Blog What I Made

blog.johnmckerrell.com · English

General geeky postings from John McKerrell. iPhone, Rails and JavaScript software developer in the North of England. DoES Liverpool co-founder and two time B...

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Fitness Goals and My Running History
Sep 14, 2025 · original
I want to blog about running, but having never mentioned it on here I feel like I should give some history, so let’s go back in time…. Back in 2008 my old boss Steve Frater mentioned to me that he was planning to run a 10k race near me and would I like to join him. I’ve just entered the Liverpool 10K on Oct 5th - that gives you plenty of time to train so how about it? I laughed at him and said that I don’t run, I cycle, but for some reason I did start considering it and ultimately did sign up. (Looks like his original suggestion was in April and I didn’t sign up until August the 1st!) I must have caught the bug as I ended up agreeing to do a 5k race two weeks before this too. Over the years I did keep running but I didn’t really get into a regular pace, sometimes I’d run with friends, sometimes not. I did the Santa Dash and a few other races, including the Tunnel 10k Run through the Mers
Starting a running log
Mar 20, 2021 · original
I was listening to a podcast recently that suggested that everyone (who runs) should keep a running log, to keep more than just the details of a run like the distance and time but also how you feel on the run and what you were thinking about while you were out. I thought I’d give it a go. I started writing this post a long time ago, it’s now 29th December 2024! It seems that while I didn’t do anything with my blog I have been writing regular notes for my runs since around March 2021, i.e. when I started writing this post. I don’t write much, just a little around any problems, aches or pains that I had. It’s probably useful really just because it puts my mind at ease, as even if I don’t feel 100% on one run it generally doesn’t last. Not going to extend this specific post much now but I do hope to write more about my running in the near future (so going by the current cadence, 2027?) The
MING and the Kindle
Nov 2, 2019 · original
I’ve recently been playing with a set of technologies that are becomingknown as the MING stack which consists of: MQTT - A pub-sub message queue/protocol Influx DB - A time series database Node-RED - A GUI tool for doing event driven programming in a web browser Grafana - A graphing dashboard tool We’ve had these set up for a while in DoES Liverpool to monitor the poweruse of the space and of some individual devices. Julian set up a device that watches the flashes from the electricity meter andpublishes messages via the Wi-Fi to an MQTT broker. Node-Red picks up onthese and pushes them into an InfluxDB database. Grafana then reads thevalues from the databases and publishes them in graphs. We’ve also gota variety of Sonoff devices around the space that can measure the powerusage of the things they’re plugged into, or turn those things off and on. The above image shows the overall power us
Ethan's Name Plate
May 9, 2018 · original
My daughter Evie was given a very nice thing soon after she was born - her namecut out of a piece of wood. My son Ethan however wasn’t bought such a thing and I decided thatI should try to make something along the same lines. The idea developed into making a nameplatefor his bedroom and after thinking about it for a little while I came up with an idea. The laser cutter is still my favourite thing in the DoES Liverpool workshop, and the thing thatI’m most capable of using, but it does have its limitations. It only produces flat things, itcan only cut thicknesses of maybe 3-6mm, and it really produces things in only 1 or 2 colours(the colour of the material and whatever colour it turns out if you engrave). I don’t entirely remember where the idea came from but I decided that I’d like to try layeringmultiple materials on top of each other to allow me to introduce more colours. I also cameup
Year Notes: 2016
Jan 17, 2018 · original
So 2016 started quite similarly to 2014 with a new baby in the house. I was fortunateenough that when agreeing to take the job at Axon Vibe I’d had the foresight to request that,in the event that we had another baby, I’d be able to take a 3 month extendedparental leave (unpaid). I was so glad I’d done that as it meant I could be much more involved inEthan’s early days and also give Evie some much needed attention too. Although I’d beenfreelance when we’d had Evie, so in theory was more in control of my time, I was also moreworried about what money was coming in. Although my extended leave was unpaid I didhave the security of knowing I had a well-paid job to go back to. I’m definitely a supporter ofextended parental leave, ideally paid, and was able to put this into practice when DoESLiverpool’s admin guy, Seán, had a child last year. We agreed to give him a month’s paidleave rather than
Year Notes: 2015
Nov 3, 2017 · original
