Directory

 It has been another lovely hot day. We've had some cloud cover but that has made it a little humid. 

Ellie was dropped off soon after 7:00 and the normal sequence of events followed. She has her iPad with her. This is a problem as she becomes totally deaf to anything else when she is watching it. We don't mind her watching the Amazon tablet (it doesn't have iTunes) but the iPad is like a child-magnet.

Having dropped Ellie off at school, the Silver Vixen headed off to Pilates and the Gorse Fox stayed home as the football had been cancelled. He used the time to catch up on some admin then decided to look at the new digital home phone.

It seemed daft that the new digital home phone had no app to allow bulk addition of entries in a phone directory. The directory is, however, stored in the broadband hub. It can also be backed up and restored. This gave the Gorse Fox an idea. If he could work out the format of the files then he could create some code to populate the directory.

It took a bit of fiddling about and because of the Mac's "helpful" habit of processing downloads rather than filing them and letting the Gorse Fox look at them, he switched to his Windows machine to examine the formats. With that done he went to Google Contacts. Here he selected the subset of contacts for whom it would be sensible to have directory entries. These were exported to a CSV file. The Gorse Fox then wrote some code to select the relevant data and format it into a file that could be loaded into the hub to populate the  digital home phone. It took several hours but is now almost there. The first few items load correctly but then it stops. The Gorse Fox has a little further debugging to do.

Ellie is with us overnight tonight.