There’s an old sailor’s trick that comes in useful when on the high seas, when stuck with safety matches and no box to strike them on. They can be turned into strike-anywhere matches with the use of a hot stove. This also helps pass the time on the long unending days when the ship is becalmed at sea.

Gloves were used because it wasn’t physically possible to get my hand that close.

This was a facebook comment that got out of hand. If this isn’t the kind of pointless string of words that belongs in a blog, I don’t know what is. The first part follows the Rime of the Ancient Mariner reasonably closely. The rest correlates with the worst excesses of Roald Dahl at his most metrically depraved.

It is an ancient housemate,

And he washeth one of three.

‘By thy long grey beard and glittering eye

The thing about living on a boat is that there is more than likely a hatchet to hand.

Which means that if you come home from the shops with a can and realise that you have no can opener, you can puncture holes in the lid.

Using the hatchet

… and get at the insides.

Try doing that in a house. I dare you.

On Monday 9th January 2011, version 4 of FolkTuneFinder.com went public. It was a bit of a journey getting to this point.

I run FolkTuneFinder in my spare time. Mostly it runs itself without intervention. I keep an eye on things, monitor spam (except for a recent occasion when it got out of hand) and answer mail. There is a fair amount of programming behind it, and I’ve re-written the search engine a few times over the years. The melody search is the main point of the site and the bulk of the programming, but recently the extra bits, such as comments, favourites, blogs etc have become more significant.

When searching FolkTuneFinder, you may find search results that you don’t agree with or can’t understand. You may think tune has nothing to do with your query, or the highlighted notes bear no relevance to what you typed. Here’s why.

The thing about folk tunes is that they’ve survived in the aural tradition, in many cases for quite a long time. A good tune spreads because people like it, and different parts of a tune may appeal to different people. We all hear and experience tunes slightly differently, and we can interpret and remember them differently too.

The first version of FolkTuneFinder was written in a combination of Java and PHP. I was still working out the best way to do melodic indexing, and the index build process was parallelised. The job ran across 14 Apple Xserves, made available to me by my university. That was back in 2008. These days it runs in a single virtual machine … somewhere.

It’s annoying leaning a bike up against something, especially on a train, only to have the handlebars rotate and for the bike to fall down. Or to be carrying a bike on your shoulder and have the wheel come round and smack you.

A simple lock on the front of the bike which could be flicked to stop the steering from moving whilst it’s being transported would solve this problem.

I started FolkTuneFinder as a student project back in 2008. I’d done websites for a few years before, but this was the first serious one with any kind of heavy lifting or interesting behaviour. Over the years I added features that allowed people to interact, such as the commenting and FolkTuneFinder blogs, which has been surprisingly popular.

I have always had a very small problem with spam: I received perhaps a small handful of blog posts a month, which was fine to deal with. It wasn’t a problem, and the most time-effective way of dealing with it was to delete the posts when they arose. There has always been a battle with spare time, and various interesting things have happened to me since 2008 meaning that I haven’t quite had as much time as I’d like.

I don’t drive, but being a passenger and a cyclist, I imagine dazzling lights can be something of a problem to drivers.

To combat this, a camera could be mounted in the head-rest of the driver’s seat of a car, so that it was able to see what the driver saw from the same perspective. It could identify where egregious bright lights were coming from.

A liquid crystal matrix could be embedded into the windscreen. An on-board computer could calibrate the camera and the ‘screen’ built into the windscreen. It could then darken in the spots where bright light, to provide a very specialised shield and prevent dazzling.

I strike a match to light my oven or stove, and blow it out within a few seconds. Most of the match is un-burned. Why not dip the match at both ends so that it can be used twice? And you wouldn’t have to get your fingers mucky: it’s not hard to avoid holding it by the end.