The second day of setbuilding, and a concrete result - we built a workbench.

For the next show Gilbert and Sullivan Society are performing, I've been chosen as Technical Director (TD).

We don't know which show it is, or where it is being performed, but we do know we need a new set, the old one having mostly fallen apart or been dismantled.

I got an ABC Mini Copter for Christmas (thanks James!) which is damn cool. I've been trying to get the hang of flying it, but I was having real difficulty with the take-off. Apart from my ineptitude, the gears were slipping as the rotor started, making a nasty grating noise, so I decided to fix it.

This week I uploaded some videos from my mobile phone to Facebook, but my friends complained that the audio got out of sync with the video.

After a few experiments I tracked this down to Facebook's re-encoding process, since the source videos are fine.

The new RapiTime GUI uses the Paperclips library to generate printed reports. Integrating charts into the reports can be accomplished using JFreeChart, but there are some extra tweaks needed to make it work.

I noticed today that the latest version of Ext has been released, ExtJS 2.1. Also, the first beta of an official GWT mapping for Ext is now available, Gxt 1.0 Beta 1. Both are now available from the public repository.

We've cooked sausage, apple and mustard stew a few times now. It's a pretty good recipe.

I bought a shiny new MacBook Pro this week, and I've installed Windows 2003 on it. Here's a guide to how I did it.

This recipe was quite successful, we’ll probably try it again.

When given a recipe to follow, and you don’t have the exact ingredients, it is unwise to let Simon substitute alternatives as he sees fit. Under his careful supervision, ‘Spiced Country Chicken’ became ‘Chicken Chilli’ - here’s how.