Welcome to the personal website of Robert Meerman.

It's moved to Facebook. You may not be able to view it unless your a friend, but to be honest it's not of much interest if you're not.

• Site map

• File renamer script — Designed for renaming anime series by using AniDB.net as a source of info, and matching it up with existing episode numbers in the current files names. Eg [K-F]_One_Piece_137_[28EF4A99].avi –> One Piece 137 - It profits and is the ambition of moneylender Zenii!.avi. Now also handles TVtorrents.com websites and generic TV series, with the ability to be easily (modularly) extended to support other sites. Past v2.0, so it's mature and well tested.
• Superfluous Cycling Computer — My project for the Super Happy Dev Club¹⁾ where I intend to hack together a load of sensors on my bike; because I can. It should also allow me to play with visualization of some real-world data which is actually of interest to me. As a starting point I'll get ground and air-speed, and later I hope to add accelerometers, GPS and if I can think of a good excuse: RFID. All this ought to get tied into something with a screen, perhaps my old GBA:SP²⁾? Once the basics are in place I'll be playing with connectivity to my desktop and all sorts of silly visual representations of the data and reconstruction of my trips.
• Wall Timer project: I took apart a digital mains wall-timer and hooked it up to my PC's parallel port with nothing but a couple of wires, and coded a windows application to turn the thing off for a few seconds if my ADSL router stops responding; I even got it to run as a windows service. Areas of note: WinXP direct I/O access, Windows services

• Final Year Project — I created a USB ↔ Nintendo Game Boy Advance connection, and documented everything about.

• Links
• Windows Start Menu — How to change the default browser & mail client in the WinXP start menu, handy if you want to use “G-Mail to” or make a portable application you're default (as I did)
• Using Unison with DokuWiki — Problems I overcame to get this site to automatically synchronise with my home PC
• Webmastering — Tricks I've used in the past that might prove useful again.
• GIT-SVN Crib Sheet — Crib-sheet for using GIT to work with SubVersion (i.e. the project uses SVN and you want to use GIT)
• Radio — You can listen to my Last.FM radio station using a little embedded flash-player, I use it for when I'm away from my MP3 player or my harddrives crash

I got the new version of infoRSS, a really handy and unobtrusive RSS/Atom feed reader extension for Firefox, and noticed that I'm mentioned first in the contributors. Which is awesome.

• Fiddle with scripting the sending of a Skype chat-message from BASH. Would be very handy for work!
• Proved. Skype provides a module for Python, and it's about 3 lines of Python to send a message.
• Oratory Hell 2
  • Harry Coade's videos of leavers pranks!
• He's still not sent me the video tapes. sigh
• Explore OpenGL (using Computer Graphics book)
  • GUI Ideas (see tablet PC notes)
  • Work, D'oh!
  • Animate and script a bead-sort (in Flash?)
• Compiz Fusion / GLX:
  • Ability to peel back windows to peek under them like you do with paper on a table. With pretty curl and shadow of course.
  • Window destruction ought to be animated. Perhaps a cigarette burn?
• Python binary packagers: http://effbot.org/pyfaq/how-can-i-create-a-stand-alone-binary-from-a-python-script.htm
• VNC
  • Flash-based control app: http://osflash.org/fvnc
  • Screen recorder that produces Flash video: http://www.linux.com/articles/113764 or http://www.unixuser.org/~euske/vnc2swf/
• Photoshop on Ubuntu? http://luiscosio.com/how-to-adobe-photoshop-cs2-on-ubuntu-10-steps
• Slick Java-applet for browsing SVG files generated by GraphViz - may be very useful for browsing call-chains generated by ncc
• Folding plugin for Compiz, see this video
• Video4Linux drivers for Sumvision Panther GT 4.0 webcam
• Peter Schiff
• Python block-motions in VIM
• Flash charts
• wmii window manager (with virtual filesystem)
• http://suckless.org - Software that sucks less
• rsnapshot (for backups)
• LVM
• gkrellm (complete system monitor (temperatures / loads / traffic etc)
• Mobile Broadband (as backup internet for my house)
  • Vodafone Topup and Go datacard
  • Linux drivers for Vodafone
• Service management (daemons / init.d): http://cr.yp.to/daemontools.html
• Noise cancelling in-ear buds
• Linux Video Resources — http://www.exploits.org/v4l/
• VPN with SSH
• XBMC with VDPAU and VDR

If you have any requests or feedback, please let me know!

Robert.Meerman@gmail.com