The new layout offers a great viewing position that is parallel to the screen.

However, the new position for the screen is on the other side of the room from the cabling for the Sky box (dish feeds) and the wall socket that comes from our Loftbox (supplies TV aerial, CCTV and sends the Sky RF out to other Rooms).

So, my current project is to run cables to the new location. I need to do this neatly so have devised a route through our downstairs toilet that is adjacent to the lounge. The cables all come from the loft so they will partly run outside before entering the toilet and then through the wall and into the lounge.  I’m aiming for minimal disruption in the lounge, I can close the door to the downstairs toilet and commision it “out of use” while I do this!

I can run one of the Sky LNB’s through the Loftbox as it is, which means there is only one down cable along with a return cable needed to the lounge.  The down cable basically has all the signals combined (TV aerial, Sky LNB, and modulated CCTV) and removes the need for multiple cables, the signals are combined in the Loftbox and seperated in a special wall plate at the other end in the lounge.  The return feed allows the Sky RF-out to be sent to the Loftbox and distributed to up-to 8 other TV’s in the house.  The use of “Remote Eyes” at each other TV allows the Sky box to be controlled by a remote.  As I said, the Loftbox can take one LNB as it is but Sky+ uses 2 LNB’s so it can record one channel while watching or recording another.  I noticed that there is a product called a Loftbox Expander which allows the second LNB to be combined through the Loftbox and keep to the single down lead option. Another product called a DIP1 is used to seperate the second LNB signal out at the Sky+ box. This will cost about £20 + P&P and I worked out it is cheaper to run a second cable straight from the LNB’s to the new location in the lounge, I am going to all the trouble of making holes etc so an extra twin WF65 cable won’t be too much hassle.  There’s also less chance of any problems that way.

I started tonight by cutting a hole in the lounge for one of the faceplates (there will be 3) and a hole on the other side of the wall in the toilet, I’ll drill through tomorrow. Scary stuff! At least I know I can fix (read: hide) any of this with plaster/polyfilla!

I’m also going to mount the TV to the wall and use brush faceplates to hide the cables between TV and the devices below.

There’s also the cabling for the surround sound too, sometimes I wonder what I’ve started!

This year has gone very very quick for me. Scary really.

Here’s to another great year!

I’ve been itching to have a play on PSK for a while so I set up the Icom 706 on Saturday and put the 40m Delta Loop back up, it didn’t take long and I had the radio back on.  It wasn’t until last night that I got the 706 connected to a computer for PSK,  I’m using DM780 (part of Ham Radio Deluxe) and have configured it to report to pskreporter.info for reception stats.  The radio is running as I type and you can see the reports here.

I was quite surprised at how quiet the HF bands are, my father reported the same from his location.  I’m not in a great spot for radio but I haven’t heard it so quiet for years!

Looking back at the PSKreporter stats from early this morning there does seem to be some good propagation going on, I might need to get up early one day and make some contacts (this is not going to happen!).

Went for a walk to the top of Moelfre Isaf today which isn’t far from home. Decided to use the Photosynth app on my phone to capture a 360 degree panorama, it’s the best one I’ve done yet:

I was stood on the top of the trig point which is a concrete block about 4 foot high, it was well windy and I nearly misplaced my feet a couple of times while turning around taking pictures!

The picture attached to this post is a view from our patio this evening, it was just one of those photo-worthy skies so out came the camera again!

I’ve also made a change to the “mobile cam” (which is just the iPhone really). The images it sends now have the GPS coordinates embedded in the EXIF data. I’ve made a script to extract these coordinates and show the location on a map below the camera image. The map refreshes at the same time as the camera image so if I was driving along you’d actually see where I am in real time!

I used the Google Maps static API for this but will change it to a proper embedded map so there isn’t an image being replaced each time. It should make it less clunky.

I need to be able to post from my iPhone, including media, mostly images.  I wanted to be able to post multiple images and also be able to set one of them as the “featured image” as that is a requirement of the theme I’m using.  The featured image is the one that shows on the post listing pages and the main page.

I decided to use the Postie plugin and blog via email.

Here is how I have it setup currently:

• WordPress 3.2.1
• Slightly modified Unstandard theme
• Postie plugin – to blog via email (modfied – details below)
• Javascript chat for wordpress plugin – like the old days!
• Lightbox Gallery plugin – Postie adds images as a “gallery”, lightbox makes viewing more elegant
• WPtouch plugin – to make viewing from mobile devices nicer – needs mods though!
• WordPress Mobile Admin plugin – is useful for using the admin from mobile devices

Modifying Postie to set the “featured image”

Inside  postie/postie-functions.php  there is a function called  postie_media_handle_upload  – this function does what it says on the tin, it handles the media uploads!

