Welcome! This blog is a collection of all sorts of things we want to record either for ourselves of things we think might be of use for others. Articles are from Birgit and Matt Fullerton; maybe at some point our kids will write some articles too.

All articles

  2. DIY Solar Power

    After a lot of research, thinking, confusion, finding out how much weight our garage roof can take, looking at a local subsidy scheme, finding out said scheme had run out of funding for the year, we finally took the plunge and ordered an (almost) all-in-one plugin-in-solar kit for flat-roof mounting …

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  5. Building 2030-watch.de: measuring progress towards the sustainable development goals (SDGs)

    For the last 15 months the Open Knowledge Foundation Germany has been working on a prototype to monitor progress towards the sustainable development goals (SDGs) from an independent, civil society-led perspective. There’s a detailed blog post on why such independent monitoring is necessary at our

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  8. Export Drupal nodes to CSV

    Want to extract all your content from Drupal? I bet you do… seems like the world has gotten a distaste for all things Drupal and is jumping on the WordPress or even Jekyll bandwagon. Anyway, this query will probably get you what you need: SELECT DISTINCT no.nid, n.title, u.name, n.timestamp, n.body, group_concat(DISTINCT td.name) as terms

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  11. Get pnet to do UDP blocking

    Pnet is a MEX-file-based toolbox for Octave/MATLAB. The help instructions would lead you to believe that UDP reads block by default, but this didn’t work for me: I had to specify a timeout. You can specify Inf, but given that you can’t ctrl-c out of a program whilst the MEX part is running, I’d recommend

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  13. R rJava (.jinit()) stops working - make it work again

    Windows 8, 64 bit, 64 bit Java 7, 64 bit R… Apparently (!) it worked before. And then R said it was “Unable to create a class loader” (no arguments) or that it couldn’t start the JVM (with arguments) when using .jinit. Unfortunately, I can’t say exactly what was wrong, or why it apparently stopped

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  14. Findings of the investigation of garment factories of Bangladesh

    During the weekend of October 18th-October 20th, a group of volunteers, data-wranglers, geo-coders, and activists teamed up with the International Labor Rights Forum and P2PU for a Data Expedition to investigate the Garment Factories. We set out to connect the dots between Bangladeshi garment producers and the clothes that you purchase from the shelves of the world’s largest retailers.

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  17. Generate a movie from SUMO

    SUMO, the open-source traffic simulation tool, does not have a simple option to output a movie. Using TraCI, the UDP-based control interface for SUMO, you can quickly generate a set of images from your simulation: import traci import sys import subprocess #change if necessary PORT = 8816 sumoProcess = subprocess.Popen("C:\path\to\sumo-gui \"C:\path\to\simfile.sumocfg\"", shell=True, stdout=sys.stdout) print "SUMO

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  18. Generating HTML 5 videos for Chrome (with Virtualdub Mod)

    I finally took the time to educate myself on the virtues of HTML 5 video. I’ve been doing presentations in HTML for a while now, but had been using browser plugins, which were awkward. Chrome’s preferred format is “VP8″ inside a container called “webm”. I often am preparing videos for presentations with Virtualdub Mod, as

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  22. Green Wave FAIL

    In Munich we have a few "green waves" - sets of traffic lights along arterial streets that are coordinated for a certain speed so that vehicles can move through the city without stopping. Although they're a nice idea, they seem to fool many a driver into thinking they're on the Autobahn …

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  32. Internet Sharing in OS X 10.8.2 seems to work after well

    After updating to OSX 10.8.2 (Server), internet sharing stopped working. After a lot of fighting, that included setting up manually (turned out not to be viable because I couldn’t figure out how to automatically launch an ad-hoc network at startup), I undid everything I tried except for this one tip: http://support.apple.com/kb/TS4418 Perhaps if I’d done

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  33. AudioRecord plugin on Cordova/Phonegap 1.9.0

    Phonegap’s Media.startAudioRecord on ios records 16 bit stereo uncompressed WAV. Not exactly ideal for uploading afterwards. The AudioRecord plugin for ios allows full access to the available Core Audio encoders. The installation instructions are less than required, so after piecing together some items from across the web, here are some edited instructions (if I knew

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  34. Sewing baby blocks

    After purchasing an Aldi sewing machine and nice organic cotton fabric, I finally tried my sewing skills (not sure where they would have come from). Here is the result. Well, not quite perfect, but I'm quite happy considering it's my first attempt.

    baby cube

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  37. Potato-Pumpkin Curry

    Two weeks ago we started ordering food from a group of local farmers, who deliver organically grown food. This week we got a huge pumpkin so I started searching the internet for ideas of what to do with it. Here is the first meal that came out of it: a …

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  39. Upgrading Drupal 6 to 7

    So, I’m finally going to take the plunge; first with a test, local site, and then with mattbirgit.de. Only found one point to watch out for, in addition to the clear advice at: http://drupal.org/node/570162: It really is important to update to the current Drupal 6 before upgrading; that isn’t just ‘in case’ some assumptions are

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  41. iPAQ kicking the iPhone's ass

    I thought I’d go for a provocative title, but let’s say from the outset that the iPhone is clearly better in many, many ways than the device I’m about to ‘ramble’ about… My girlfriend, Birgit, has an iPhone. What’s more, she has a contract where you can pay €30 once, and you get a second

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  42. Poison!

    And so it is, the neverwhere of the day after Boxing Day. That day when you know you really should start doing some real work, but you can’t, either because you’re too full of Christmas cheer, or recovering from being poisoned by dodgy German-Chinese food. So I figured I’d do some more PHP/web stuff, and

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