ali napier

Stargazing – a middle-aged man’s new hobby

By Ali Napier | October 26, 2010 - 7:07 pm | homelife

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I’ve been fascinated by the stars, planets and all the other stuff in the night skies since I was a kid – I got my Cub Scout astronomer’s badge at age 9, pleaded with my parents to let me stay up late on Sunday nights to watch Patrick Moore’s “The Sky at Night” and am generally uncontactable by humans if there’s anything to do with NASA on the TV – I’m sure you get the idea. (more…)

Posting to WordPress from a mobile device

By Ali Napier | September 27, 2010 - 12:55 pm | Teaching materials

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WordPress on your phone

Many mobile platforms, such as iPhone and iPad, Android, Windows Mobile RIM Blackberry etc can be used, through add-on applications, to post content to WordPress. There are also desktop applications and widgets which allow you to do the same. There is a slight problem, though, in that these methods of writing to WordPress require the use of a different protocol from that which is used when adding content via a browser. This protocol (called XML-RPC) is really just an extension of the HTTP internet protocol, but it allows remote procedure calls (the RPC bit) to websites – that is to say, they can be edited remotely, from a phone or other mobile device, or a non-browser-based application.

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Circuit wiring guides for Arduino

By Ali Napier | September 27, 2010 - 10:16 am | Physical Computing, Teaching materials

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1 – Powering an LED (for use with “Blink”)

Here we have brought a RED cable from the 5v supply on Arduino, and a black one back to GND, and connected them to the two common rails at the top of the breadboard. (more…)

Nice clean URLs in WordPress

By Ali Napier | September 23, 2010 - 9:17 am | Teaching materials

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By default, WordPress URLs are a bit ugly and don’t make any real sense.
Here are a few tips on how to cure this.

WordPress URLs

If you select any post on your blog, you’ll find that post’s specific URL looks something like this. It’s not exactly memorable, and it doesn’t really mean anything to anyone except really geeky people. (What it actually means is that this post is item #87 in the MySQL database that holds your WordPress site together).

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WordPress bugfix for auto-installation of themes, plugins & updates.

By Ali Napier | September 22, 2010 - 2:59 pm | Teaching materials

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Carrying out this step will allow auto-installation of themes, plugins and updates directly from WordPress, rather than having to manually download and install these. The problem arises from the way in which Mac OS X Server delivers users’ personal websites – it’s not really a problem with WordPress.

You can also follow the steps in this video.

This operation requires you to insert some text – you’ll find it here.

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Arduino – An Introduction to Physical Computing

By Ali Napier | September 14, 2010 - 1:06 pm | Physical Computing, Teaching materials

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A first look at the Arduino microcontroller, some programming basics and some simple electronics.
Ali Napier, Digital Interaction Design, School of Computing/DJCAD, University of Dundee

(These notes have been created using Mac OS X – if you are using another operating system, such as Windows or Linux, you should be aware that will be some small differences, particularly with regard to the setup procedure).

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