Last year’s notes ended with a cliff hanger, would I take a permanent job at Axon Vibe or would I not? Well the year began straight away with a visit to head office. Flying out to Lucerne in Switzerland on the fifth of January. This was actually my wife’s first day back in work after being off for over a year’s maternity leave. It was unfortunate to have to leave her to sort out our daughter during her first week but I did at least get a later flight so that I could help get Evie to her first morning in nursery. After much consideration I ultimately decided to take the job at Axon Vibe. I was intending to continue working for them so it’s not like I was looking for other clients, and the money was such that I wasn’t losing out by being a salaried worker. By this point I’d already agreed that I would have my daughter on Friday afternoons so I ultimately decide to work Monday - Thursday bu
Year Notes: 2014
Oct 27, 2017 · original
So obviously after the events at the tail end of 2013, this year was mostly spent dealing with the fact that we now had a tiny (not so tiny) baby to look after! Work-wise I’d stupidly taken on two new clients just before baby came along so while they were freelance clients who were aware of what was happening, it did mean I had some worries about making sure I could do work for them. In the end one of them tailed away to nothing within a few weeks of the new year and the other was just a week or so’s work that I managed to get in while baby was napping. In retrospect the newborn stage is actually something of a calm before the storm as they do tend to sleep a lot. We had some issues around baby’s feeding and weight gain which the midwives dutifully freaked us out over but after a few months she did start putting on weight better. In fact once we weaned her onto food, which with perhaps r
Year Notes: 2013
Oct 20, 2017 · original
I was tempted to skip this year as I had after all written a blog post that year already, but why not go crazy and write a second one, maybe the 2013 review would have been the first post of 2014 anyway? Although I tend to write about geeky work related things on this blog it’s really my personal blog so I should definitely mention that the two major events of 2013 for me were personal rather than work related. We (my wife and I) moved house, and got pregnant! The house move wasn’t particularly planned and just came from noticing a house around the corner from ours that looked interesting, checking it out (awful) but then looking at a few more and deciding that actually we really could manage a nice upgrade, and might need to as we’d be needing more room soon. We were lucky that we could afford a lovely big victorian house, which looks nice and provides lots of room for kids and associat
New New Blog, New Old Blog
Jun 24, 2017 · original
So I’ve decided to replace my previous blog with a WordPress blog. That was the first line I put on my WordPress blog, which I’ve now replaced with Jekyll. The first post on that was in October 2006, so nearly 11 years ago! Over the past 11 years I’ve moved away from doing anything PHP, or anything server-side really. I have no particular need of the online editing that you get with WordPress or any of the other features really. I’m also trying to be quite paranoid about what daemons I run on my hosting server. I came across Jekyll (again) as part of a documentation project in my day job and was impressed by how easy it was to use so decided I would start migrating some of my own stuff over. My first migration was actually the website for my CamViewer iOS app which was already based on Gollum the markdown wiki so should have been quite simple to migrate (actually it was still a bit of a
Long time no see
Jan 18, 2017 · original
It’s been a very long time since I’ve written anything here. I thought I’d like to write up a small project I did recently, but then there would be a bit of back story, and then a bit more, and oh yes I haven’t blogged in 4 years so I should really do something about that. As such I’m going to try to write some year reviews. Not promising to make them in depth but it’ll give me a chance to look back and see what I’ve actually been doing all these years (actually it’s pretty obvious to me given that the last post was 4 years ago and a major thing happened just after that but here’s goes nothing..!)
Adding a Wiki to MapMe.At using Gollum
Jan 7, 2013 · original
I recently added a wiki on my MapMe.At site and found it quite tricky to get working and difficult to find just the right information I needed so I thought I’d write it up. MapMe.At is still on Rails 2 which seemed to mean I couldn’t install Gollum as part of the site. I created a separate Rails 3 project that runs alongside MapMe.At and simply hosts Gollum, using instructions from here: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/13053704/how-to-properly-mount-githubs-gollum-wiki-inside-a-rails-app I wanted it to use the user information in MapMe.At’s session hash so switched MapMe.At to use activerecord based sessions and used information on here to make the rails 2 session load in rails 3: http://www.kadrmasconcepts.com/blog/2012/07/19/sharing-rails-sessions-with-php-coldfusion-and-more/ I’m not actually using the rails2 session as the main session, I just load the information in. I have the f
WhereDial Ready to Ship
Dec 2, 2012 · original
A good few years ago I blogged about making a clock that showed location , similar to the clock that Weasley family had in the Harry Potter books. Well now you can buy one! I’ve spent the last year working on the design and getting the hardware ready. Take a look at the photos below and head over to the website for more information on the WhereDial!
