- 2nd
- Hair → I just moved house! The new place is lovely, but the bathroom lacks a shaver socket. My workaround is a US-to-UK 2-to-3-pin adaptor, but unfortunately it’s the one I’ve been using on my desktop computer (a Shuttle SN25P - double check the plug type if you buy one in the UK). So it seems that [...]
- 7th
- Light at the end of the tunnel for stuttering GL Slideshow → Mac OS X has had a smoothly fading, panning and zooming screensaver for years, and so has the Freeosphere, up to a point. GL Slideshow, part of xscreensaver, suffers from an annoying stutter between images, which sort of defeats the point of having smooth fading in the first place. The source code gives a detailed [...]
- Direct debits are an exploit → BBC News: TV presenter Jeremy Clarkson has lost money after publishing his bank details in his newspaper column. The Top Gear host revealed his account numbers after rubbishing the furore over the loss of 25 million people’s personal details on two computer discs. He wanted to prove the story was a fuss about nothing. But Clarkson admitted he [...]
- Social engineering Facebook → We had visitors this weekend. One of them told me about a security problem she’d had. Her boyfriend had correctly guessed the answers to the “security questions” on her Yahoo account, and had thus managed to gain access to her email. From there, he had managed to find out her Facebook password, and do all [...]
- 10th
- Mini-tasers? → In store now!
- 11th
- Binary stopgapping → There exist 48GB CompactFlash cards. Cool. 48 is a strange number in computer science. Not as strange as 27, but still not a power of two. Ignoring the gibibyte controversy for a moment, new memory types appear in binary increments: 512MB, 1GB, 2GB, 4GB, 8GB, 16GB, 32GB, 64GB, etc.. So where does 48 come from? The industry [...]
- 14th
- Betterlympics → BBC News: ‘Blade Runner’ handed Olympic ban. This man has no legs, so he had some artificial ones fitted. They are similar to the heel springs in Portal: Unfortunately, they turned out to be better than his original legs, so he’s been banned from the Olympics because he’s a sci-fi freakin’ transhuman robot. Stunning.
- 22nd
- Remember the LazyWeb? → This article on the LazyWeb is more than 5 years old. The implementation it describes now 404s, and its spinoff is dead (”The LazyWeb is now closed.”). I think the original formalisation of the LazyWeb idea was massively over-engineered. It involved RSS, RDF and Trackback - the latest cool toys back then. A Google Blog Search [...]
- 24th
- “Not plagiarism, just illegal” → On using a song in a YouTube video: (13:28:14) Daniel: do you think there are copyright issues with the izzard music? (13:28:24) James: yes (13:28:33) James: but that hasn't stopped many people on youtube so far... (13:28:45) Daniel: excellent (13:28:53) Daniel: it is non profit (13:28:59) Daniel: and obscure (13:29:20) James: doesn't matter that it's non-profit, though the obscurity makes it very [...]
- 31st
- 1998-2008 → I truly don’t believe you are a real geek unless you can love this image. (Previously…)
Posts
Oneliners
The Ugly Truth About Anonymity Online: “Hint: if you see a van with several antennas arranged in some geometric pattern on the roof, that would not be a positive development.”
(0)HOWTO make money from Free software: be MySQL and sell yourself to Sun for a cool billion.
(0)Gizmodo on what’s coming at Macworld 2008: “…it may be some kind of magic tablet…”
(0)Status
9:49am, 31st January 2008
Car insurance is up for renewal. My current provider turns out to be the cheapest. Convenient or suspicious?
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