neuro.me.uk

I like to blog, but I’ve been remiss in posting. So what better time than the end of the year to post what I’ve been up to.

Three tomatoes are walking down the street: a poppa tomato, a momma tomato, and a little baby tomato. Baby tomato starts lagging behind. Poppa tomato gets angry, goes over to the baby tomato, and smooshes him … and says “Catch up”.
    — Mia Wallace, Pulp Fiction

Verk

I’m now working at Concept Systems in Edinburgh, very much a Linux-friendly shop. It’s great to be working full-time with operating systems I love, and this is the third company in a row that has given me the opportunity to do so. The commute is probably the longest I’ve ever had to do on a regular basis — 41 miles from door to door — and the last 9 miles are through Edinburgh city centre traffic, but it’s worth it to be in a friendly professional environment, surrounded by people who have a genuine passion for what they do.

Oh, and Google have updated their Earth imagery for Edinburgh, and it turns out that every morning when driving up Maybury Road, I’m passing a big Poo! in a field.

Interweb Technological Gadgetry

Now that I’m no longer working for an ISP, sadly I’ve lost the perk of free broadband, so I signed up with Web Tapestry. They’re a great little outfit, courteous and knowledgeable, and I’d recommend them in a heartbeat. In fact I’ve been recommending them for months, and everyone who I’ve referred has been very pleased. I even get a nice wee kick back if you mention my name to their support team after signing up with them

Something else I’ve enjoyed this year has been Sipgate’s Voice over IP service to give me 1000 landline minutes a month for under six quid. Real phones plugged into a Linksys PAP2 phone adapter make life so much easier than having to piss about with headsets and PCs just to call people.

Schtuff

I’m watching a programme from Artsworld that I taped last week, Morricone Conducts Morricone. It’s fantastic to listen to (and watch) a great composer conduct his own music with a full orchestra — the Münchner Rundfunkorchester in this case, with guest performers — but something that stands out is the number of other composers work I can hear in the performances. This isn’t to say Ennio Morricone is a plagiarist, but rather that his work has had such a profound influence on so many other composers. I could hear twinges of Don Davis, Michael Kamen and even Jerry Goldsmith. Genius.

On a different tack, something dawned on me the other day. I thought how cool it would be if you could simply wish yourself back in time to an earlier period in your life to perhaps unfuck something bad, or to revisit something good, but then an interesting thought entered my head. Perhaps we can all do this already, but we can’t change anything when we get there, so events unfold exactly the same, and we have the same memories as we would have anyway, meaning we don’t really remember actually going back in time in the first place.

Public Service Announcements

The Nokia N70 is poo. Casino Royale is the best James Bond movie in 25 years. McDonald’s mint chocolate milkshakes are vile. Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgt Eft” is the first Linux distribution that makes me feel comfortable on a computer away from Windows XP. My Sky+’s 40GB hard disk is too small. I sold my Xbox and a pile of Xbox / PS2 / Gamecube games I didn’t want/need and got a PSP for virtually nothing. Did I mention the N70 is poo?

That is all.

Lang May Yer Lum Reek

It’s now 2007, so a Happy New Year to you and yours. Chi-ching!

My ADSL connection is currently tres latent due to some Cisco badness on BT’s part. If you’re trying to call me on Skype or my VoIP number, it’ll either sound like I’m the Moon, or it won’t connect. You may also find my site a tad slow too until it’s sorted out.

Still, in other news, I’ve found out a great way to get a cheap flatscreen TV that looks like this …

… the only problem is, that to install it, you have to do this …

Cheers to Derek for that!

Just sifting through some tech stories on the BBC News site this morning, and chatting about it to folk on IRC, there are some reporting discrepancies that really wound me up. Hey, what’s new; I love railing on the BBC for minor screw-ups, but for BBC News to get things wrong like this doesn’t bode well.

• File-sharing ‘darknet’ unveiled
  “A “darknet” service that allows users to share music files anonymously on the web has been launched in Sweden”, squeals the first paragraph. The problem is, that the service — Relakks — costs €5, or 49 swedish krona per month. How can something be anonymous when you have to pay for it? However, the critical part is that it isn’t a “darknet”. Wikipedia currently defines darknet as “a private virtual network where users only connect to people they trust”. Relakks is a PPTP VPN service which allows all your Internet traffic to be sent via a PPTP server in Sweden, where you will appear to all intents and purposes for IP lookups. This isn’t a darknet, this is a proxy service. Eeshk.
• Blogs buzz on Dell battery recall
  Stop me if I’m wrong, but of the sites they mention — The Inquirer, The Register, Slashdot, Ars Technica and Engadget — only one, Engadget, is by definition a “blog”. I’m pretty certain Slashdot would refute the blog label, and The Inquirer, Ars and el reg are news outlets. Is the BBC trying to belittle online tech news sites by calling them “blogs”, and in the process attempting to lead naive readers to see the Beeb as one of the only authoritative news sites? Thanks to sporkle for that one
• Smash hit for internet chav guide
  Decapitalizing “Internet” (it’s the Internet, not an internet) aside, this is a story about two girls from Somerset who got 30,000 hits on their YouTube-submitted video called “How to Be a Perfect Chav”. A quick flick onto YouTube reveals videos about a cat crapping into a toilet (~ 646,000 hits), a dog humping a cat (~ 260,000 hits), someone making pancakes (~ 299,000 hits), and Gizmodo showing off the new Sony Mylo (~ 820,000 hits). Really, 30,000 hits is a drop in the bucket – many popular YouTube submissions have millions of hits, some even only a week or two after being uploaded.

