January 2012
2 posts
“Meetings are an addictive, highly self-indulgent activity that corporations and...”
– Dave Barry
“He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp posts - for support rather than...”
– Andrew Lang
December 2011
1 post
“Common sense is nothing more than a deposit of prejudices laid down by the mind...”
– Albert Einstein
November 2011
2 posts
“If I’d asked people what they wanted, they would have asked for a faster horse”
– Henry Ford (maybe!)
“the spread of secondary and latterly tertiary education has created a large...”
– Sir Peter Medawar
October 2011
2 posts
“Ha! I laugh at danger and drop ice cubes down the vest of fear.”
– Blackadder
September 2011
0 posts
“The thing I like about bikes is that only people who like bikes are on...”
– James May
July 2011
1 post
Remote support app - Join.Me, quick review
Just popping up a (very) quick review of Join.Me, a remote application from the folks who bought you LogMeIn.
I’ve use LogMeIn in the past when doing support for people from home with stuff on their PCs. One of the downsides has been that when dealing with people with, uh, “less than ideal” PC skills is that there was a bit of setup to to at their end to get it going.
To use...
May 2011
1 post
“Study the box. Observe it. Inside. Outside. From inside to outside, and outside...”
– Michael Quinn Patton
February 2011
1 post
1 tag
Basic Bread Recipe
I thought I’d put this up here, but I hadn’t when I came to find it again. Haven’t made this for AGES, so it’s time again.
This is the Jamie Oliver recipe. The only thing that I change is that to speed up the process of proving is that I put some boiling water in a bowl in the bottom of the oven (oven off), and put the dough in there to prove. Makes a nice, slightly...
December 2010
3 posts
“A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a...”
– Robert A. Heinlein
“The problem with internet quotes and statistics is that often times,...”
– Abraham Lincoln
“The first myth of management is that it exists. The second myth of management is...”
– Robert Heller
November 2010
6 posts
Tumblr for Droid
Niiiice… this is posted from my phone. That said, I’ll stick to a full keyboard when I can!
Using Robocopy to copy to a NAS
I’ve bought me a Shiny New QNAP TS-410, and am in the process of migrating my “stuff” over.
In Windows, I’ve used Robocopy for some years now, which is really good for moving these types of large amounts of data across. What I’ll usually do is give Robocopy a couple of runs at it, to make sure I’ve got everything - OK in theory, but what it’s been doing...
“Smoking is one of the leading causes of statistics.”
– Fletcher Knebel
Power Balance Bands →
Firstly, let me say HAHAHAHAHAHAAHAHAAAHHHAAAAAHAHAHA!!!
HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAAAHAHAA!
HAHAHAAAA!
Ahem, done now. Be sure to check out the link to the Power Balance website, where if you click on “How It Works”, you get a page that says “Coming Soon”. (ie, once we figure out a semi-valid pseudo-scientific-sounding explaination that won’t have people laughing so much...
October 2010
8 posts
http://www.arnnet.com.au/article/366334/accc_launch... →
I’ve always wondered how they got away with saying that they don’t handle warranties, and sending you to the manufacturer. Maybe the ACCC isn’t a completely toothless tiger.
Things Bogans Like →
Replacement Wiring Harness Smoke kit →
I’m not sure if this replacement electrical system smoke is compatible with old British bikes too….
“Here is presented for your perusal one Lucas Replacement Wiring Harness Smoke kit, P/N 530433, along with the very rare Churchill Tool 18G548BS adapter tube and metering valve. These kits were supplied surreptitiously to Lucas factory technicians as a trouble-shooting and...
“There is hardly a thing in the world that some man can not make a little worse...”
“There is no time like the present for postponing what you ought to be doing.”
“Time waste differs from material waste in that there can be no salvage. The...”
– Henry Ford
1 tag
Things that annoy me.
As part of a growing list as I make my way towards being a fully-fledged Grumpy Old Man, I’m going to share with you some things that annoy me.
- People who don’t wait for you to get out of a lift before they start piling in.
- Apparently able-bodied persons who catch a lift up one floor, or down any less than two.
- People who sit in the right-hand lane on multi-lane roads, when...
Goats in Trees! Goats in Trees! →
DAMN that's a big kid! →
Having a recent addition to the family, I find this interesting. This kid is bigger at birth than our new model, who is 3 months old!
1 tag
Photography in the "modern" age
Have the masses reached and surpassed the pinnacle of photographic fidelity? Now that P&S cameras and DSLRs are cheaper than ever, it seems that most photography now occurs through pinhole lenses attached to crappy sensors on phones.
Will the photo album of the future be a series of tiny, out of focus digital shots which are obscured by pocket lint? (Those photos that weren’t lost...
