Andrew Cook

Goodbye Hewlett Packard

I've has a HP laser printer for a year or so. It's worked fine. It's better than the inkjet it replaced. Yet recently HP decided that it's absolutely essential I only use HP toner - so kindly forced an update which stopped me using toner from anyone else - including

New Conservative Candidate = Old Conservative MP

Sadly, despite the appaling perfomance of Mims Davies (who has now run away from Eastleigh to inflict herself on the unfortunate mid Sussex constituency), we have been landed with a conservative candidate who seems just as vaccuous and disinterested in engaging on the issues as his predecessor. Questions that Paul

Can my MP read?

I recently wrote to Mims Davis, my Member of Parliament. Dear Mims, Today the court of session in Scotland found that "that Mr Johnson was motivated by the "improper purpose of stymieing Parliament", and he had effectively misled the Queen in advising her to suspend Parliament (https:

Are you looking for a new Summer House, or other wooden garden building?

If so, my advice is not to go within miles of Hampshire Summer Houses. After many months I have finally received confirmation from my credit card company that they have recovered my money, and I can finaly dispose of the shoddy pile of wood that has been taking space in

Acronyms

I've been involved with developing several studies recently, and the question always arises... What are we going to call it?Not the full title, but the snappy acronym which all clinical trials seem to need. I've always found coming up with these pretty hit and miss. Some clinicians have systems

Drobo failing to mount a partition

I use a Drobo as a source for a Plex server. Having my children get video from Plex is much neater than having them ransack a set of DVDs. The Drobo video partition suddenly decided not to mount on my Mac server. I could see it in disk utility -

Apple Watch

3 Apple Products

In the past month I've bought three Apple products. I'm going to keep two of them Apple Watch This is a series 3 Apple Watch. It's much like the Series 0 (the orginal model) that I've had for the last couple of years except It actually runs WatchOS 4 reasonably

publication

Uploaded

The follow up from the previous post is 8 days. Then a further 4 days to appear on the website once the production system said published. The final paper is now available at the BMJ Open. If you're interested in getting clinicans more involved with shaping the national research agenda

publication

Upload for online first

Odd phrase is't it? I've been looking at it for about a week now at the BMJ Open submission portal. According to the FAQ, this is one of the production stages involved in getting an accepted paper from the submitted document to a published referenceable output: Clean up – the article

sous vide

Nomiku v Anova

For a couple of years I've had a Nomiku, which I use for sous vide cooking. I've produced chocolate, steak, short ribs - even rib roasts. It's great. Sous Vide Steak, 53°C for 1 hour Sous Vide Ribs, it takes three days to get them like this Sadly, at

photography

Burning Wire Wool

For Christmas 2015 I was given a Photography Experience Day, which I finally got around to using in December 2016! The idea is simple. Stuff some wire wool in a metal balloon whisk. Attach the whisk to a dog lead. Light wool, and swing lead. Take a longish exposure picture

Sous Vide Chocolate Tempering

I bit more on chocolate tempering using the Nomiku - as it's the end of the Christmas term and the children's teachers need chocolate houses! Vacuum pack the chocolate. Up to 1kg in a pack seems to work well. Drop in a water bath at 45°C. It'll melt fast.

Daylight: Twilight and Shadows

This is a rewrite of Daylight, in Swift. The latest update is available for iPhone, iPod Touch, Apple Watch, and now Apple TV - all with one purchase. If you bought the original version of Daylight for iPad or iPhone, you can upgrade to the new version for a small

sous vide

Sous Vide at Home

Due to a couple of successful Kickstarter campaigns I find myself with two kitchen gadgets which offer to provide a temperature controller waterbath for sous vide cookery. The Nomiku. The Codlo. They each take a different approach to the challenge of providing a constant temperature waterbath, so I thought it

Upgrading to Yosemite

On both my Macs, after upgrading to Yosemite I've had a problem with the Launchbar icon in the dock showing an empty progress bar, which doesn't show any progress. defaults write com.apple.dock ResetLaunchPad -bool true; killall Dock fixes it.

Why do I say "yes" to too many things?

I've seen this chart, which seems to explain why. But unfortunately I've lost the original reference - I'd be happy to be pointed at it. In essence, there's an expectation that your workload will be lighter in the future than it is right now but this is never bourne out.

Apple Watch and Swift

It seems to me pretty likely that 3rd party programming for the Apple Watch is only likely to be supported in Swift. Why? It's a chance for Apple to start changing the way Cocoa APIs look. Lots of the syntax for Swift is driven by the need to be as

cocoa

McIcon

While writing ParaDocs I spend a lot of time working on the icons... particularly the app icon the the document icon. This involves editing images in multiple sizes and making sure they end up in the right place in Xcode. It's tedious. In the end, not finding something I liked

cocoa

ParaDocs

I like to try to put some sort of help system in my apps - either using the default Mac help menu, or rolling my own for iOS apps. Producing the content for either approach usually involved writing lots of html, manually assigning links, then trying to massage the resulting

NIHR Paediatric Orthopaedic Stakeholder Workshop

One of my interests is the delivery of research to improve surgical practice. This partly manifests in my involvement in the HipOP trial (and the resulting poster) and the ETTAA cohort study. Last Friday I (along with other NETSCC staff) facilitated a workshop on Paediatric Orthopaedics, at the Royal College

Download WWDC 2014 Videos

I found this bash script for downloading all the WWDC 2014 videos in HD. curl https://developer.apple.com/videos/wwdc/2014/ \ | grep -iIoh 'http.*._hd_.*dl=1">HD' \ | sed -e 's/\?dl=1">HD//g' \ | xargs -n1 curl --remote-name If you'd rather have SD, then

Society for Clinical Trials Meeting, Philadelphia, May 2014

This year I took a poster to the Society for Clinical Trials meeting in Philadelphia. The Society for Clinical Trials is an international organisation dedicated to the development and dissemination of knowledge about the design, conduct and analysis of clinical trial methodologies - rather like HTAi but with a focus

GlobalView

Here's a little something I've been working on. GlobalView is a geographical twitter client for iOS (both iPad and iPhone) - rather than ordering tweets by the time they were tweeted, they are positioned on a map which can be zoomed or rotated to explore the tweet zeitgeist. Give GlobalView

chocolate

Chocolate Tempering with a Nomiku

I used my new Nomiku to temper some dark chocolate for an easter egg. Melted at 47°C, held for 10 minutes. Changed the water, set to 27°C, held for 10 minutes. Warmed the water to 34°C, held for 5 minutes, then used the chocolate. The only thing

Screening Woes

Screening is difficult. Even NHS hospitals get it wrong Sixty-seven year old Vincent O'Dea took up a 'MOT Health Check' at his GPs, which showed a slightly raised PSA. As a result of this he's now had 37 sessions of radiotherapy - with all the adverse effects that implies. Is