The McKenzies' Blog…

Why? Why not. I was wondering how else I could make use of Twitter for other things I thought “How could I use twitter with my Asterisk PABX?” Doing some Google searching showed I wasn’t the first to think of this (as if that would have happened). There are a few people doing various things with asterisk and twitter.

I didn’t really like much of what I found, or found it wasn’t really what I wanted to do with it .. so I decided to use some of that info and came up with something of my own.

The short story is this. When someone calls my Canadian number, my US Toll-Free number any number that ultimately rings the group of phones in the house, I will now get a direct message in Twitter from a special account I setup for this purpose, which also sends a SMS to my phone (device notifications in twitter).

Read more by clicking below… Be warned! Thar be scripts and technical stuff in them thar parts

Read the rest of this entry »

The Register has a story today about a Canadian bloke named Daniel Burd.  He’s discovered how to dissolve plastic bags in around 3 months.  Take his magic “goo”, a bucket and plastic carrier bags, mix and watch the microbes go to work and get rid of all those bags. 

Dissolving the plastic bag problem | The Register

The BBC is carrying a story about biologists calling for a ban on mass balloon releases.  I must say, after reading the article it makes perfect sense.  I’ve seen plenty of huge balloon releases and likely only pondered where all those balloons would end up, but never gave any thought about it beyond that.  It would make perfect sense they would end up some where on the ground, after all, they don’t float around forever.  They will climb until they pop then the rubbish will drift around before falling back to earth (isn’t Gravity wonderful).  Well, its never once occurred to me that these would land and endanger animals.  Perhaps, had at some point in my life I’d been walking along and had the remains of a balloon fall on or near me it might have come to mind that these could fall into wild animal habitats.  I suspect if people are honest with themselves they’ve never thought about this either. 

BBC NEWS | UK | Biologists call for balloon ban

As cool as big balloon releases look, I have to agree with these guys.  I think it’s a bad idea.  Not to mention the general environmental impact all this rubbish will have.  Which is something else I’ve started to become a lot more conscience about recently. 

While looking for some resources on the net to re-learn how to tie knots (and there are no shortage of these BTW), I came across this one.  It’s “animated” with a series of still pics, and it’s very well done.  There are some sites that show guys tying the knots but in some cases their hands can get in the block the process from being seen.

Grog’s Climbing Knots Index

Check it out..

I’ve put some new pics up on Flickr today. Here are some… click to go to the gallery and see the full sized ones.