Working out the lights section of the boblight config file can be a real pain, and so a calculator to do the hard work for you is really helpful. Fortunately one has been written by Adam Boeglin, released under the GPL version 3 or later. I've converted it to python and put it online for those that might find it useful. The original bash script can be found here. As noted in the original script, certain assumptions are made:

Dell XPS 15 I've just bought a Dell XPS 15 l502x laptop, with a full HD (1920x1080) 15.6" screen, Sandybridge i7-2670QM CPU (quad core 2.20 GHz, up to 3.1 GHz turbo boost) with a larger 9 cell battery and cool backlit keyboard. Initial indications are good, it is quick, the screen is great and the sound (2.1 - yes, it has a mini sub in it!) from JBL is amazing for a laptop. It also has a 2 GB nvidia GT540M GPU, which is set up using optimus switching technology with the integrated intel HD3000 GPU. This should be interesting to get running with linux, as nvidia don't support optimus with their linux driver. It comes running Windows 7 Home Premium, and while I don't mind Windows 7 (it is certainly much better than earlier efforts), the aim is of course to run linux on it - so let's see how it goes.

I'll be trying to get my distro of choice running on it, Arch Linux, with KDE (4.7.3).

I wouldn't normally do "advertising", but I couldn't help but to write about this. I recently stumbled across GiffGaff who are a UK mobile phone network who seem to be pretty cheap. Their pay as you go is pretty competitive (8p a minute, 4p per text, free internet until February 2011, actually free to call 0800 numbers, free calls between giffgaff members, ...) but what really makes them stand out is their good bags.

There are various different ones, but for e.g. £10 you get 150 free minutes (currently 250 until March), unlimited texts and actually unlimited data for a month. This means that if you buy a goody bag a month, then you have essentially a very competitive monthly contract without the contract! Bloody marvellous.

The best thing is though that if you sign up through http://giffgaff.com/orders/affiliate/alex_p we both get £5 free credit! I've been using them for a couple of weeks now, and am very pleased.

So it seems that the world and his dog have a blog, or some other equally pointless method of letting people who don't really care know about the irrelevant minutiae of their life. With this is mind, I've just set one up too.

However I don't intend to use it to broadcast information about how fascinating or otherwise my life is, but more as just somewhere to store various bits of information that I have sporadic need of, look up, and then the next time I need it have forgotten both what it was and where I found it the first time. I don't expect anyone to read this except for me, and that is probably just as well. I've even given it a cunning url: http://aeparker.com/blog.

I've been looking for a travel map to keep track of countries I've been to for a while and whilst this isn't perfect, it does the job.

Make your visited countries map

JavaScript charts

I make quite heavy use of certain CSS3 features on this site, such as border-radius and box-shadow to put nice curved corners, 3D shadow effect borders around images (see e.g. photos). Unfortunately no version of Internet Explorer supports this. My advice is to use a browser such as Firefox or Chrome.