When Postie is processing an email it will call that function once per image attachment so what we need to do is add some code to also populate the relevant part of the database to set the image as the “featured image”.

To do this we simply add this code to the end of the function (just before the “return” statement):

update_post_meta($post_id, '_thumbnail_id', $id);

This is a simple hack and does mean that each time an image is processed the code will set that one as the featured image for that post meaning the last attachment to be processed will become the featured one. I will quite often be including multiple images and couldn’t think of a simple way to specify which image is the one you want as the featured one so will have to work with this fact.  I have figured out on my iPhone how to get the picture I want to be the last one processed so can control this anyway.  I also haven’t tested what happens if you attach a video and that is the last one to be processed as the name of the function suggests it deals with video attachments too.

The main problem with the mobile admin themes is uploading images. I need to be able to do this and it wasn’t working out from the HTML based admin control panels.

It occurred to me that I need to simplify things a bit and go back in time. I used to blog via email in the old days and I even made a “moblog” that worked via email which was sent from the phone, this was around 2003 on a very basic mobile phone and when cameras had just started to become mainstream. The email was actually sent via the MMS feature on the phone, the phone didn’t officially have email functionality.

So, I have now tweaked the setup so I can blog via email. This way I can include as many images as I want and also have the added benefit of using the already familiar email editing interface on the phone. This also allows me to save drafts and go back later. It’s convenient and quick.

The built in email feature on WordPress is very basic so I installed the Postie plugin which is much better and allows lots of options to be tweaked.

This theme I’m using requires one of the uploaded images to be set as the “featured image” so that it shows on the main page. When sending an email via Postie there was no way to set the featured image so I made a slight mod to the code . (I might blog separately about it later).

I think I’ve nearly got it how I want it

This is coming from my phone as a test.

On average, a website on CloudFlare

- loads twice as fast
- uses 60% less bandwidth
- has 65% fewer requests
- is way more secure

All for free!

Too good to ignore so I set it up on here yesterday.  More of an experiment than anything.

Technically, kevw.com should now load fast from anywhere in the world rather than just in the UK.  I especially like the protection it offers and the claim that it will prevent known bots and crawlers from attempting comment spam, something of a nuisence with any blog.

If it proves to work without any real issues then I have a couple of other sites that will benefit from it

Gone are the days of hosting the blog on an old PC in the cupboard at home, it’s now possible to set up a global-capable site without any costs!

The network map is impressive!

The drawback for me at the moment is that most of them are not doing exactly what I want!  I think this is why in the past I have always resorted to developing my own blog software and website features.

I am having major difficulties to get the official WordPress developed iPhone app working, scouring the web brings up loads of problems, some the same, some similar but different.  No definitive solution but it always seems to be the security configuration on the server that is causing the problem.  Most *nix Apache servers these days use the mod_security module and it seems this blocks the XML-RPC protocol for various reasons.  It also seems that some hosts block this script or protocol other ways.  My host are telling me it isn’t blocked apart from mod_security being active, which is now tweaked, but it’s still not working.

It’s a shame as the app sounds promising and has all the features I think I need.  In an attempt to be able to easily post from my iPhone I have tried a “mobile” admin theme.  This works great but I can’t upload an image via it, this is a key aspect of how I want to post, I want to include images!

I’m now getting the urge to develop some WordPress plugins to fulfill my ideas but I know in reality I don’t have the time to complete them.  We’ll see.

Well,

This isn’t the first blog I’ve hosted on this domain, far from it infact.  Thinking about it now I had a blog of sorts between about 2001 and somewhere around 2009.  I think I lost interest when work became stressful and my first daughter was announced.  I had lots of projects on the go and Facebook boomed.

Facebook gives us an outlet to converse and share – for most people this removes the desire for a blog.  People who never would have dreamt about setting up a blog are now in a daily routine of Facebooking, you could even go as far as to say they are hooked.  What a great job Zuckerberg has done!

Things have moved on since then and I have the urge to keep all of my stuff in one place where I ultimately have full control of it.

I’ve ended up quite disorganised with my digital possessions.  The main concern is that all of my pictures are spread out amongst multiple devices and storage services, I aim to get them all safely stored on here but with a nice easy to use security system so not all of them are public.

Once again I have chosen WordPress as the blog engine and found a theme that is quite image orientated, I take loads of photos and intend them to be an integral part of any posts.  There is a WordPress app for iOS devices, I’ve installed this on my iPhone ready to use but at the moment there are some teething problems!

So, the blog is reborn.