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Showing posts from 2008

Desktop Tower Defense

Desktop Tower Defense

Great game for wasting those precious hours

Dilbert

Dilbert.com

I met this really kinky girl last night. 'Humiliate me,' she said ... So I bought her a Tottenham shirt | Football | The Guardian

I met this really kinky girl last night. 'Humiliate me,' she said ... So I bought her a Tottenham shirt

Tottenham are so rubbish it is unbelievable, and I had such high hopes at the beginning of the season. Yet again a disappointing year.

My personal favourite doing the rounds is, "what is the difference between a triangle and Tottenham hotspur? A triangle has three points."

Cern webcams

To celebrate the launch of the LHC they have set up some webcams (http://www.cyriak.co.uk/lhc/lhc-webcams.html). They're muh more interesting than they sound ... honest.

Dropbox

Dropbox - Secure backup, sync and sharing made easy.

Dropbox is a clever web file storage thing that has great desktop clients for windows, OS X and ... linux. It has just come out of private beta and it is well worth a look. 2 GB of space free, user-friendly and on linux, marvellous.

Much better but less space than Adrive. Not as open but more user-friendly than box.net.

Don't forget about drop.io, but thats for a different purpose really.

CodeIgniter - Open source PHP web application framework

CodeIgniter - Open source PHP web application framework

This looks like another interesting web framework, along with cakePHP (php) and django (python).

I will eventually get round to trying one of these ... honest.

Large Hadron Rap

Ahhhhhhh you got to love those physicists.

Ivan Ukhov drunk(?) before his last jump at Athletissima 08

Thats Friday entertainment for you

LastGraph visualises last.fm data

LastGraph

LastGraph is a web-based service that aims to give you a new way to explore your last.fm listening history.

Features
* Live browsing of individual artist histories, as well as your entire artist chart.
* Rendered posters, displaying your musical history in a pretty and digestable format.
* Data export of your profile data in various formats.


The thing I like most is that you can export your complete profile.

This is another visualisation thingy.

Martin Durkin

durkinemails.htm

Martin Durkin, the producer of the "The Global Warning Swindle", seems a pleasant chap!

Dancing Liquid

Got to love the mix of science and thumping bass.

Bloody BBC radio 6 music

First they get rid Phil Jupitus, then Andrew Collins and now they have moved Tom Robinson's evening show to one day a week (Friday). Why do the powers that be at 6 music keep removing my favourite DJs from the station. At least Adam and Joe are still around! And Shaun Keaveny is more then rubbish, just a standard commercial local DJ. A continuing decline in the dedication to quality music methinks. It will end up no more than a shaby radio 1. Bah!

List of commercial games released as freeware

List of commercial games released as freeware - Wikipedia

FFFFFFFFFRRRRRRREEEDDDDDDDDDDDDOOOOOOOOMMMMMMMM!

Google Doctype - Google Code

Google Doctype - Google Code

Looks interesting

Drop.io: Simple Private Exchange

Drop.io: Simple Private Exchange
This looks an excellent website for quickly exchanging files with people.

Just noticed that skydrive from Microsoft is offering 5GB of space for free. It's a shame you can't do a batch upload and the file size limit is 50MB. With batch upload it would be a useful place to back up photos.

Python with a modular IDE (Vim)

sontek ( John M. Anderson ) Python with a modular IDE (Vim)

When I final get around to learning python properly, this looks useful

evolution is useless for ical calendars

Evolution (a popular linux email calendar) supports reading a web calendar in ical format but doesn't support write access to it. How dumb is that? That means that it is impossible to use services such as icalx.com or simply use a home webdav server. Back to Sunbird and apple ical for me.

I know calDAV is meant to be the superior protocol but show me a decent free service that does it or a way to do it on apache without setting up a completely new service on the server.

Bah!

iusethis mac software

iusethis mac software

This looks like an interesting site that ranks apps depending on who uses them.

Apps I want to look at: Secrets, Carbon Copy Cloner, Chax, Monolingual, ImageWell, App Update, AppFresh, MacPorts, Solitaire XL, Max & MacFusion.

Also want to big up Lifehacker, a very useful site.

Bomb the bass - new single

Absolutely love this video - Butterfingers by the the old classic, bomb the bass

How to prolong lithium-based batteries

How to prolong lithium-based batteries

I was interested in this as I wanted to know the best way of prolonging the battery life of my Mum's new macbook.

Here is the advice from Apple and some people recommend to calibrate the battery every month or so.

Coconut-Battery is an application which tracks the health and cycles of your battery.

And if your battery is below 80% and has more than 300 cycles (some say 250 cycles) Apple will replace the battery for free of charge, as long as it is still under warranty.

1&1 mislead over subdomains

I have got two domain names registered with 1&1 and they generally seem to have a good service, but in the last few days I have come across a blatant bit of mis-selling. They claim that you can create five subdomains when you purchase a domain from them. Well it turns out that you can only create five subdomains no matter how many domains you have purchased from them. So instead of the sensible approach of have five subdomains per domain name it is five subdomains total. The stupid thing is that I could have just created another account and had one domain per account each with the five subdomains. Arrrgggghhhh.

So I complained about this and here is their useless reply:
Dear Daniel Brewer, (Customer ID: *******)

Thank you for contacting us.

