Shaun McDonald's Blog » Uncategorized

Happy New Year

smsm1986 — Tue, 01 Jan 2008 12:05:00 +0000

This year I headed into the centre of Edinburgh with some friends from university for a house party. Also went out to see the fireworks from a pedestrian bridge over the West Approach Road. This was a great spot as you can see the castle from the west.

There is a video below of the fireworks.

British Summer Time from tomorrow

smsm1986 — Sat, 24 Mar 2007 19:04:00 +0000

It’s that time of year again when all the clocks in Europe change again. Tonight at 1AM the clocks all jump forward an hour. Being in the UK, it is nice that during the Winter, my current time is GMT/UTC. However, during the Summer, I’m an hour out from GMT/UTC. This does confuse me at the start of the summer. The change in sunrise and sunset compared to local time is annoying too.

Thanks to Pavel, I learned a new flag for the the date command on unix based systems. If you run date -u, you get the current time in GMT/UTC rather than your current local time when running the command without the flag.

Upcoming Lothian Buses changes

smsm1986 — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 15:27:00 +0000

Some more changes to the local buses.

It’s strange that they are making the 20 circular considering that in July 2003 the took away the last of the circular routes, I wonder what caused their change in mind.

The 35 is being extended to the Airport again, yet they don’t seem to be putting it into the Gyle Centre. There is demand for this. One example being two weeks after Lothian Buses took it away the last time a couple came up to me, while waiting at the Gyle to ask which bus went directly to the Gyle.

The 36 is being extended to the Scottish Parliament, I wonder what frequency it is going to be! The last time they had a bus doing a similar route, it was every half hour. So infrequent that you could walk o your connection by the time the bus would turn up if had missed it.

The number 30 has finally been increased to every 10 minutes. I knew it would eventually get increased to this frequency, ever since they took the other services away from Fort Kinnaird.

The 29 is going to have more journeys to Gorebridge in the evening. Will they be going into Tesco Hardengreen?

Evening and Sunday journeys to ASDA the Jewel using the 49 are all very well, but it takes longer than walking there directly from South Edinburgh.

So it seems as though they are not going to extend the 18 from the Royal Infirmary to Fort Kinnaird and ASDA the Jewel. It worries me when they don’t say what the changes are explicitly and just say “revised timetable” or “minor timetable changes” as in the past this has meant that there was a decrease in frequency.

iMac G5 has no internal modem

smsm1986 — Thu, 13 Oct 2005 09:25:00 +0000

I’ve just noticed on the Apple store that Apple now have a USB modem that is required for connecting to the internet. This is probably due to the fact that the majority of people connecting tot he net these days do so via broadband rather than dial-up.

Is Apple starting the beginning of the end for dial-up internet connections by phasing out modems in the iMac? This seems to be the same thing as the loss of the floppy disk drive from the iMacs when they came out in 1998.

South Local Development Committee Don’t mention petition in minutes

smsm1986 — Fri, 27 May 2005 11:47:00 +0000

See http://cpol.edinburgh.gov.uk/getdoc_ext.asp?DocId=65425
for the minutes of the meeting that the petition to get the 18 increased in frequency, increased hours and extended to Fort Kinnaird was handed in.

It does not mention anywhere that a petition had been handed in!

Mac OS X Tiger: Spotlight: Man Importer

smsm1986 — Fri, 20 May 2005 14:25:00 +0000

There is actually a useful Spotlight plugin on Apple’s Spotlight page!

Unfortunately Spotlight won’t index hidden folders or files, which means that you need a copy of the man pages elsewhere, what a waste of space, but never mind.