiFm radio transmitter at http://www.icrobotics.co.uk/wiki/index.php/Turning_the_Raspberry_Pi_Into_an_FM_Transmitter

  • Raspberry PI - now with FM inbuilt!

    - So you looked down the Raspberry Pi spec sheet but weren't happy they didn't include an FM transmitter? No worries! I found it's possible to transmit FM using the clock generator built into the broadcom chipset. Just hook up a bit of wire as an antenna, and you're good to go.

  • Lg KP500 cookie - sending SMS's with AT commands

    - In short - it doesn't work. That means if you connect the phone to a computer, you CANNOT get the computer to send a text message for you.

  • Testers wanted...

    - For this:

  • The 0007 from London to Cambridge...

    - It isn't often you have fun on a train...

  • Oliver Mattos Timetable

    - Oliver Mattos Timetable is here.

  • Game of Life

    - I knocked up a quick "game of life" on html canvas in 20 mins - enjoy! (this isn't pretty or neat code - don't use it as an example!)

  • The problem with Chrome Extensions

    - One big aim for Extensions in any browser is to provide something which modifies the page the user is viewing. For example, one might want to highlight certain links, add spellcheck, block flash, block ads, or implement parental controls.

  • Google Me

    - Lots of us have "unique" names on google - ie. every result for your name in quotes refers to a website about you, rather than someone else with your name.

  • The Chrome OS - hardware identified

    - Browsing around the Chromium open source project I found a little snippet of info Google probably didn't want to make public.

  • The HP nx6125 / nx6115 and Windows 7

    - I'll just document the "bugs" with windows 7 64 bit edition running on the HP nx6125 - hopefully it'll save anyone else the bother of installing it only to find it doesn't work acceptably.

  • The browser memory feast

    - I've been looking for a really good browser - problem is I can't find one.

  • The Story of When Dinosaurs Were Roaming

    - Here's a poem I've liked for many years, and when I found out that not one of the billions of web pages on the internet include even a reference to the poem I decided to publish it here for safe keeping. (note I can't be sure of the copyright status of the poem, but feel free to contact me if you are the rightful owner).

  • The Evolution of a 1st Year University Project

    - The assignment: Make a computer program to simulate the movement of a pendulum.

  • Missing your Wireless Drivers?

    - Well I might have just the thing...

  • HTML Canvas - adding a dimension...

    - The web is such a great platform, but there are still things it can't do, and one of them is support for decent graphics without flash. HTML 5, the next version of the html the web is written in, goes some way to address this. With HTML5 you can do pretty much anything you like with 2D graphics by using the new <CANVAS> tag.

  • Figuring out if Jekyll will do what I want

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    First impressions: It has taken me an awfully long time to get this thing to output 50 lines of HTML code, some parts of which still aren’t quite right…