Update 2009-12-13 17:54: updated Facebook group URL, charity total Update 2009-12-13 21:49: original Facebook group is back! Update 2009-12-14 08:00: It’s Monday! BUY IT NOW! Update 2009-12-15 13:00: Keep buying! A one day push isn’t enough, it needs to be sustained throughout the week! We’re currently up 10% over X Factor Joe! Update 2009-12-20 00:10: [...]
I got a letter addressed to “The Occupier” from Virgin Media this morning. It’s the latest in many advertising missives that I’m convinced I’m only sent because someone has surveyed the street and spied my Sky minidish attached to my back wall. So this one I got this morning has listed ten reasons to switch [...]
I have a cheap dedicated server running Ubuntu Linux — the 8.04 LTS “Hardy Heron” release — with Kimsufi, the budget arm of French hosting company OVH. All their Linux servers (and FreeBSD servers too, I think) are provisioned with their own custom, static kernel. This, they say, makes it “secure”. It also makes it [...]
For the last couple of years, I’ve fallen more and more back in love with Macs. One of their foibles is that Apple have decided the standard British English, or UK, keyboard layout should not match that of every other computer manufacturer on the planet. Various characters are just in the wrong place, such as [...]
I’ve been playing about with OS X on a Dell Mini 9 netbook. A major hassle is that it only has 8GB of on-board disk space (albeit on a lovely silent SSD). I bought a 16GB Class 4 SDHC card to use for my home directory, but it turns out OS X only automatically mounts [...]
(With apologies to Monty Python) Four well-dressed men sitting together at a LUG meeting, surrounding a laptop running Ubuntu 9.04. First Yorkshireman (1Y): Ahh … Very passable, this, very passable. Second Yorkshireman (2Y): Nothing like a good install of Ubuntu Jaunty, eh Gessiah? Third Yorkshireman (3Y): You’re right there, Obediah. Fourth Yorkshireman (4Y): Who’d a [...]
I was flicking through the iTunes Store this morning and noticed something odd … some words in reviews and track titles had asterisks in them as though they were swear words (e.g. ‘b*ll*cks’). But they didn’t appear to be swear words. iTunes uses allmusic for the bulk of their album and single reviews, so luckily [...]
As someone said on IRC this morning: “the FSF appear to have come up with the perfect plan for how to look like a bunch of annoying, smart-arse tossers“. Has the Free Software Foundation gone nuts? Update 13:30: I don’t seem to be alone on this: popey, mgdm, ZDNet, Slashdot. I’ve been saying for a [...]
Google Earth has had 3D building views for a while, but I didn’t realise how good the quality of the newer photorealistic buildings were until I decided to recreate one of my favourite skyline shots using Google Earth. At the thumbnail level, it’s hard to tell which is which. Gobsmackingly impressive stuff.
I dropped my dinky Dell Latitude X300 a couple of weeks ago. The whole thing just locked up hard, and wouldn’t recover from a reboot. I ended up claiming for it on my home insurance. The insurance folks got back to me and said it was unrepairable, and they’ve offered me £400 in vouchers for [...]
