Chris Luke: Random Stuff Page

Tea required, apply within...

I'm not a big fan of the arbitrary biog. pages you sometimes find. This page is a sort of placeholder for random stuff of mine that I think someonme might someday be vaguely interested in.

You can look at some random pictures, and some random thing I did at university way back (and that I recently discovered was used as the example project for a number of undergrads in the years after I left! Scary!)

Canon EOS 20D and Vista x64

Canon don't support their RAW codec under a 64-bit installation of Windows Vista...

Update! Axel Rietschin Software Developments have released, for free, a codec for Vista and Windows 7 that will view various RAW files on x64 platforms! You can get it here.

Piper Luke

In October 2005, I became a dad! My daughter Piper entered the world and has turned it upside down ever since.

Elexol Ether I/O 24

A random device I have been playing with recently. The intention is to use it to drive my domestic irrigation system... It's an IP-savvy module with 24 I/O lines on it. I'm working on a Perl module to make the programmatic interface a bit saner.

Our house...

We're building a house. Read about it and see the pictures!

R/C Monster Trucks!

Latest toy is a Traxxas Revo Radio Controlled Monster Truck. It's fast, smooth riding, loves to jump and appears indestructible! Of course, I've only had it less than 24 hours, so time will tell if this is accurate... It's Nitro-powered, like the Helis, but uses a different fuel mixture.

Helicopters!

I'm quite into flying a radio controlled helicopter these days. I likened my early experiences of doing this to "Trying to control a rabid animal that has been given an electric shock and that is on the end of a bungee cord". I think I'm past that part now! If you look for them, you can find pictures and some movie clips around here someplace...

Astronomy Picture of the Day

This is a dinky script you can run periodically to set your X background to either todays or a random Astronomy Picture of the Day. Call with the parameter "random" to get a random picture, or no parameter to get todays image. It's not the best shell script in the world, but it's cute in function. (APOD is fab)

NANVAENT

I host this game called NANVAENT. It has some history now. I first knew my now wife from it, I have introduced numerous people who have since wasted good portions of their lives on it, etc. You can try out the game by using Secure Shell (this SSH client is written in Java) or telnet.