Rob Young

Cascade Calculator

I made this a while ago, but decided to improve it a bit and make it available to people in my year who’ve also received exam results today, as Aberystwyth University’s cascade calculator is not available due to technical difficulties.

As I did an industrial year as part of my course it includes the band for these results, but shouldn’t be too hard to adapt for those who didn’t.

To use it, click here and select File > Save a Copy, and use this copy to enter your module codes and results. Read on for further instructions if needed.

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Ford Focus Trip Computer Calibration

The MPG figure displayed by the trip computer is calculated from the quantity of fuel injected on each engine stroke. Because the accuracy of this calculation will vary depending upon how you drive and the state of wear of your engine, you might find your trip computer is over or under optimistic to a degree.

To adjust the computer to compensate for known inaccuracies, follow these steps.

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Circular Moon Halo

Circular Moon Halo, originally uploaded by Bobby:.

I saw this optical phenomenon for the first time the other evening – took the camera outside to try and get a picture of it before it disappeared and this was the best I managed to get

It looks a bit like lens flare, but there was in fact a halo surrounding the moon! I had a quick Google for what it’s caused by and found out it’s due to the refraction of light through cloud suspended ice crystals!

Stop Maven Complaining about javax/jms/jms/1.1/jms-1.1.jar; cannot read zip file

My build was breaking due to Maven complaining about not being able to read jms-1.1.jar, as if it was corrupt after having been downloaded.

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Update Your Tomtom’s Map Without Losing Your Favourites

I have surprised in the past to find that all my favourites have been erased after updating a map with the TomTom Home application.

This was extremely frustrating, so to make sure it doesn’t happen to you here’s what you should do

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Arctic Photography

The Scott Polar Research Institude at Cambridge University has just published a website with some awesome photography from Robert Scott and other arctic explorers.

Check it out at http://www.freezeframe.ac.uk/gallery/gallery

Quickly Disable Windows Vista’s User Account Control

If Vista’s incessant UAC dialogs begin to annoy you they can be quickly nuked by doing the following…

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Keep Your Private Files Private in OSX

There are bound to be files on your computer you’d rather keep private such as files for work, financial information or simply things you shouldn’t have in the first place.

If you’re new to OSX and want to guard certain information against being seen in the eventuality of theft or otherwise, this short guide may help.

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Fix Redeployment of Webapps to Tomcat in Windows

I came across an annoying bug today where I was able to deploy a webapp to Tomcat once, but subsequent redeployments resulted in an exception when attempting to write to the server.

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Use Your 3 Mobile’s Unlimited Internet With Your Mac

If your internet connection suddenly bombs out and you need to get something important done, this might help you out.

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