This is regarding to your issue about subdomain. As we have checked,
your account is an Instant Domain Package. With this package, you can
only create maximum of 5 subdomain. You can check this on this link
below.
http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/MailInstantMail

If you want to create more subdomain, you may upgrade your package to
any of our Hosting Packages. You can have 5 to 3, 000 Subdomain
depending on the Package for our Linux Hosting Packages. You can check
the number of Subdomain for Linux Hosting on this link below.
http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/Hosting

For our MS Hosting, you can have 50 to 3, 000 Subdomain also depending
on the package. You may also check this informationon the link below.
http://order.1and1.co.uk/xml/order/MsHosting

If you have any further questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

--
Sincerely,
Nina Troena Tabudlong
Technical Support
1&1 Internet


Thankfully they sent out a customer satisfaction survey just after, so I could let rip.

The reason I wanted more subdomains in the first place is because I am playing around with Google Apps and that requires lots of subdomains and CNAME entries. Haven't got far with it yet, but it looks promising. I might even ditch the email package I have with 1and1 and take it to google which provides pretty much the same service for free.

Anyway, there is a solution to my problem and that is to use free DNS providers, in my case editDNS and everyDNS. Following the excellent instructions here I have set up redundant DNS with EditDNS as my primary DNS server and EveryDNS as my secondary. This means that if either of the services has an outage my domain will stay visible on the net. This is important as even though both services have geographically separated servers, they both have been target of DDOS attacks previously. I expect that I now have much more secure and reliable DNS than with 1&1, with the added bonus that I have almost complete freedom with the number of subdomains and virtually everything else.

Arthur C Clarke, writer and futurist, dies at 90

Arthur C Clarke, writer and futurist, dies at 90: "Arthur C Clarke, the pioneering science fiction author and technological visionary best known for the novel and film 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died at his home in Sri Lanka, aged 90."

BBC iPlayer on Linux

BBC iPlayer on GNU/Linux without Flash using only free software - Exploring Freedom with Matt Lee

Another link

As iPlayer has been released for the iPhone and the iPhone does not support flash, you can now get content in MP4 format (DRM free).

==Edit==
This loophole has been swiftly closed (link).

Appendix out!

In a startling moment of completely bad timing I got appendicitis last week and so had to have it removed in an emergency operation on Thursday evening. Everything went smoothly and Alice and Anneli are coping with the generous support of the two Mums and Em.

So on Wednesday morning I had a stomach ache and it seemed to get increasingly bad throughout the day with me continuously wanting to go to the toilet but with nothing coming out. By 3pm I had had enough at work and drove home which initiated a period of vomiting which lasted on and off until 9pm. After a fitful night of pain and strange dreams (I convinced myself that I, along with the duvet cover, was the centre of some con involving cars or something) we decided that something needed to be done. By know the pain had moved to the lower right of the abdomen. So we phoned up NHS direct, who we have used a lot in the last year, and they suggested to take a paracetamol(!) and if that didn't do anything go and see the GP. At a 4pm appointment with the GP confirmed our worse fears, Ann raced us off to St. Helier's.

After seeing the casualty nurse who took some blood for tests and 1.5 hours wait I managed to see a very nice surgeon who quickly diagnosed me with acute appendicitis and from then on everything went very rapidly (there must have been pretty worried about the test results etc.). By 8pm I was under the knife with the surgeons on call removing a black gangrenous appendix! The ironic thing is that by the afternoon I thought that the pain was subsiding!

There were apparently no complications in the surgery and early the next morning I managed a walk to the toilets. In fact apart from a bit of pain the wound was fine. My biggest problem (and still is) was that when I had a tube down my throat for the general anaesthetic it caused a bit of damage giving me a swollen uvula. This is pretty uncomfortable. At one stage I was able to cough it up onto my tongue. This provided an interesting identification test for one set of medical students (well I hope they were students), set by the head surgeon. They failed miserably with the worse answer being that it was "a bit of thyroid", bloody medics. My appetite was slightly reduced but I still managed to eat all the meals from Friday. Amusingly, because of the way the food works at one stage it looked like I was going to have haddock with beans for lunch on Friday! I managed to wangle this to chicken korma and mashed potato, but I am still not convinced curry is the best thing to have after gut surgery.

As the appendix was in a very poor state when they opened me up, they have been pumping me full of antibiotics, first by IV and then by tablet. Apart from that it was just paracetamol (the wonder drug) and another pain killer (Diclofenac sodium). My current antibiotics are Cefaclor and Metronidazole.

I managed to get home on Saturday evening, which is a relief as I must say I can't stand hospitals. How anyone can get a good nights sleep in those places I just don't know ... I suppose needs must.

I have had a pretty good crop of visitors both in hospital and out: Ad, Em, Alice, Anneli, Ann and Trevor and my parents. One of the unfortunate circumstances surrounding this event was that my mum and dad were away in south east Asia without mobile reception. It must have been quite a shock to hear I had had my appendix out when they got to Bangkok on the way home. Thankfully, due to the combined efforts of Em and Ann, I managed to see Anneli and Alice for quite a large chunk of the time in hospital.

So now I am just recovering at home. Yesterday, I went for a very short walk which normally takes 5 minutes but took me more than half an hour! Obviously not there yet. Not sure how long I will be off work but it is bound to be a couple of weeks.

I am a father!

Check out this

Why, oh WHY, do those #?@! nutheads use vi?

This article has quite a few interesting articles on the advanced uses of vim, the text editor. Wish that could keep all the info required for vim in my little head.