For our Momentum men's events we have a Google Calendar that we use to manage the upcoming events, and this gets pulled into our website using the Wordpress plugin ICSCalendar. Recently I set up a twitter account as well, and decided that it would be useful to provide reminders of events on there, which people could then follow and receive SMS updates for.

Initially I had a look around to see what I could find, and came across Calendar Tweet, but that didn't do quite what I was looking for. Then I remembered smtp2web.com, which you can send e-mails to and it will post them to your website over http. So I set up our gmail account to forward the event reminders to my smtp2web e-mail address and built a PHP script to receive the content, parse it and send a nicely formatted message to twitter.

So I can now set up e-mail reminders for the events in Google Calendar:

and they will automatically get posted on twitter at the right time:

Update: The PHP Code used is available at http://gist.github.com/280986/

One of Abi's favorite games recently has been to pretend to be on the telephone, having a conversation with someone and then pass the phone around saying "I'll just pass you over to Daddy". Today when she passed the phone over to me, we had the following conversation:

Me (talking on the toy phone):

Hello?

Really?

Why did she do that?

Abi (protesting profusely):

I didn't!

Abi has recently decided that she wants a boat

Abi: Can you give me some money?

Me: How much do you need?

Abi: Mummy, how much do we need?

Mummy: £20,000

Abi: Yes (looking at me)

Me: Sorry I haven't got that much

(Drawn on the computer with a stylus)

I seem to have started more books than I can read at the moment, currently I've got the following on the go:

• The Bible - Both NIV and ESV (currently reading through Exodus, and dipping into 1 and 2 Peter)

• Know and Tell the Gospel - John Chapman

• Effective Men's Ministry - NCMM

• 15 Minutes Alone with God for Men - Bob Barnes

View Larger Map

I created the twitter feed based on a JSON feed of the geographic location of the minibus provided by my colleague. I then compare the coordinates of the minibus with a set of bounding boxes stored in a database. If the bus is within squares defined in the database, then the pre-defined description is sent to twitter so that anyone following the bus can receive updates as to where it is.

The current set of boxes are the bus stops on route and the car park back on site.

One possible future enhancements could be to allow you to subscribe to a particular bus stop and receive a twitter direct message so that you know when the bus arrives at that particular bus stop.

Links:

• Hursley Minibus on Twitter

• Digital Planet podcast (minibus mentioned at 21:37)

• From Spitfires to sensors - BBC News article on Hursley

lvextend -L +2G /dev/basevg/var_lib_mysql

Add 2GB to the logical volume var_lib_mysql in basevg

resize2fs /dev/basevg/var_lib_mysql

Resize the filesystem /dev/basevg/var_lib_mysql

Other useful commands:

vgs

list volume groups

lvs

list logical volumes