A couple of times in the past I've thought about using other computers/tablets as additional displays for my main computer.

This time I actually found a way to do it.

xrandr can be used to create a new monitor without the need for an actual monitor, I used the VIRTUAL1 output and was pleased to see a VIRTUAL2 pop into existence when I did. Then x11vnc with an appropriate -clip can make a VNC server for that bit of the virtual desktop.

I tried both a spare laptop and my tablet as extra displays and it seems to work well with either.

I love this adage. Having read the Wikipedia article on it (you have to like any sentence that has its own Wikipedia article) I seem to be in good company; there's wise men, various royals and Abe Lincoln.

One of my plans for if/when I have stupid amounts of money to throw at frivolous projects: write this somewhere that the passing will take a while.

I can probably afford to get it carved in a lump of granite now. Wandering round a graveyard gives you an idea of how long that'll take to pass. I put it at a couple of centuries (if you can stop future people finding a better use for the chunk of granite for that long).

I like the idea of making a standing stones version of the phrase. Stone henge, and the other stone circles, suggest that these can last a few millenia. Though we don't really know how many didn't survive...

I was thinking today that I haven't been doing much photography lately. Given I had a bit of free time the obvious thing to do would have been to get out my camera and take some pictures.

I don't like to do the obvious thing.

Instead I started thinking about a process to get me taking more pictures. I decided I should set myself a schedule that I can keep to of shooting something. I've previously tried a daily schedule (with a group all shooting on the same theme each day) but within a week I got distracted by other things and then forgot about it. This time I think I'll try weekly.

With that decided I needed an idea of some subject matter. For the few days I stuck to the daily shooting I quite liked getting a theme and having to find something to fit it. I tended to interpret the theme quite loosely, but it was a good starting point.

I've picked up a few LED floodlights that can do various colours (and some effects) controlled by IR remotes. They have their uses as they are - but I want to replace the IR remotes with something connected to a computer so I can have random programs control them.

Getting IR codes

The first thing I wanted to do was record the IR codes that the remote was sending.

I found some stuff on using lirc on a pi, so cut one of the IR receivers off a light and hooked it up to a pi and recorded the codes from the remote. That gave a lirc config file with the codes.

I have decided to move to a new site and a new system for blogging.

This is being generated with cryogen to make the server side really simple and save me having to worry about code there breaking.

Writing things for this is a lot closer to my normal work flow (I write something in emacs and then run some commands to make it appear here) so hopefully I'll actually put more on here than I have on previous attempts at blogging.

It looks like it won't be a huge amount of work to pull the content from my old site into this - I'll put that on the TODO list and might get to it some time before the heat death of the universe.