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Welcome to Camden Kiwi May 27, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Miscellany , 3 comments

Welcome to everyone who’s come over from Camden Lady at WordPress.com.  This blog contains all the old posts, but I haven’t been able to move comments, and am working on the blogroll.

I hope you’ll enjoy it, make lots of comments to make up for the ones I’ve had to leave behind, and spend time reading here.

If you’ve got a link to Camden Lady, I’d be very grateful if you could update it, and also update your feed reader.  The feed is now at http://www.camdenkiwi.org/?feed=rss2

Trees for Cities May 23, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : London,Trees , 1 comment so far

In a fit of enthusiasm, about this time last year, I signed up for a 5km run in aid of Trees For Cities, a London based charity which plants trees in cities. Much to my amazement, I managed to finish and didn't even come last. They gave me a nice goody bag, in a jute shopper, including a t-shirt, bottled water (not sure about that) and some tree seeds. I planted them immediately, they hatched a week or two later, quickly grew to about 3 cm high and then did absolutely nothing until the last couple of weeks, when they've suddenly put on another centimetre or so.

I think they'll grow to about 30-40m, given the chance, so I may have to bonsai them. I've no idea how quickly they'll grow here, but the ones on a plantation in NZ that I have as part of a long-term pension scheme are supposed to be ready for harvest at 25 years. They can stay in the yoghurt pot for a little bit longer.

Somers Town Project May 21, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Camden , add a comment

I just found this – the Somerstown Project – including photos and stories from Somers Town in the 20s. I must go and have a look at the model.

Most of Somers Town was built in the 20s and 30s, and then some rebuilt in the 50s, though there are a few older buildings. There's some uncertainty about when my flats were built – the surveyor said 1910, but people here believe it was later. There is a photo of Johnson St (the old name for my street) but its showing a different block.

Get rid of your junk and save the planet

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Camden,Green in the City , add a comment

You've got some stuff to get rid of, it's not really good enough to sell, but you're a greenie so you're reluctant to just put it out with the rubbish.  One solution is to put it in the basement and hope the fairies will take it away.  This does not work, and has led to broken furniture which 'could be repaired', useful containers, ten years worth of the Philosophical Review and all the other unwanted paraphenalia of an affluent but environmentally friendly lifestyle clogging up space in guilt-ridden sheds and basements all over England.

A better solution is to put it up on Freecycle, if you've got the time and inclination, but if you're busy, lazy, or not too keen on total strangers turning up on your doorstep, there's a reasonably priced alternative in central / North London.

I've seen these trucks around a fair bit lately with one parked over the road the other day, and they look like a good idea.  Ecojunk pick up your junk, take it away and try to recycle it as much as possible.  They have a goal of a 50% recycling rate in their first year, and say they'll put their actual figures on their website, though there's nothing there yet.

They use LPG trucks as well, so lower emissions.   They're a new, green business and need your support.  Go on, you are never going to use all those yoghurt pots, you know.

Walking on the Heath May 20, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Camden,Trees , add a comment

London is a big, sprawling, crowded metropolis with a deceptive ability to provide green and almost wild spaces. A short ride on the number 168 bus takes me up to the South End, close to the Royal Free hospital in Hampstead. The Heath is so very different from Regents Park and the lovely but very orderly squares of Camden and Bloomsbury, with woodland areas that are left to grow almost as they will, dead trees providing habitats for small beasties and fungi, flowers growing wild. Its a place to be quiet, to walk and get lost, to pretend you're out of the city for a while.

After an hour, or a day, wandering across from South End, I arrive at Parliament Hill Fields where the 121 bus is waiting to take me back home again, after a stop for coffee at the Cafe Mozart.

Happy geeking

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a comment

I've spent the afternoon having a happy geeky time, setting up wordpress on my new hosting service.  It works well, and at some stage in the near future, this site will be moving. 

I'm doing this because I need a new host for my business website and blog, and may as well have them all together.  Although its a long time since I've worked in technical roles, I used to be a Unix / Oracle systems engineer, and there's still a bit of geek in me, so it was rather fun getting it set up, and having a good look at MySQL and some of the PHP scripts I'm planning to use.

One of the (very few) disadvantages of wordpress.com is that you can't put javascript into your blog.  That would let me do a few nifty wee things, such as participate properly in webrings, and show all the green bloggers links.  I'd also be able to get better stats and see who's visiting.

Tony Blair losing it rapidly May 17, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Politics , add a comment

First, he signs a pro-vivisection petition.  A PM signing a petition of any sort seems a bit bizarre, but this one seems guaranteed to alienate many of his middle-class constituents.  Given a choice between using a life saving medicine that’s been tested on animals, and not, I doubt I’d take the noble route either, and the animal extremists  probably do their cause more harm than good.   Vivisection may be a necessary evil, but it is surely an evil.  It seems very odd to sign up to it.  As a small aside, I just had a look at the website, and can’t find a copy of the petition itself, without pressing the ’sign me up’ button.  You can apparently sign up anonymously.  Definitely democracy in action.