September 2010
4 posts
3 tags
Installing Eclipse for Django/Python
Install Eclipse from the repos. I’m just using Synaptic (installing on Mint), search for Eclipse and tick it (and agree to install the bunch of dependencies)
Once installed, open Eclipse. Following the instructions here,
Click Help > Install New Software
Click Add
In the name field, enter Pydev and Pydev Extensions. In location, enter http://pydev.org/updates
It should locate the...
2 tags
Django setup - Part 1
I’m going to have a bash at building me a webpage using Django.
On the tin it says it’s a “high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.”
Rapid = good. And although my experience is limited (close to nil really), Python = good in my books too. Plenty of folks will argue otherwise, but for a beginner apparently Python is...
One for the nerds - Duke Nukem Forever →
“Political Correctness is a doctrine, fostered by a delusional, illogical,...”
August 2010
17 posts
Fat fingered sumo wrestlers given iPads →
Japanese sumo wrestlers have been given iPads to communicate because their fingers are too fat to use a standard mobile phone.
Kodak’s 1975 Model Digital Camera →
As old as me!
“it took 23 seconds to record a single digital image to its cassette deck. To view the filmless photo, Mr. Sasson had to remove the cassette from the camera and place it in a customized reader that could display the image on an old black and white television.”
(via Slashdot)
Another one for the lawyers →
Sounds like Sesame Street. First, Apple tried to assert that they own the word “pod” and the letter “i”, now Facebook are trying take ownership of the word “book”.
Oh well, it’ll keep the lawyers in hot dinners I guess…
Desalination plant delayed, because there's been... →
‘‘Now we’ve got this massive white elephant down the coast, three times as big as the one they swore they’d never build. All of this and an absence of using some contemporary technology for capturing and recycling, let alone capturing stormwater.’’
“Trust me Bart, it’s better to walk in on both your parents instead of just...”
– Milhouse Mussolini Van Houten
“If you watch Jaws backwards, it’s a movie about a shark that keeps...”
Think TV commercials are louder than the shows?... →
No matter what you think you’ve heard, TV commercials really don’t get louder than the programs they accompany. Production tricks only make them sound like they do. It’s called “inconsistent” or “perceived” loudness. Perceived or not, the problem likely will get worse with digital television.
“An idea that is developed and put into action is more important than an idea...”
– Siddhartha Gautama
2 tags
Software sources for Mint
My ISP (iiNet) mirrors Ubuntu, but not Mint. Aside from being free content, it’s also the fastest download coming from the iiNet mirror.
Since Mint is so closely based on Ubuntu, it seems to use the same repos. So what I’ve done, is opened /etc/apt/sources.list (take a copy first) and done a find and replace to replace:
archive.ubuntu.com
with
ftp.iinet.net.au/pub
A little...
“You will reach the highest possible point in your business or profession.”
2 tags
Multi-monitor madness on Mint
Well, madness may be overstating it. Maybe “Slight inconvenience”? Doesn’t start with M though…
I’ve got around to rolling my main desktop onto Linux Mint (from Ubuntu) after running it on my laptop for a few weeks - definitely a nice little distro, works a lot more “out of box” than Ubuntu (which is what it says on the tin).
Anyway, the madness of...
“You should never say anything to a woman that even remotely suggests that you...”
– Dave Barry
“I love deadlines. I like the whooshing sound they make as they fly by.”
– Douglas Adams
1 tag
RDP for Android
Found a ripper little app (currently in beta) for Android, it’s a remote desktop app called PocketCloud.
I’ve been using it to RDP to Windows boxen, but it also handles VNC and other stuff from the looks of it. At first glance, I thought “how the hell can you run a remote desktop session on a 4 inch screen?”, but I can tell you, it actually works! Not the same as...
Five Ways Around The Filter In Two Minutes →
July 2010
8 posts
Flash Photography with Canon EOS Cameras →
Got directed to this as a primer on flash photography, there is a scary amount of information here. Very informative!
1 tag
Bypass stupid fan pages in Facebook
Found this site on doing a google search for one of those “Oh Noes, check this AMAZING thing out, you just need to click to be a ‘fan’ and we’ll show you…” pages on Facebook. This site http://www.bypassfanpages.com/ shows what they’re talking about (if you’re interested), without joining as a fan of it.
Nice one…. :)
3 tags
Applications List
I’m hopeless at remembering applications I’ve used, for those little things that you only have to do every 6 months or so. So I’ve started a Handy Apps list, and I’ll try and remember to pop up any apps I use and might want to come back to.
The first entry is Anti-Twin, which is de-duplication for files/folders. Seems pretty good - I’m using it to sort through all...