Bored on the Bus?

You know what it's like when you're bored on the bus, you get your phone out and mess around. I did this a while ago and found myself playing with the burst function. The pictures were sitting around for a while until I was playing with mencoder, a nice video encoding tool. Anyway, It can make videos from a stack of ordered Jpeg files using the command:

mencoder "mf://*.jpg" -ovc lavc -fps XX -o XXX.avi

The X's, well, for the first two put in your desired frame rate, the others are just your desired file name.

Its not brilliant, but it give you an idea of how to get up Oxford Rd in Manchester!

Geeks Anonymous

I have a confession to make... I am a geek. I always feel better once somebody understands that about me! I have been trying to learn to program for years now. I've tried loads of different languages, with varying degrees of success. 

I started using Ubuntu Linux a couple of years ago. Now it is the main operating system on my home computer. It's nice, you can fiddle with everything, a geeks paradise. 

Anywho... after getting to grips with the whole Linux thing - A word to anyone thinking of making the switch, don't be afraid of the command line, it is your friend, and so are the people in the forums - I decided to have a crack at learning to program again. This time in the cross-platform language, Python. The reason I chose this language was well, because it looked simple and, happily, it is. When you write a program, or script if you're being pissy, it doesn't look like a spider has been tap dancing on your keyboard, it's nice and simple, just like me.

So once you have got it all up and running, I found the Python Homepage and this tutorial page to be a good place to start, you need something to program. For this, rather than working from a book, I found the Project Euler website. Here they give you maths problems that you need a computer to solve, perfect.

Alright, so now you know my geeky secret, I hope you have fun.