Next, he’s all for overriding the judiciary on the Human Rights Act.  It’s called the rule of law, Tony and while you may get to participate in making them, you are not above them.  A few Afghanis who hijacked a plane out of desperation and brought it here cause me a lot less fear than the notion that, having gone through the courts to get a ruling on a human rights matter, Tony and his mates could just turn around and veto that ruling. 

Then, he comes out guns blazing for nuclear power pre-empting the energy review.  That will be a good legacy, and ensure that Tony’s remembered for aeons to come.

And now, because a department managed by one of his cronies has proved utterly incompetent in applying the law we already have, he’s going to change the law. 

These look like the last days of a tired, stressed and finished man.  He’ll be gone by 17 June, for sure.

Here endeth the rant.

How to use Flickr for photos on your WordPress.com blog May 16, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , 1 comment so far

A friend asked for instructions on how to do this, so here they are. They’re detailed so that even the most untechnical blogger can do it. She’s using IE, rather than Firefox, and has only just started using a digital camera. She’s been having a lot of problem with WordPress’ upload facility and because she’s on the other side of the planet, on a dialup modem, I can’t figure out why. It could be that dialup modem?

I use Flickr for all my photos now, because its so easy and you don’t have to worry about resizing or anything. Now that Flickr’s been bought out by Yahoo, it’s not likely to disappear any time soon either.

To do this, you need to:

  1. Get a Flickr account
  2. Upload your photos
  3. Put them into your blog

1. Get a Flickr account.
Go to www.flickr.com
Select ‘Sign up!’ from the menu at the top right.

That will take you to a Yahoo signon screen. If you don’t have a Yahoo id, select Sign up again.



Go through, fill out the form, and you will be able to use Flickr.

2. Upload your photos into Flickr.
Go back to www.flickr.com, and sign in with your new Yahoo id
Select ‘Upload Photos’ on the right hand side

Use the Browse buttons to select the photos you want to upload
If you want to give the group of photos a tag, enter one
Make sure the privacy settings are set to ‘Public’
Press Upload

Flickr will take a few minutes to upload your files. If you’re on broadband, a few seconds, if you’re on an old modem, quite a few minutes. There are tools for multiple file upload, which you can try later.

3. Now you’re ready to put the photos into your blog. There are a few ways to do this. One is to register your blog in Flickr, by selecting ‘You’ from the flickr menu, then Your account, then Your blogs. For the moment, we’ll do this the straight WordPress way. Also, its probably easier to do this using Firefox browser and Performancing, but because my friend is using IE, these instructions are for that.

Open two IE windows, and go to your flickr.com account in one, and your wordpress.com account in the other.

In the WordPress account, start a new post.

In Flickr, find the picture you want to display in your blog
In Flickr, right mouse click over the picture you want to display, and select properties. Then select the url for the picture (this will end in .jpg), and copy that (using ctrl-c, or right mouseclick again)

In WordPress, start typing your post. When you want to put a picture in, select the little ‘picture’ icon in the editing tool bar. This is the toolbar just below the post title. Don’t even think about the area you normally use to upload pictures.

In the window that appears (see picture above) paste the url for the picture that you copied before into the ‘Image URL’ filed, and select the Insert button. Your picture should now appear.

This will be a bit slow if you’re on dialup, and you might find it easier to type out all your words, and then put your photos in at the end (or go and get broadband!)

Good luck. If you run into serious trouble, email your photos to me and I’ll upload them (this is not a general offer – just for the person who asked for the instructions!!).

Anyone using this, please comment if you find any flaws in the instructions.

Suz blog May 14, 2006

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Camden,Green in the City , add a comment

Another interesting local blog, from Suz Lamido over in Islington.  She’s a Lib Dem, interested in green issues, and well worth a read.

Back Up My Blog

Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Blogging , add a comment

Techcrunch mentions a useful new service, which allows automatic backups of blogs.  The problem is that you’ve got to run a php script on your server, and I don’t think the nice people at WordPress are quite ready for that.

It is a worry, given that WordPress.com is a free, beta service and I’ve now got over 100 scintillating masterpieces sitting on their servers with no easy way of backing them up myself.  Over the last few weeks, I’ve taken to using Performancing, the Firefox plugin that lets you compose your post locally and then publish it to the blog of your choice, and I’m holding all my posts on that now. 

It would be nice to have a ‘download my blog’ or some sort of export feature, even if it was a manual one, that would allow me to easily copy down my blog and save it somewhere.  Alternatively, when and if WordPress.com starts offering new, chargeable services, this would be a good one.