Come on, BBC, do yer job.

Well, looks like one of ThinkGeek’s excellent 2003 April Fools — the George Foreman USB iGrill — is still wreaking havoc amongst the gadget blogging community. Not only did Wired’s Gear Factor (cached copy) pick up this from mobilemag.com (cached copy) as though new — Wired, newsflash, it’s over three years old — before deleting the article — Wired, breaking news, Google remembers all — but numerous other gadget sites carried the same thing as though real, including Gadgetspy (cached copy). Someone even tried to digg the story.

Bwahahaha.

TiVo Series 3 has landed. How sweet — and expandable — does this DVR look? If only a UK release would happen again …

Last week, I bought a cheesy Pinnacle USB2 TV-in device. I really only wanted it for composite video in from a PlayStation2; the fact it had an aerial socket for analogue terrestrial TV wasn’t a factor in the purchase at all. In fact the main purchase factor was that it was in stock at a local PC World and that it only cost £34.99—much cheaper than the nearest Hauppauge kit.

So I take it home, plug it into one of my Dell laptops, and yay: the TV-in works. Now to make the composite video work … hmm, where’s the software options to enable it? Why does the clunky media centre-like software say “can’t change channel” when I press AV on the remote? I was becoming more and more worried about this purchase. Eventually, I searched the Pinnacle support forums and found a post which absolutely floored me.

In the readme file on the installation cd this is mentioned.

7.00 Known limitations
Composite and S-video are not currently supported.

How do you like dem apples? Two ports, which are clearly visible on the actual hardware through a clear pane in the retail box, just don’t work. Not even the manufacturer knows how to make them work. I was back in PC World like a shot looking for a refund, which to their credit they happily gave me.

Wandering around the store, I saw some cheap and cheerful PlayStation2 games. Lurking amongst the chaff was a beaten up copy of Twisted Metal Black with a bundled Network Adapter. Now this is something I’ve been looking for for an age—a search which has sped up now that I’ll have a copy of Pro Evolution Soccer 5 within the next couple of weeks. The RRP of this bundle pack is £39.99, which the PC World “reduced price” sticker reminded me of. The reduced price was £12.97. Yoink, mine!

When it was rung through the till, it came up with a price of £7.97. Bonus! Saved myself £28.02, which is not too shabby at all. On opening it at home, it was in mint condition: Network Adapter packaging untouched, plastic seal still around the enclosed game … PC World marked off 70% of the cost simply because the box was a bit tatty.

So the reason I’m not wibbling and ranting like I usually do was that my returning the gash USB TV card got me a piece of console gadgetry that I’ve been hunting for at a cheap price for months. I’ve a bit more respect for PC World now, even if just that whoever prices up some of their “used and abused” products just doesn’t have a clue

Crap.

I love blogging, but sometimes I just zone out and forget all about it. So it’s time for another CramBlogEntryDuNeuro™ …

november > new car > dj’ed (!) at john and sabrina’s wedding > videoisland died > december > firefox 1.0 > rediscovered celestia > blagged myself a free iPod mini (a gold one, bling bling) > culturekitchen > smoothwall’s site got hacked > new phone > chill out! > finally sold the tivo > sun must buy red hat or die! > rediscovered dooce > cheerio blunkett > ny times firefox ad > ruff! > strange people at my work make christmas video card > equally strange, but absolutely superb, works night out > on call from 24th to 31st > enjoyed quiet christmas with family, slightly marred by getting called out on xmas eve, plus some evil boxing day late-nightness due to some bloody worm > tsunami badness > rediscovered chunk’s snowball > finally managed to download grand theft auto 2 > january > came off call, drinkies, sore head, oy > thank god the west wing is back > rediscovered queen of sky > pro evo soccer 4 kicks serious arse > brad and jen split up — so she’ll be shopping around then … > learndirect sucks > so looking forward to huygens landing this friday …

… and relax.

US budget airline JetBlue have satellite TV built into the aircraft. Each passenger can watch live TV as broadcast on the DIRECTV platform (similar to Sky here in the UK), which is pretty damn cool. Something similar could surely be done with Sky on UK domestic flights, which would make up for the utter lack of entertainment on BA shorthaul