http://www.earthinfo.org Down to Earth Information Sat, 25 Feb 2012 07:33:37 +0000 en hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3.2 http://www.earthinfo.org/objective-c-correctly-scaling-button-background-images/ http://www.earthinfo.org/objective-c-correctly-scaling-button-background-images/#comments Fri, 28 Oct 2011 15:16:45 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=734 I often find a need to scale buttons and background graphics to the correct size, but leave the edges at the same scale. So taking the button in Fig 1, if you simply scale it normally it looks like Fig 2, however I want to keep the borders the same like in Fig 3. So [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/objective-c-correctly-scaling-button-background-images/feed/ 0 http://www.earthinfo.org/dslr-off-camera-flash-study/ http://www.earthinfo.org/dslr-off-camera-flash-study/#comments Tue, 25 Jan 2011 16:41:45 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=647 The object of this little exercise is to assess the various different lighting techniques and setups that I could use when taking portrait photos. I tried a few different combinations of the 3 light sources (2 flashes and a reflector). The Equipment Camera is a Canon 550d Key (main) light is a Speedlite 580exII (Canon [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/dslr-off-camera-flash-study/feed/ 1 http://www.earthinfo.org/extract-metadata-from-apple-ipa-files/ http://www.earthinfo.org/extract-metadata-from-apple-ipa-files/#comments Mon, 11 Oct 2010 17:37:23 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=628 The resources and code for Apple iDevice Apps are all contained in a single .ipa file. I needed to find out who was the Apple account that purchased a particular Apple store app. This information is stored inside the ipa file in a plist file. [However this code could be the basis for extracting any [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/extract-metadata-from-apple-ipa-files/feed/ 3 http://www.earthinfo.org/britannia-1682-dockyard-model-by-colin-morris/ http://www.earthinfo.org/britannia-1682-dockyard-model-by-colin-morris/#comments Sat, 09 Oct 2010 09:59:49 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=579 The first time people see a dockyard model, they almost invariably comment, that it’s going to sink, and it surely would as the planking towards the bottom half of the ship are entirely missing, but these models ships where never intended to go on water, they were designed so the King of England could visualise [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/britannia-1682-dockyard-model-by-colin-morris/feed/ 1 http://www.earthinfo.org/spider-attack-mad-squid-iphone-game/ http://www.earthinfo.org/spider-attack-mad-squid-iphone-game/#comments Mon, 28 Jun 2010 13:47:01 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=561 I recently got a pre-release version of the new Mad Squid iPhone game called Spider Attack, and so thought I write a quick review. It’s 1953, the US Army have been conducting secret experiments with mutating radiation. Experiments that have gone badly wrong.  The Army baracks are destroyed.  The only thing between these Giant Mutant [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/spider-attack-mad-squid-iphone-game/feed/ 0 http://www.earthinfo.org/quick-dirty-fix-to-speed-up-qmail-for-bulk-mailings/ http://www.earthinfo.org/quick-dirty-fix-to-speed-up-qmail-for-bulk-mailings/#comments Tue, 19 Jan 2010 14:24:12 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=553 We were getting around 2 mails per second with qmail for a bulk emailing, which was not fast enough and rather than try and patch qmail to fix a bunch of problems,  we chose to put the qmail queue on a temporary file system. It appears that one of qmails bottlenecks is disk access (so [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/quick-dirty-fix-to-speed-up-qmail-for-bulk-mailings/feed/ 0 http://www.earthinfo.org/how-much-space-is-all-the-music/ http://www.earthinfo.org/how-much-space-is-all-the-music/#comments Mon, 21 Sep 2009 13:17:06 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=541 I wanted to know how much disk space all the music ever released would take up and couldnt find an approximation, so I put together this to give me a ball park figure. If you add up all the abums on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Albums_by_year It gives 81,708 At around 4mb per track and 10 tracks per album [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/how-much-space-is-all-the-music/feed/ 0 http://www.earthinfo.org/f100-technical-fault-on-meile-w3824wps-washing-machine/ http://www.earthinfo.org/f100-technical-fault-on-meile-w3824wps-washing-machine/#comments Sat, 18 Jul 2009 06:12:12 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=536 I’ve got a Miele W3824WPS washing machine, and I accidentally forgot to close the drain door at the bottom of the washing machine when doing a regular clean. This triggered an error “Technical  F100″  Fault nothing seemed to clear the error and I couldn’t find anything on the Internet about it. After a little but [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/f100-technical-fault-on-meile-w3824wps-washing-machine/feed/ 0 http://www.earthinfo.org/sqlite-v3-with-php-sample-script/ http://www.earthinfo.org/sqlite-v3-with-php-sample-script/#comments Wed, 20 May 2009 14:47:48 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=506 SQLite [http://www.sqlite.org] is a very handy tool, essentially it creates a database in a file. SQLite V3 should be installed automatically with PHP5. I find SQLite very handy when I want to make standalone code that uses a database, and because it doesn’t require an external application(such as Mysql) it makes it very portable. I [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/sqlite-v3-with-php-sample-script/feed/ 2 http://www.earthinfo.org/an-easy-way-to-use-gnu-screen-over-ssh/ http://www.earthinfo.org/an-easy-way-to-use-gnu-screen-over-ssh/#comments Thu, 14 May 2009 20:16:07 +0000 Chris Morris http://www.earthinfo.org/?p=458 GNU Screen is a free terminal multiplexer developed by the GNU Project since at least 1995. It allows a user to access multiple separate terminal sessions inside a single terminal window or remote terminal session. It is useful for dealing with multiple programs from the command line, and for separating programs from the shell that [...]]]> http://www.earthinfo.org/an-easy-way-to-use-gnu-screen-over-ssh/feed/ 13