- 1st
- Amazon Associates → Exactly 4 years ago today, I wrote up some reviews of Iain M. Banks’ Culture books. As an experiment, I signed up for an Amazon Associates account and linked each of the book covers to Amazon’s page selling it. While doing my customary yearly dig through hundreds of unread emails, I find Amazon Associates has [...]
- Abusing archive.org for backup purposes → The Wayback Machine is fussy about what types of file it archives. I can’t find a relevant FAQ, but it appears to only archive text (HTML) and images. For example, this little-known amazingly unpopular and unlinked image is archived, whereas putty.exe, a well-known super-popular program with high pagerank is not. Based on this evidence, I’m assuming [...]
- Fiction → They’ve finally put “First Bible Stories” in the same section as “Twinkle the Tooth Fairy”.
- 7th
- Internet destruction for oil? → 6 undersea fibre-optic cables have been cut in the last two weeks, and conspiracy theories abound. Is this the smoking gun that proves there is evil afoot?: Wikipedia’s map is better, but its data sets off the same alarm bells: Assuming the dates and locations are accurate, this can’t have been caused by any natural phenomenon, unless [...]
- 12th
- Gmail’s dot-ignorance → Yesterday I read out my email address over the phone to a super-secret company, and today they sent me an email with a random period right in the middle of the address. It arrived, because Gmail ignores dots within usernames. So this old “bug” saved me a lot of hassle.
- 15th
- Out With A Bang Foundation → I just found this from 2004, while e-housekeeping: Out With A Bang Foundation - for old dying people who don’t want to wither away. They get to do something spectacularly dangerous as their last act. With a minimum 95% chance of death, they’ll get into the history books, and go out with a bang. Come on venture [...]
- FCrackZip → Continuing the data-archaeology theme, I found a file called ancient.zip, which seems to hold some incredibly interesting Amiga files from when I was very young. There are home-made OctaMED modules, Deluxe Paint IFFs, AMOS scripts, and some text files. I’d love to get into this file, but it’s password protected. FCrackZip is a Free (GPL 2.0) [...]
- 17th
- Kosovo declares independence → There are 192 states recognised by the UN. Kosovo will likely become number 193 assuming the West calls Russia’s bluff of revenge-recognising states in Georgia: Russia’s foreign ministry has indicated that Western recognition of an independent Kosovo could have implications for the Georgian breakaway provinces of Abkhazia and South Ossetia. Implications? Bring it on. 193 states is [...]
- 18th
- 3 Mobile Mail → Update 19/02/2008: Disregard any positive sentiments I express below. Mobile Mail causes data loss by deleting from Gmail any emails it downloads. I can’t explain my earlier results. I guess I should’ve known better than using dodgy proprietary software in the first place. Here’s the original post: Here’s what I’ve learnt about using Gmail with my [...]
- 19th
- Ron Paul won Nevada → Since Mitt Romney has since withdrawn from the race, Ron Paul actually won Nevada! I reckon Vegas-based fellow libertarian Penn Jillette’s endorsement did it! Not that it’s going to make a whole lot of difference. America is apparently not quite ready for responsible government.
- RIP HD-DVD → I knew there was a reason I took this picture:
- 22nd
- Phun is amazing → Phun, a 2D physics sandbox, is amazing, and there’s a GNU+Linux version that Just Works, as opposed to the Windows version which seems to require extra files and fiddling. I want to say tipping point, but apparently that’s rubbish. This is my attempt at building a pump. Unfortunately, Phun doesn’t seem to do hydraulics yet. [...]
- 25th
- Barack Obama vs Hillary Clinton → Although I’m not an American citizen and have no direct interest in the next generation presidential candidates, I can’t help but opine and speculate on such an interesting battle. Hillary Clinton represents the establishment, bringing with her brand-name recognition from the previous Clinton. Indeed, her campaign is just the Clinton campaign, but with “Hillary” tacked [...]
- 26th
- 10 years of lynz → 10 years ago today, Adam received his lines. His lynz. The grand total is now exactly: which is approximately 10 to the power of a 1040-digit number. And if he doesn’t do them by tomorrow, there’ll be more. The number of lines weighs in at just under the value of a particular universal constant implicated in inflationary [...]
- 27th
- L2 cache → Intel’s new Penryn-based Core 2 processors have as much as 12MB of L2 cache on the CPU. Considering my 2005-era Athlon 64 only has 512KB, that’s a lot - a 2500% boost in 3 years. So here’s the deal: Dear Lazyweb, please write software to mount L2 cache as a drive à la RAM disks. Not [...]
- Model number bling → Am I the only one to notice that AMD, Intel and NVIDIA now all have products numbered 9500? Previously, ATI, Apple and Nokia have had the Radeon 9500, PowerMac 9500 and the 9500 Communicator. Quick googling reveals many more 9500s. What is it about this number? I think it’s the 9 that’s important. 9 is the [...]
- 28th
- KDE vs GNOME → Kubuntu 8.04 will mini-fork for KDE 4. I’m not sure I like the way this is going. The commercially supported, stable, feature-complete Kubuntu-KDE3 may draw users away from the still-experimental Kubuntu-KDE4, denying KDE 4.0.1 the extended testing that it needs. But then what choice do they have? Not many people are going to use KDE [...]
Posts
Oneliners
C64 games on Wii Virtual Console. The “abandonware” excuse will become harder to defend.
(0)The new EOS 450D only supports SD cards. Is this the beginning of the end for CompactFlash?
(0)Microsoft+Yahoo: The AOL+Time Warner of the 2000s IMHO.
(0)Status
9:52am, 29th February 2008
Opera seems to be an order of magnitude faster than Firefox for executing certain Javascript.
(0)5:08pm, 22nd February 2008
Last time I recommended a Mac to someone was 1996, and it was probably a PowerMac 9500. Now it’s a MacBook.
(0)9:40am, 21st February 2008
Hypothesis: if some genres of music "all sound the same", then it should be possible to write a more efficient compressor for that genre.
(0)11:58am, 12th February 2008
Knowing somebody’s phone number is now an indicator that you don’t know them that well.
(0)7:54pm, 8th February 2008
Heh. The ball of the foot is actually in a completely different place to where i’ve always thought it was.
(0)7:26pm, 8th February 2008
How do undersea cables cross rough terrain? Do they stretch across submarine gorges like rope bridges?
(0)12:22pm, 8th February 2008
I only ever seem to update this when i’m waiting for something, and this time i’m waiting for a train.
(0)10:01am, 5th February 2008
Does old tech get cheaper with time? Not necessarily. DDR1 is now about 3 times the price of DDR2.
(0)