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Music mashing with YouTube, YQL and Open Data Tables

BBC’s top 20 chart + YouTube’s music videos + YQL = AddBass top 20 excellence!

The plan

Grab the top 20 chart singles from the BBC web site, look up each song on YouTube and get the most popular matching videos. Show them in the chromeless player and set it so that they play automatically and users can skip ones they don’t like.

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Category Clouds WordPress widget

Tag clouds are an effective way of conveying information about the popularity of key words where the size of the word corresponds to the importance of the word. It is also visually more interesting than a standard list and attracts attention.

On Super Fun Days Out we needed something similar to WordPress’s built in tag cloud using categories instead of tags. Fortunately WordPress has an active plugin community and developer Lee Kelleher had already written a Category Cloud widget. A couple of changes were needed to update it for multiple sidebars and to include or exclude specific categories.

Now hosted at WordPress.org at http://wordpress.org/extend/plugins/category-clouds-widget/stats/.

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BBC Micro Chuckie Egg Level 4 Guide

This is my guide to each Chuckie Egg level:

  1. Level 1
  2. Level 2
  3. Level 3
  4. Level 4

Level 4

Level 4 strategy

With a lift and a gap in the bottom platform, this level combines the features introduced in level 2 and level 3 and adds some tricky jumps to the mix. In particular, the top left jump nearest the caged bird can cause you to fall through if you jump from the nearest platform.

Avoiding hens is still fairly easy where the central ladder can be used to escape.

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BBC Micro Chuckie Egg Level 3 Guide

This is my guide to each Chuckie Egg level:

  1. Level 1
  2. Level 2
  3. Level 3

Level 3

Level 3 strategy

This level introduces the lift. This is three moving platforms, moving vertically up the screen. The platforms are not evenly spaced, with two appearing closer together. Missing the lift and falling down the gap between the lift and the platform will result in a life lost.

The level design makes it easy to avoid the hens, but good timing is needed to complete it quickly.

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BBC Micro Chuckie Egg Level 2 Guide

This is my guide to each Chuckie Egg level:

  1. Level 1
  2. Level 2

Level 2

Level 2 strategy

The second level has a large number of ladders connecting the platforms. Although there is one more hen compared to level one, there are many jump-able gaps to aid escape and turn back hens.

The single gap on the bottom platform has a gap and falling through results in an instant life lost.

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BBC Micro Chuckie Egg Level 1 Guide

I was a massive fan of Chuckie Egg on the BBC Micro when I was about 10 years old. There have been a couple of ports, but it wasn’t until 2009 that Mark Lomas released the ultimate version built on an BBC emulator for the PC.

This is my guide to each Chuckie Egg level:

  1. Level 1

Level 1

Level 1 strategy

The first level is dominated by a central ladder running through all five platforms. Two hens start in the top left of the level, moving slowly towards the bottom. They can sometimes get in the way on the central ladder, but several nearby platforms can be used to wait them out.

The bottom two platforms have plenty of ladders to avoid getting trapped and to practice running and jumping.

Strategy path for completing level 1 of Chuckie Egg

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Logging laptop battery life

1005 ha netbook in shiny whiteI bought an Asus EeePC 1005HA Seashell net book for Christmas with Windows 7 and have been very impressed with battery life and lightness. Still… I wasn’t sure if Sleep mode was working as expected, so I logged the battery life for a couple of days under normal use.

I didn’t use any rigorous scientific testing — ‘normal use’ for me was watching a bit of YouTube or iPlayer, checking my email, using Facebook and that kind of thing. If power was still being consumed in Sleep mode, then I would expect big falls in power levels as the net book logged the level after coming out of Sleep.

Results

Download BatteryStatusData for CSV data file of this graph.
line graph of battery life of my network in percentage remaining and calculated number of hours left
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Extract a web site’s colour palette

Hextractor is an awesome tool. From their website:

Hextractor will extract the colors from your stylesheet — whether they're hex codes, RGB, or named colors — and generate a color palette from them showing you exactly what you've got, displayed in the formats you prefer.

However, extracting the colours does rely on a server-side php script and I thought it would make an ideal javascript bookmarklet. An example of the result is shown on the right.

This page also helps me to documents some common javascript examples and links for reference.

How to install the colour palette bookmarklet

Try it now! Click this link to view the colours on this site.

To use on other web sites, click and drag this show page colours link to add it to your favorites or bookmarks bar. Visit the web site you would like to see the colour palette of and click on the bookmark or favorite. It will then show the 'Colours used on this page' table.

  1. What is a bookmarklet?
  2. Outline of the colour palette bookmarklet
  3. Code deconstruction
  4. Using JSLint for best practice javascript
  5. Compressing the bookmarklet

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Making a magic dragon

TROGDOR the BURNINATOR Magic Dragon on YouTube

You will need

  1. Template print out
  2. Scissors
  3. A tiny bit of sticky tape
  4. Socks to be knocked off

Templates

Cat Illusion

Cat Illusion template

download | source

Dragon Illusion

green dragon illusion template

download | source

Super Robot Dog

SuperRobot illusion template

download | source

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My development toolbox

There’s a core list of software tools that I find indispensable for development in the office and at home. This list helps me keep track of the tools I need when re-building a computer.

1. Visual Studio

As a .net developer, VS 2008 is a fantastic Integrated Developer Environment. From code snippets to Intellisense, debugging to stack traces, Visual Studio helps me develop swiftly while concentrating on the code.

2. Firefox + Firebug extension + Web Developer extension

I recently had a problem running Firefox on my new PC and boy, did I miss Firebug and the Web Developer extension. Although some of the features overlap, the simplicity of Web Developer means that it is very quick and easy to disable CSS, view all images or check page size.

Firebug is indispensable to hunt down CSS inheritance irritations, preview quick style modifications or unravel client-side javascript complexities.

Special mention to ColorZilla, User Agent Switcher and FireShot.

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