Random Thoughts

Attenborough Nature Reserve

Drew — Mon, 19 Jul 2010 17:35:21 +0000

New Flickr album of a walk around the Attenborough Nature Reserve in Nottingham. A really pleasant place and only a handful of miles from Nottingham city centre.

Album [...]

Photos from a passing through Cambridgeshire

Drew — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 21:18:09 +0000

Two new sets of photos taken from a couple of National Trust places in Cambridgeshire as I travelled back from Essex.

Gallery from Anglesey Abbey, Gardens and Lode Mill can be seen here.

Gallery from Houghton Mill [...]

Using OpenID from Your Own Domain

Drew — Sun, 20 Jun 2010 20:12:21 +0000

I’ve recently added OpenID support to my WordPress installations via a plugin. This allows anyone with an OpenID to log in and set up a profile using an existing provider such as Google,Yahoo etc rather than having to remember yet another username/password combination.

However the one problem I have had using OpenID is that I settled on [...]

Carsington Water Photos

Drew — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 19:02:11 +0000

Went for a walk around Carsington Water today. Carsington is a reservoir in Derbyshire (near Ashbourne) run by Severn Trent. The site has some really nice walks, all well signposted and it’s easy to combine them with other freely available instructions on the internet to take in some of the local villages as well [...]

What Motivates Us At Work?

Drew — Wed, 16 Jun 2010 16:32:32 +0000

I’ve read research along these lines before but this is a really nice way of illustrating the findings relating to what motivates us to work. The results surprise many but should be mandatory reading for anyone who [...]

Rufford Abbey and The Workhouse Photos

Drew — Thu, 27 May 2010 21:08:38 +0000

Goose from Rufford Abbey

Up on Flickr now are two sets of photos taken from a trip around Nottinghamshire.

The first batch are from the English Heritage site Rufford Abbey (and the park around it) including a walk around the lake.

The second is from The Workhouse which is a National Trust property in Southwell and was a [...]

Pictures from Calke Abbey

Drew — Wed, 19 May 2010 21:04:21 +0000

Another Piggy Originally uploaded by drewkeavey

Calke Abbey in Derbyshire is a National Trust property that is unique in that far from being a place that has been renovated it has been restored back to the eccentric ramshackle creation of the former owners. A couple of elements stand out, pigs and stuffed birds. Lots of stuffed [...]

Map A SkyDrive Folder In Windows via Office 2010

Drew — Tue, 18 May 2010 20:28:15 +0000

DISCLAIMER: What I’m about to describe is tortuous and potentially useless but I use it and I even give an easier alternative so there .

Google tend to get most of the buzz (no pun intended) around the “Cloud” and Microsoft tend to be seen as a company who are being dragged kicking and screaming in [...]

Hubble 20th Aniversary Google Earth Tour

Drew — Mon, 17 May 2010 14:29:51 +0000

To celebrate the 20th anniversary of the Hubble telescope Google has put together a file with a short 5 minute Google Earth tour of some of the iconic images gathered over the years. It relies on a version of Google Earth with the Sky mode but any recent version should have that. The tour has [...]

Star Wars Retold in Lego

Drew — Sun, 09 May 2010 09:12:48 +0000

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Great TV Theme Medley

Drew — Thu, 01 Apr 2010 23:10:58 +0000

OK so not even I’ve seen all of these shows but this is a great piece [...]

Busking. It’s all about being different.

Drew — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 00:04:46 +0000

So. You want to try your hand at busking? You need a unique selling point. OK, to go beyond that you need two, dress as a chicken and play a [...]

Windows 7 “God Mode”

Drew — Mon, 04 Jan 2010 21:57:03 +0000

I’m a big fan of Windows 7, it has finally moved me from XP on my work machines. However I still haven’t quite got the locations for the settings stuck in the old memory and find myself hunting for them every now and then. I was going to blog about a piece of software called Windows [...]

Installing Windows 7 on a Netbook Using USB

Drew — Fri, 11 Dec 2009 20:12:57 +0000

I’ve recently acquired a Netbook (Asus EeePC 1005HA to be precise) and in common with many such devices it came preloaded with XP. Now up until 6 months ago I’d probably have left it at that but having used Windows 7 for those last months I really didn’t want to go back. So I decided to [...]

Cool Large Hadron Collider Photos

Drew — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 11:42:59 +0000

The Boston Globe has a piece on the restart of the Large Hadron Collider that has some fantastic photos including some of the damage done at the original startup. The scale of this thing never ceases to amaze.

The article and the rest of the photos can be [...]

OS X Screen Grab Shortcut Reminder

Drew — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 14:13:59 +0000

When putting together the earlier post I needed to grab some shots of the process and as always I’d forgotton the OS X screen grab shortcut keys so I thought I’d stick them down here.

Command-Shift-3 will capture the whole screen and save it Command-Shift-4 perhaps more usefully will present crosshairs to allow the capture of a specific [...]

Setting Up Snow Leopard VPN from PCF File

Drew — Sun, 15 Nov 2009 11:54:48 +0000

Having recently upgraded to Snow Leopard one of the things that stopped working was my Cisco VPN client for access to my work network. From reading around it seems a reinstall should solve this but rather than go down that route I decided to look to the built in VPN features instead.

The starting point for this [...]

Colours Made Easy

Drew — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 22:09:23 +0000

For the non-arty one of the hardest things to do when putting together websites is to get just the right colours. For the criminally untalented, like me, there are loads of free css templates but when using these there is always the desire to choose different colours that make the site stand out. Even if we [...]

Kids + Puddle + Car = Cruel but Funny

Drew — Fri, 30 Oct 2009 22:00:00 +0000

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My cat is trying to kill me apparently.

Drew — Mon, 28 Sep 2009 21:19:15 +0000

I’ve just taken a quick online test and made a disturbing discovery

I’m not going to sleep tonight! Luckily there are more tests for me to take at [...]