With winter on the way, one thing I really had to sort out was heating for the garage, especially on the summer house side.  The insulation in the walls and ceiling is working well, but with outdoor temperatures dropping to single digits I really needed something to raise the temperature in the winter evenings.

I had looked at various wee fan heaters and oil heaters but nothing seemed quite right for the project.  Then I happened to find a nice glass panel heater in the B&Q sale.   It seemed to tick all of the boxes: not too thirsty (max 1kW); compact; wall mounted; silent… and best of all it’s digital!

It’s ideal for the summer house, just turn it on and it quickly heats the room to the chosen temperature — 12c to 19c takes about ten minutes — then it just maintains that temperature for as long as you’re out there.  The loft insulation seems to be doing it’s job, as the heating element only comes on very occasionally once the room is up to temperature.

And now for the missing link… high-speed internet access!

Even though the garage is only a few meters from the house and approx 15m from the wi-fi antenna in the loft, the metal foil insulation used throughout the garage prevents a decent wi-fi signal from getting through.   I’d occasionally manage to get a connection from my laptop, but it was flaky.   And a connection from my iPhone… forget it!

I didn’t want to run a hard-wired Ethernet connection from the house, so I decided to set up a wi-fi repeater instead, taking the signal from outside the metallic cage and repeating it inside.   I’m already running the dd-wrt custom firmware on my main router and had read good things about its Repeater Bridge mode for this kind of task.   So, I decided to look for the cheapest dd-wrt compatible router I could find to act as the repeater.

I found an ex-display Buffalo AirStation WHR-G125 on ebuyer for £15 which was perfect for the task.  Once it arrived I used tftp to flash it with the latest dd-wrt Mini Generic firmware from the dd-wrt site, then followed this tutorial to set it up in Repeater Bridge mode.

All that was left was to give it a permanent mounting place in the garage.  The WHR-G125 doesn’t have any mounting holes as standard and I was reluctant to spend extra on the official wall mount, so I ended up strapping it onto the roof joists with a couple of zip ties.  The result: the garage now has it’s own SSID which broadcasts a nice strong signal to any devices out there and gives me reliable wi-fi in the garage and elsewhere in the garden.  £15 well spent I think.

Running your webserver from home gives lots of opportunities to connect the real world to the internet.  I’ve previously connected a webcam with motion detection so I can see people entering and leaving the driveway and, more recently, connected a wireless weather station to give regular Elderslie weather updates.

I decided my next project would be to put my front doorbell online.  As well as being a relatively simple, fun project, it also makes some sense: coupled with the webcam it can be used to give me a decent idea of who’s there when the doorbell goes and I’m out.   It also means I can hear the doorbell when I’m at the bottom of the garden, thanks to SMS or IM alerts on my iPhone.

Here’s the project in it’s rough state, before it gets packaged up into a project case.

If you’re interested in setting up a similar project, read on…

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I’ve always been a fan of developing desktop and kiosk applications in Flash.  Many people see it as a web-only technology, but over the years it has matured into a very capable programming language.  And if you add on a third party extension such as Zinc or mProjector, Flash has all the file/registry/device capabilities of any other language.

My latest kiosk app is a re-working of GSC’s News Editor.   This time the client was the Scottish Crop Research Institute and the subject was the GM debate.   The original plan had been to create a kiosk-only application, but in the end we decided to export a web version too.  Because everything was based on web technologies (Flash, JPEG, PNG, etc) the only thing that had to change was the compression level of the video files.  The web export added just a few hours to the overall project, but resulted in a far wider reach for the application.  

You can try it out here: http://www.scri.ac.uk/knowledge/games/youchoosethenews

s1jobs has been named as a finalist in the 2009 Onrec Awards in the category of Best Technical Innovation. The nomination — which is the first ever technical award nomination for s1 – recognises the huge technical advances made with the new site. 

From a UI point of view, we ripped the site up and started again in 2008.  Making use of the latest web techniques such as image sprites, ajax, streaming video recording and drag & drop personalisation, we developed a site which had far more functionality than the old site, while at the same time being a lot faster and more efficient (there are more details on the original launch post here).

The full list of Onrec finalists is available here: http://www.onrec.com/conferences/250309A/finalists.html

We went a wee hill walk/climb today up Dumgoyne, just behind the Glengoyne distillery in the Campsies.   It was a freezing cold day, but the hill was still popular.  It was also a good opportunity to try the Trailguru app on my iPhone. You can see the results here.

There’s also some geo-tagged photos from the trip on the Trailguru website.

I finally gave in last week and bought an iPhone.   I’d been trying to resist for ages, and bought the LG U990 (supposed iPhone-beater) just at the start of the year.  But the one thing the LG taught me was that tech specs don’t count for anything - it’s the quality of the UI that’s most important, and that’s what Apple have got right.

My first paid-for App Store purchase was Dynolicious, one of the many car speed/performance apps already on the market.  What really appealed about Dynolicious over the competition was that it didn’t use the GPS at all.  Instead, it relies on the built-in accelerometers and some clever physics to work out the acceleration (and therefore speed) of your car.

I was already fimilar with performance meters that work this way, having played with my friends G-Tech Pro a few times over the years.  I’d actually considered buying a G-Tech myself, but couldn’t really justify the £250 or so it cost for the odd occasion I’d use it.  But a £7.95 app for a device I already own?  …much more interesting!

I’ve read a lot about the impressive accuracy of Dynolicious online and have to say it seems pretty damn accurate.  

First I tried the 1/4 mile timing.  You just press the ’start run’ button and it waits for you to move off.  As soon as it detects a movement of over 0.1G (configurable) it starts the timer.   Again, the results seem really accurate.  Compared to my TomTom GPS the terminal velocity of 83mph was bang on and the 0-60 time of 9.69s felt spot on too (the quoted figure for the IS200 is 9.5s and I expected to be slightly slower given the cold damp road surface at the time of the test).

Next I gave the skidpan feature a go and managed to rack up a Lateral G figure of 0.90 and a Braking G of 0.86 on the local roundabouts.  I have less hard facts to judge these on, but again they felt about right, my braking being less effective than the cornering due to the ABS kicking in.

All in all I’m dead happy with it.  The only thing I’d like to see in a future revision of the software is a way to store and review the dyno graphs it captures during a run.  The graphs — showing BHP, torque and speed — have an impressive level of detail that I’d like to take a look at later.  For example, you can clearly see the length of time you lose on each gear change.