OpenStreetMap at Social Media Cafe Liverpool
Feb 17, 2012 · original
I gave a talk last night at Social Media Cafe about OpenStreetMap. I actually haven’t been too involved in the OSM community of late so it was nice to get back into it a little bit. It was also good to find that a large portion of the audience was not already aware of OSM so it was nice to introduce it to people. You can find the video of Social Media Cafe on USTREAM. The video will be chopped up soon at which point I’ll link to or embed my own talk here too. I ended up with 63 slides taking up about 100MB so I’m going to try not uploading it to Slideshare this time, instead I’m going to summarise the talk here. Why do we need OpenStreetMap? Geodata historically isn’t Current - things change so often maps quickly become outdated. Open - if you know the map is wrong, wouldn’t it be simpler to let you update it yourself? Free - You want me to pay how much for Ordnance Survey data?? Especia
YAHMS: Revisited, Upgrading to XBee with Wire Antenna
Oct 23, 2011 · original
A good few months ago I blogged about my YAHMS project and my YAHMS Base Station . It was a funny time to get the project complete, just in time for the summer, but it has ended up being useful. Being able to turn the hall light on when we come home in the dark is really useful and, with the summer we’ve had, the heating has gone on from time to time too. It hasn’t been without its problems, though fortunately they have been relatively few. Power ended up being an issue for the temperature probes, using four AA batteries would keep the probes running for about a week. This isn’t bad but would mean replacing them regularly, also when the voltage went low, the voltage detector didn’t seem to work and I would see rising temperatures. In the end I decided to use some wall wart power supplies, unfortunately that means the probes are less portable and also means that half of the circuit was un
Reversing the Brain Drain
Sep 27, 2011 · original
An unfortunate tweet from a friend yesterday suggesting that he might have to leave Liverpool to get a job, led to a little exchange: That got me to a realisation: Now that comment is certainly meant to be taken as tongue in cheek, but there’s some very real truth in it. To start with the more tenuous examples. Paul Freeman ( @OddEssay ) contracts for a company in Eccles, near Manchester. Since setting up DoES Liverpool Paul has been able to spend more time in Liverpool. Yes he’s still working for a company in Eccles but he’s now buying lunch from Liverpool companies and engaging with the Liverpool tech community more regularly. Let’s move onto Paul Kinlan ( @Paul_Kinlan ). Paul is a Developer Advocate with Google. He’s based in their London office but also spends a lot of his time travelling around Europe and the world promoting Google Chrome and HTML5. His main reason for being here is
Another Catch Up, Week 157
Jul 30, 2011 · original
A month since my last update, I felt I had to post an update today though as it is in fact the third anniversary of the formation of my company, MKE Computing Ltd! I’m intending to post a bit of a retrospective sometime over the weekend but thought I’d better update on the general stuff first. Oh, one other housekeeping note, it seems that for the last few months of updates I’ve managed to mess up the week notes numbers, I first randomly added 3 weeks and then accidentally added 10! This week’s update number was actually lower than the previous one a month ago. I’ve gone through the past updates and updated them to make sure they’re right. The biggest thing I’ve been “working on” recently is DoES Liverpool. In my last blog post I mentioned that we’d been finalising details of the bank account and the venue. We moved into our space shortly after, spent an intensive week decorating, cleani
Catching Up, Week 152 (was 165)
Jun 25, 2011 · original
Long time since an update but there’s some important things going on so I wanted to get up to date. In the weeks after my last update I continued to work on the Colour Match app for Crown. I’ve added various features to try to help users find the right colour better including adding in a new set of colours that need to be mixed on-demand, and then a set of colour palettes to let you browse the colours similar to the one the app has selected for you. I submitted that app last Thursday and Apple approved it around Tuesday of this week so that’s now available from the app store . I then went on holiday for two weeks! Apart from a really crap start to the holiday courtesy of US airways and a cancelled flight meaning we were 24 hours late into our destination we actually had a really good time. We started our holiday in San Francisco, eventually having 2 full days there. This was actually my
Launching Bubblino and Client Apps, Week 146 (was 159)
May 14, 2011 · original
I spent most of this week updating the Crown “Colour Match” iPhone app that I’ve previously made a few small changes to (I had nothing to do with the original codebase on this app). There was a few false starts while I waited for the graphics for the app, there was a few issues getting them through in just the right formats for the low and high res iPhone screens, but once I’d got them I did manage to make some headway. The other thing I did was to launch the new version of Bubblino & Friends . This new version offers some great new graphics, new animations and audio that has been created just for the app. I’m really happy with the app and have enjoyed using it to follow some hashtag searches myself but I have to say that sales have actually been quite low since it launched, lower than I’d like anyway. I think that it’s not clear to people why they need an iPhone app to help them use twi
YAHMS: Base Station
May 9, 2011 · original
Bit of a delay as I’ve been busy with other things but in this post I’ll be completing the set of YAHMS hardware by discussing the base station hardware and software. The base station has a few jobs to do in my YAHMS setup: Physically connect to the relays via digital output pins. Download the config for digital output pins and then control them. Receive the XBee signals from the temperature probes. Take samples from an on-board temperature sensor. Submit samples received locally and via XBee to the server. The circuit for this is fairly simple though, just connecting up some inputs and outputs. I mentioned connecting an XBee to an Arduino in the temperature probes post , we simply need to connect the DIN and DOUT pins up to the Arduino so that it can receive the information (and of course the power and ground wires). Because I like to use the main serial interface on the Arduino for out
Weeknotes Week 145 (was 158)
May 8, 2011 · original
Quite a mixed week this week as I was expecting some materials from a client to come through to let me work on some updates for them but they didn’t come through until Friday. In theory it was also a short week due to the May Day bank holiday in the UK. As it happened I ended up spending Monday making some final changes to Bubblino, including the addition of bubbles! Such an important thing for Bubblino but I kept forgetting to add them. Really happy with how they came out, they’re randomly generated and individually controlled. At the moment the bubbles all float up which is a bit different to the real Bubblino, but they look good for now. I finally got the app submitted early on Tuesday morning so hopefully it’ll get accepted in the next few days and we can get it up for sale. The new version is going to be on sale for 99c/59p so it’ll be interesting to see if it generates any useful r

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