Recently we took a trip to Twycross zoo, in Leicestershire. We'd never been to Twycross before, but it's a zoo that I had heard about a lot as a child, it was often mentioned on the likes of Newsround and Blue Peter back in the eighties, so it's a zoo with a lot of history behind it, and one that I've always wanted to visit.
Our visit was in mid-march, before the completion of the new 'Himalaya' visitors centre, and before the completion of the Elephant Walkway. Despite all the construction going on around us, we had a very enjoyable day, and there was still lots of animals to see and enjoy. The weather was quite cold and windy, so the all the bigger apes just wanted to lie around inside and sleep, which was a bit of a shame. But we did get to see a lot of the smaller monkeys and gibbons, along with assorted other animals.
I took at lot of photos while there, along with quite a bit of video footage, feel free to check out my Twycross Zoo set on flickr, and my video on youtube.
Wow! It's been a heck of a year for me. Particularly the last 8 months or so.
The year started with quite a bit of DIY on the house, including getting the cellar ready to become our new office/study/computer room, in order to allow us to use the second bedroom as a nursery. We got all the computers moved down there, and although half our stuff is still in boxes at the moment, I'm hoping that 2010 will provide me with some time to start building shelving and cupboards so that we can get things unpacked properly.
April saw the birth of our wonderful daughter, and since then it's been an incredible 8 months watching her grow from a small little thing, with only the ability to eat and sleep, to the noisy, crawling, laughing, bundle of fun that she's become in such a short time.
Since April life has really revolved around her, everything we do is all tailored around her needs, and while this can sometimes be annoying I don't think we'd want it any other way.
Some consequences/benefits of having a child that you don't necessary consider beforehand, the need for more hard disk space, in order to sort all the photos and video footage. Not to mention the requirement to get a video camera, and additional photography equipment! There is also a complete change in how much spare time you have, which is making it very hard to actually get much done these days, including updating this site.
In September I finally got around to moving all of my websites to a new server, and I'm now using Vidahost for my hosting, and so far they've been really great. So I can highly recommend them.
Finally I also got around to moving away from the Geeklog software that this site used to run on, and I'm now using Joomla instead, which so far, seems to have been a good move.
So there we go, a very brief round up of my 2009, hopefully 2010 will see some more articles on this site, and maybe with more regularity. :)
I posted up my first YouTube video just recently, and while I've created some videos in the past this is the first public one, which meant I had one additional thing to consider, namely I had to find some suitable music that fit the video, but most importantly I was allowed to use for "Free".
A quick search on the net for 'Free Music' will bring up a lot of results, but the vast majority tend to be "Royalty Free" music, rather than really "Free". I understand that people want to be paid for their work, that's only natural, but these days with the amount of internet videos knocking around I figured there must be some sources of really free music and sound effects.
Eventually I came across this site, Incompetech, which has a large library of music, covering many different genres, and all created by one person, Kevin MacLeod. All the music is covered by a CC license, and he's quite happy for people to use it as long as he gets credit for his work.
For this particular video, I also needed some sound effects, and again I found a lot of 'Royalty Free' sites, but eventually I discovered FreeSounds. This site also has a large and varied library of sounds, again covered by CC licenses, I haven't had a chance to fully look through the site, but I did find the sounds I needed pretty quickly.
I'm sure I'll be using both of these sites again in future video projects.
Finally, as this is a post about my experiences in creating my first YouTube video, I might as well link to it, the video itself is nothing special, and will probably only be of interest to those that know the person starring in it. But nevertheless, here it is: BigFoot Revealed.
Of course the fact that I'm using a piece of copyrighted film footage at the beginning of the video isn't lost on me.. In my defense, it's fairly short, and poor quality.. :)
Many years ago I developed my first site that made use of UK Postcodes in order to locate train stations close to specific venues. At that time I investigated postcode databases, and what was available, I quickly realized that it was going to be very expensive to obtain a proper full postcode database, and eventually had to make do with a much more basic cut down version, which was generally fine for what I needed.
Ever since that first website I've messed with geolocation stuff, and in my current job I have worked with full postcode databases, and
various pay-per-lookup services. The amount of different postcode data varies quite a bit, from 'outcode' only data sets with just the first part of the postcode (which you can generally find for free), to full data sets with each and every address, postcode, and latitude/longitude data.
It has long been a desire for many web developers to be able to use full data sets, but for most of us it's impossible to cover the kind of costs involved in obtaining a proper license for this data.
Recently there have been several developments in the postcode data area. ErnestMarples.com was setup to provide a free look up service, but within weeks they were contacted by the lawyers acting for Royal Mail and told to take down the service.
Personally I think this kind of data should be free to use (certainly for non-commercial use). It allows us to people better websites, that provide content that is much more relevant to the visitor.
Current options for free postcode data includes the data set from Geonames.org and the leaked data set that's available from wikileaks.org (although using that might get you into trouble. ;).
Update: There's also a been a request made on the OPSI site for the Postcode data to be made avilable, you can vote here.
So, finally, after several months of my site being offline, I've finally breathed live back into it!
The old site was running on GeekLog, but now I've moved to Joomla, which so far looks to be pretty nice and easy to use. The next big job is to write a migration script to get the GeekLog content converted over to the Joomla format, I haven't really decided yet whether to attempt an almost complete migration (i.e. pretty much everything), or to go for the simple option and just grab the article content.
There's still a lot of cleaning up and sorting out to do on the site, along with some new graphics to etc, all of which I'm sure I'll fail to find the time to do! But I'm hoping that I'll at least get around to adding more regular articles and stuff.
Incidently the theme in use on the site is a customised version of 'Colorfall' by [ Anch ], the layout and CSS is pretty much the same, I've just changed several of the graphics.
