I have been playing with Yahoo Pipes recently as a replacement service to Afeeda that has sadly closed down. It is a very useful service, although one for developers and not the man in the street.

The first mashup that I did was one to combine the feeds from my main and vox bloggs to automatically import in to Facebook. The import is actually done using the feature built in to the Facebook “Notes” application from the pipe’s RSS feed. The pipe in question retrieves the feeds, filter out older posts, and then sort chronologically and crop. The feed is cropped because Facebook thought I was spamming the system when originally I imported many many posts. If you need to do the same then you are welcome to copy my pipe and alter it for your blogs.

As a side effect of doing this I have decided to stop using Twitter Feed as I don’t want every blog post to be listed as a note and a status update.

A while ago I took out a lifetime “venture capital” hosting package with SteelPixel. This was when they were looking for funds to grow there business and upgrade their servers. Although I would not normally trust a lifetime agreement this did make financial sense to me as the cost of hosting will be less than the return expected from any other investor. After careful consideration I decided it was worth the risk to me.

Sadly the company has been having some problems with maintaining stability, and a recent hardware failure has caused them to leave the hosting business. The good news is that because of there efforts another company has agreed to honer there agreements, and although I no longer have lifetime hosting I do have a package for three years.

So from now this site and most of my other projects will be hosted by Rails Playground. There will be a few issues to work through in this move but if you spot a problem then just let me know.

Some good news. It took until the third round of tickets being issues, but I am now going to BarCampLondon3. I am still deciding what to do a session on, but it will be something different to what I have done at prior UK BarCamps. All suggestions welcome.

This morning I gave another talk on Geocaching. The talk was simaler to my talk at BarCampSheffield so please feel free to check that blog entry for those interesting links. If you are around London on Monday evening and interested is getting in to Geocaching then you may be interested in the It’s Pay Back Time Folks event.

Normally to link a radio station to a transmitter you would require a leased line or microwave link between the sites, but NE1fm could not afford this so we have used the Internet instead. It is my intention to blog our full experiences with this later on.

One problem we were having recently were short drop-outs every 90 minutes (approximately). This started after we had upgraded the streaming computer and installed a higher quality sound card.

The cause, and it took a while to figure this out, was that the clock speed on the new sound card was ever so slightly slow. This resulted in the remote sound card playing the audio faster than it was being recorded, and just running out of audio to play.

To confirm this theory I coded up a small application that uses the Windows multimedia API test the clock speed of the sound card. It compares this with the system clock to work out the error.

If you want to test your sound card then download, extract and run the Sound Speed application (165KB) and leave it running for a long time. Remember that we are talking very small errors here so you will need to leave the application running for a few hours at least, and keep your system clock accurately synchronised at the start and end of the test. I would be interested in the results of your sound card if you don’t mind sending them to me.

Finally, the solution we hope to adopt is to get two top quality sound cards with a very high quality clock on board when more funds are available. In the interim we are using a small bit of code to slow down the playback by 0.016%, and that appears to be working without any notable degradation in audio quality.

The good news is that I am going to BarCampBrighton (wahoo).

This is possibly the most popular UK BarCamp with tickets going on sale (actually they are free, but you know) a smidgen after 11am, and 21 minutes later they had all gone. I had completed my booking by 11:02am. Not everyone who wanted a place got one with expected attendees like Jeremy Keith missing out. I vote we hide them in the overnight bags and smuggle them in. :-)

I think the real reason for the popularity is the people we are expected to attend, because of it’s location, and because many are travelling down for d.construct. It is a shame that the d.construct sign up was not after the BarCamp sign up or I may have tried to go after all.

Finally I need to decide what my presentation will be about. I have had great success with the Geocaching talks, but I have done that more tan once now. Perhaps an open discussion on the concept of community in the digital age. Any suggestions welcome.

I am not a top user of Twitter as I don’t want the world to know where I am or what I am doing every single second of the day, and I really can’t be bothered to continually entering such information. What I do use it for is when something strange, daft, annoying, significant or interesting happens, as well as when I post something to one of my blogs, or upload a photograph.

To date I have been doing all of this manually as there is no way to use plugins with Blogger, Vox and flickr to do this automatically. I was considering creating an online application that monitored the RSS feeds for the blogs and photo sites and used the API to update Twitter, but I waited long enough and someone else did it for me by creating twitterfeed.

You simply login using OpenID and tell it the Twitter account and RSS feed details that you want to link. You can also alter the frequency that it checks the fee, the maximum number of items to notify and a prefix for the tweets if you like.

There are a few services that offer a live blogging service like Twitter and can do the same. Jaiku has this RSS monitoring functionality integrated and I am hoping that Pownce will in time integrate feeds in a smiler way. As for Facebook, the Facebook API, need I say more. Also Tumblr can monitor RSS feeds for you as well. Finally if you just want a combined feed of all your feeds without complication then I recommend the simple to use afeeda that Dave demonstrated for us at BarCampSheffiled.