- 2nd
- More illegal art → It’s time for content-lockdown whack-a-mole, in the style of DeCSS! there once was a man and he had zero cash his post to doom nine dot org made quite a splash with F’in pig assrats who thought it was fine to censor free speech on said website doom nine one thought and one slaved on a poem all day to make [...]
- 5th
- MTU setting → Amazing! Dave’s suggestion of changing my computer’s MTU setting worked! I had been unable to visit one particular site for a week or two (”Connection reset by peer”), but the problem existed only on one computer; the laptop could connect just fine. Clearing temp files and cookies didn’t work. Changing browser didn’t help. Obtaining a new [...]
- Better than killing a pig → Ask Oxford reckons the ditty about killing pigs and being happy is a 17th century English proverb, rather than a Chinese one: If you would be happy for a week take a wife; if you would be happy for a month kill a pig; but if you would be happy all your life plant a garden. Sounds [...]
- Lucy II → Today has been too geeky, so: This is Lucy II. Her understanding of cause and effect is limited. She doesn’t know that tipping over an upturned glass will grant her playtime with the spider within, but she does know that meowing directly into my ear at 5am will cause the window to open.
- 10th
- Antz is alright → As everybody in the world should know, I’m a great friend of ants, and of insect-kind in general, except when I’m eating smarties. Why? Because ants are cool. Ants chop down forests with their bare teeth, build gigantic fortresses out of them, and farm fungus on what’s left. The only way they could possibly be [...]
- 11th
- Psst, ID cards are a crock. Pass it on. → The Labour Party are tracking you, and you’re paying more than £5bn for the privilege. There’s not much I have to say about this that NO2ID hasn’t been saying for the past couple of years, but an awful awful lot of people still don’t get it, so here it goes again: ID cards do not work. Identity [...]
- 14th
- DDoSing Estonia → Some say Russia is behind Estonia’s DDoSing, but I kinda doubt it: don’t DDoS attacks come from millions of distinct, globally distributed botnet IPs, rather than a single IP from within the Russian government? Nevertheless, I think Russia is still the #1 supervillain in the world today. Guess who’s beating up protestors, jailing opposition candidates [...]
- 15th
- Peak-oil salesmen → Peak oil is a crisis cult, and here’s how you can tell: Do they offer an apocalyptic vision of the future that can only be avoided by listening to their advice? Is the threat wildly out of proportion to the evidence, or fabricated entirely? Are they selling something? Do they have any political motivations? For the Peak Oil movement, the [...]
- 16th
- IPPA → The Intellectual Property Protection Act of the US would criminalise “attempted copyright infringement”. This has generated a lot of heat and noise from IP freedom fighters, but it doesn’t significantly expand the pool of people who are already criminalised by existing legislation. There’s not a lot of practical difference between “copyright infringement” and “attempted copyright [...]
- 18th
- Slow worm! → Lucy brought in a slow worm this morning. That’s nothing new, but it’s the first time she’s brought one in alive, in one piece. I shooed her away and picked it up to throw it outside. It immediately knotted itself around my fingers and squeezed with more strength than you would think a tiny thing [...]
- Prejudice → I’m sorry to say that people often aren’t my first priority, so I am continually surprised when I decide to notice them. Today I walked into town to buy some onions and carrots to make a risotto. In front of me in the queue was a middle-aged man. He looked like Ronnie Corbett. On the checkout [...]
- The Baroque Cycle → I just finished reading The System of the World, the final volume of Neal Stephenson’s The Baroque Cycle. It took me 3 years, nearly half as long as the author took to write it, although admittedly I was hardly reading it full-time. The cycle is a vast, sprawling mess. It’s set in and around 17th century [...]
- 22nd
- Parasites or entrepreneurs? → From The Economist: This week it emerged that 88 of Slough’s Roma are unaccompanied minors. The young migrants came in small sibling groups, travelling in the backs of lorries for €75 (£51) apiece. Six had babies of their own, and seven were pregnant. Lone minors of any nationality are entitled to a bed, a £45 ($89) weekly [...]
- 28th
- Pirates of the Caribbean 3 → I saw this last night. It’s better than number 2, and the final half hour is an accurate portrayal of the fight that the 8 or 9 writers must’ve had over what the plot should be. Thus, it’s a bit of a mess, and Mess is what the whole film is about. There are some [...]
- Jaws killed Christ → Er, no, I didn’t actually.
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The phrase “gr9 m9″ does not appear in Google anywhere. WHAT?
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