Mat's Hideout

Category: Tech

  • Amazing Robocopy

    There was a time when my home server was a large computer with RAID drives and loud fans that stayed on 24/7. Gladly that time is no longer, and I’ve moved to a more power-friendly netbook-based thing which generates hardly any heat and can therefore be left in a small cupboard without airflow concerns. The […]

  • Confessions of a GTD junkie

    My background is music, my teens were spent in music lessons, music centre rehearsals, practising for gigs, listening to music, and my university studies were classical music. My speciality is improvisation, and if you put me in front of a huge audience and gave me a grand piano and a song request of pretty much […]

  • Sync with cloud – Today ToDo

    Please don’t read this post unless you are interested in the title. It will bore the socks off you! With that out the way, here’s what I think about the subject. First point. Resist ALL temptation to host own service. This will invariably lead to an enormous amount of dissatisfaction with the app itself as […]

  • Roasting my own coffee beans

    I used to be able to buy that Lavazza ground stuff (or Illy, or whatever), put it into a stovetop, and drink it with warm milk. How things have changed. I now freshly grind my coffee (with a Baratza Vario coffee grinder) no more than 30 seconds in advance of the espresso extraction. It’s the […]

  • The closure of Becta

    The majority of people who are pleased at the closure of Becta are most likely so because they disagreed in some way or another with their leanings on various issues, for example their take on open source software in schools. These people can safely be ignored, along with those who decry “waste of taxpayer’s money!” […]

  • Browser Ballot

    Browser ballot. Ballot? What, like an election? You mean, it’s more than a mere choice, it’s a personal statement of belief, a vote? It appears that way. Each browser has its manifesto. A page held on a politically neutral website that outlines what the browser stands for. What the hell? Today I was doing some […]

  • How to get things done

    The whole concept of consolidating one’s thoughts into a list is something that fascinates me. Why? Because I’m not a listy kind of person. I’m very much an improviser in life, I don’t like to be tied-down to systems or structures, I love to see how things go before I commit – but I still […]

  • Yes, I know. (And Google SEO)

    Things that made me amused today. Warning: this post is of a boring, slightly geek bent.

  • BT vs BBC: an exercise in confusing service providers' responsibilities with those of content providers

    So much for the democratisation of the internet

  • Predicate logic

    Courtesy of this site, we have a nice succint definition of a predicate: A predicate is a verb phrase template that describes a property of objects, or a relationship among objects represented by the variables. The statement Mat is right can be thus represented by the arbitrary object Mat as it applies to the predicate “is_right” represented […]