Did you vote yesterday?
For more or less the first time in my life a candidate for whom I voted actually won! The Green party candidate for Cambridge Abbey came in by a fairly large margin. Cool!
VOTE TODAY!
If you do not vote, you absolutely forfeit the right to complain about the goverment, council or anything about the adminstration of this country. If you don’t agree with any of the candidates, then go into the polling booth and mess up your card. That get’s counted, and reduces the mandate of the winner.
Listening to people who complain about the government, and then admit they have not voted really makes my blood boil. Generally accompanied by the comment that “..all politicians are as bad as each other”, “I don’t agree with any of the major parties” etc.. My view: Do something or shutup. Vote or go march on Whitehall. Vote Monster raving Loony party if you want, vote for the mad independent who wants to ban cars, but whatever you do today, go and vote.
The future of Wifi and portable entertainment devices?
WiFi the new gadget must-have - Digital Lifestyle - Macworld UK
Is this a joke? In the fast moving world of portable communications, these people are predicting that in FOUR years time a mere 20% of portable entertainment devices will have wifi? I would suggest that in less than 2 years the majority of new devices (including phones) will have wifi. In 2012 who knows how they’ll be communicating! Perhaps 3.5G’s successor’s successor will be the main portable device communication protocol. Certainly I rely now on my phone’s 3G connection in order to get email rather than looking for a wireless point. Unless you are sat in a place where you know there is free wifi, 3G is cheaper and more reliable. When data prices come down, especially for roaming, then 3G will be the best way for all mobile connections (i.e. not fixed in one place). Of course if your idea of an internet connection is one way fat pipe for Torrents, then no. But if your idea of an internet connection is email, IM, rss, browsing, with a reasonable (not hires) amount of gratuitous (purely entertainment) video then 3G is sufficient now.
On the train from Cambridge to Kingscross recently I noticed that, at least on my network, it’s 3.5G (HSDPA) most of the way. Since the train line goes mostly through fields, I can only assume that the intended market is the commuter. That is pretty nice. Last time I did that journey with my laptop (4 months past), the connection was pretty shoddy. Even maintaining a IM conversation was hard (admittedly using iChat the most tempremental IM client there is).
Springtime is here?
It must be spring for real today. I spent a good amount of yesterday sat in a park, and this morning the amount of weeds in the garden was enough to make me actually do something about it. That and after the gardening there was still time to sit on my deck (constructed last summer, but too late to ever use it) with my MBP and squint at the screen.
Weeds are like rust on old cars. You only notice a little bit until you start doing something about them. I thought an hour should take care of most of them. In reality it took an afternoon and a full green wheelie bin. The garden looks nice now though. I also feel quite proud of that fact that i dug deep to the roots on most of the particularly large weeds and hopefully this will help next year.
I even spent an hour upgrading Wordpress and doing a bit of spring cleaning here. No weeds, but I’ve hardly spent any time writing, nevermind maintaining it.
History Meme
Ok I give in. After seeing this on many blogs over the last 48 hrs I have to give in.
history|awk '{a[$2]++} END{for(i in a){printf “%5d\t%s\n “,a[i],i}}’|sort -rn|head
Macbook Pro
98 ls
96 cd
30 ping
29 ssh
26 du
22 sudo
20 rm
19 cvs
18 top
18 sed
Linux box:
88 ls
63 cd
33 ssh
31 su
30 vi
24 du
17 exit
16 ./Encode2flv.sh
13 rm
13 mv
Even on my Mythtv box:
33 ls
23 df
22 su
19 sudo
12 firefox
9 mplayer
9 cd
7 killall
5 vi
5 tail
Not that informative, but a good laugh! Although I do have to ask myself. Why do I need to look in a directory so many times? Another question that comes into mind is that I think I do too much stuff as root. There’s a lot of commands that I know I run, that are missing there.
Veteran rocker Mark E Smith faces RSPCA probe for chopping up rare red squirrels with hedge-clippers | the Daily Mail
As spotted on the best cambridge web forum (only one?) WAN
Is he or is he not a god?
Joss Whedons Firefly Season 2
If you want to ever see a season 2 of Firefly, go fill in this user demand survey, and help Joss escape the clutches of ‘The Fox Man’.
Lost Girls
So I finally found myself a copy of “Lost Girls”. I’ve been wanting to read this piece of work for so long. But the unavailabilty of this in the UK did prohibit me. I even considered paying the hundred odd quid to get it from a US comics dealer from ebay and ship it, but common sense prevailed. Mind you I paid a fair amount for it here, but it was to a UK independent comics store, so that’s OK. It’s also a lovely boxed hardbacked set, so I think that was well worth the 25 pint cost. For those of you who do not know about this comic, and cannot be bothered to click through to Wiki, then Lost Girls is a “erotic” novel about the fantasies of Wendy (Peter Pan), Dorothy (Wizard of Oz) and Alice (you get the drift). They are all now grown up and boring, and look back on their lives.
It has been banned from being published in the UK as Great Ormond’s street hospital own the UK copyright and refuse to allow a UK publication. Not at all sure I agree with this, although perhaps the fact that it is a Children’s hospital should give them some leeway. Is this hypocritical of me? Should I donate money to them as a way of assuaging any feelings of guilt, or should I refuse to do so from a moral point of view. Tricky one.
Alan Moore is an excellent writer, and apart from Promethea, I’ve loved everything he’s done. I read all Promethea, but I must admit towards the 4th volume it got a bit silly. I could never quite escape the niggling thought in the back of my head, that he was sat laughing his socks off, at the thought that a reader would be seriously reading every word he wrote. To be truthful, I hope that he was! On the other hand the art and the concept was well worth the read, and I’m glad I did.
Back to Lost Girls, Moore ended up marrying his artist (Melinda Gebbie). The quote on the wiki page says “I’d recommend to anybody working on their relationship that they should try embarking on a 16-year elaborate pornography together,” joked Moore. “I think they’ll find it works wonders.”
Let’s hope the book is as good as its hype.
multi room music playing goodness without paying for it?
Well. I decided that I really needed to be able to play the same music in all my rooms:
- Installed and configure MPD on my Mythtv box
- Used Theremin to control this.
- Setup Icecast to broadcast a ogg stream
- Setup MPD to broadcast to a Icecast server
- Used mplayer on the Mythtv box to play the stream and VLC on the Mac.
Except it doesn’t work. I just cannot get less than about 0.5seconds latency, which does not sound much but is enough to make it painful to listen to!
Ok then let’s think of another solution.
I am very impressed with MPD though. It’s a very cool way of playing music from my laptop, direct through my speakers (along with my awesome Rel sub!). Basically it is a remote control client to play music on another computer. MPD plays and publishes all music available on that remote computer, to any connected remote clients. So I can use Theremin to search for and play music through my main system whilst sat on the settee with the laptop! Funky!
Deux Ex Malcontent: CNN gives career advice to Blogger
Deus Ex Malcontent: Say What You Will (Requiem for a TV News Career)
Vowe points to a CNN Newroom employee who got fired for nothing other than writing a blog. Apparently because of his liberal views, aired on said blog. His post is insightful into the nature of the news industry in the US, and well worth a read.