Tortoise cam...

Tortoises!

So in a not very shocking piece of news I've taken a(nother) break from playing with the meteor project. There are a number of reasons for this including 2 children, busy job, life and mostly it stopping being as much fun.
However we now have baby tortoises!

So I'm planning on setting up a "tortoise cam"...
I've got a raspberry pi and I've ordered a pi-cam so the plan is to set something up to watch them. I've even got a friend who's set up one of these before so have some help when I get stuck...
I'll be posting technical updates here with details of how I'm doing it (and probably the odd cute baby tortoise pic).
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The story so far:

We were given 2 very old tortoises (A'tuin and Molly) both over 100 years old, to our shock Molly laid 5 eggs not long after she moved in. This led to us buying an egg incubator at very short notice, reading the instructions meant we realised we needed a thermometer  as the incubator (linked above) had lots of warnings about how it wasn't great at keeping the temperature! We went for the bluetooth thermometer so we wouldn't have to keep opening the incubator door to check in on the temperature.
For those of you not following the links so far we've spent about £100.
Towards the end of August disaster struck! The incubator was knocked over, we lost one of the eggs and we were very worried about the others.
Then on September 3rd there was great excitement when 2 of the eggs started to hatch!

This of course meant more things! A tortoise table, a heat lamp, a heat mat and a thermostat. Fortunately we had had the vet on the hill round to film the tortoises and he had been kind enough to offer to source some of these things for us, they are going to turn up this week.
We now have the tortoises in their temporary home (an old draw), they are starting to eat and everyone is really excited about it.
More details to follow!

back again (again)

Well I'm back again, the little app I was working on had stopped being fun and as I was doing it in my spare time I decided to stop...

However I recently had to choose if I was going to renew this domain and I was doing a couple more fun techy things so I thought I'd re-start the blog and use the impetus of having shelled out for a .best domain for another year as a way to return me to the blog and to doing tech stuff in my spare time.

Not entirely sure exactly where I'm going to go with this. I will probably try and get the app up and working again, although it is successfully (ish) running in its hosted environment (lunch.ben.best) the version locally isn't working and upgrading my ageing mac appears to have killed off Git. So my plan for this evening is to get things up and running again. I've got an idea for a different app and I want to have a play with some other languages (I've been meaning to look at clojure and scala serverside and coffeescript for ages).

So I'm going to spend this evening getting things up and running again, I've just installed a new ssd into my ageing laptop and that is feeling a bit like a new machine. I'll let you know how it goes and if what I decide to do.

In the meantime here's a short, silent video of me replacing the hard drive:

interesting things from the web

So I saw a couple of interesting things recently on other blogs:

1. Chrome's blackboxing: 

https://developer.chrome.com/devtools/docs/blackboxing
A really interesting and useful idea for easing debugging.

2. It's not my fault

http://thenextweb.com/dd/2014/11/25/developers-arent-slow/

This was more to do with what's happened to me a lot at work recently, where I've been torn from project to project and have watched my productivity plummet. I'm sure no one's surprised by what it says, but I find it nice to read something that basically tells me it's not my fault.

I loved the user story builder that's there as well.