Tuesday 27th December 2005
Song: McFly - All About You
Hehe, this is too good. It seems President Bush has an iPod, and there's an interview with him about it.
My favourite bit, is this:
Bush: Lightweight, and crank it on, and you shuffle the Shuffle.
Hume: So you -- it plays . . .
Bush: Put it in my pocket, got the ear things on.
I also love how he thinks the button to move to the next track is "pretty high-tech stuff.". I worry.
Sunday 25th December 2005
Dear Christ,
I think too many people overlook the fact that it is your birthday today, amongst the rush to buy cards which only get thrown in the bin in January. I suppose it's fair to say that most cards these days are made from recycled stuff anyway... But what about the power required to do the recycling? That's gotta still kill the atmosphere a bit.
I wonder if Green Peace ever drive their Land Rovers with broken catalytic converters over to recycling plants to make a fuss about this.
Hehe, that reminds me. Did you see that thing a month or so ago where Green Peace were protesting at some event Blair was going to be speaking at. They were walking around on the beams that hold the place up, dropping stickers (which I expect some trees had to die for!). In the end, Tony Blair went next door and did his speech there, heh. Stupid buggers.
I'm not completely without care for the planet, just to be clear. I just feel like we humans have already fucked things up far beyond repair, and Green Peace's approach to everything is just annoying and not very productive at all. Perhaps you could have a word with Pops about this, see if he could work on a little patch for us. It was after all due to the flaws he so kindly installed in us, that we came to damage his creation.
Anyway, this was meant to be about your birthday, not Green Peace. All things considered, I'm fairly excited about Christmas this year. I think it's a lot nicer having worked so soon up to it, and working so soon after it. With uni there's several weeks either side of it so there's really no excitement left. The huge buildup for it just annoys me, and then I just want to get it over with.
So yes, thank you Jesus, for dying for my sins and all that stuff. And do have yourself a very good birthday.
Your Pal
Steven
Wednesday 21st December 2005
A while back I said I'd ordered a new graphics card, with hopes of having a desktop with a resolution of 2560x1024. Well I'll spare you of the details, but I had a bit of hassle, and a bit of (kind of) impulse buying. The result though, is lovely. I'm very happy indeed.
Pictures! Example of DVD playing on one screen (full screen), and the other screen left free to be used for whatever (in this case, chat).
The same pretty member of McFly's orchestra, this time spread across the middle of both screens. In theory, if I got a panaramic video and cropped it so there's no black bars at all, it should pretty much fill both screens without any space around the edges.
I don't have an example of both screens without a DVD on as anything remotely interesting made the screen too bright to really be able to see. But the gist of it is that it behaves as a single screen. You can drag windows between them, you can leave a window in the middle of them, you can make a window fill one, fill both, etc, etc. Good stuff indeed. :D
Tuesday 20th December 2005
I just got this in my inbox. It was sent to the jokes e-mail alias at work, and I loved it. It's incredibly geeky, and quite possibly wont mean anything to most readers. However, if you have a really geeky friend, do pass this on.
This will quite possibly be the height of my Christmas spirit:
% better ! pout
% better ! cry
% better ! shout
% tell -uy
% rcp north_pole:santa.claus /usr/local/town
% make list
% ncheck list
% ncheck list
% grep 'naughty' list
% grep 'nice' list
% rcp north_pole:santa.claus /usr/local/town
% ps -aux | awk 'NR > 1 { x = substr ($8,1,1); \
if ( x == "S" || x == "I" ) \
{ print $1 " is sleeping" }; \
else \
{ print $1 " is awake" }; \
}'
% ps -aux | awk 'NR > 1 { if ($3 > "80") \
{ print $1 " is being bad again" }; \
else \
{ print $1 " is being good" }; \
}'
% for you in goodness_sake
> do
> be_good( you )
> done
% # EVERYBODY SING!!
% oh, you better ! pout
% better ! cry
% better ! shout
% tell -uy
% rcp north_pole:santa.claus /usr/local/town
Tuesday 20th December 2005
Bah humbug.
More later.
Friday 16th December 2005
This is great!
Wednesday 14th December 2005
Song: The Used - On My Own
Ahoy! I've not been updating this so much lately. :(
Last night I spent a few hours with the remote control that I got with my Freeview TV card for my pooter. I'd not bothered to get it working until now, mainly because I couldn't be bothered. I actually wasted a bit of time trying to make it work in a way that it's not supposed to. Eventually though, I found out how to get it working, and work it did!
I then (partly out of choice) reconfigured all the buttons, or all the ones I need, anyway. This served as a nice reminder of why I like Linux. It lets you do things like this. So once I'd matched all the buttons to the values they send in to the pooter, the next job was to configure the player to work with these buttons.
The end result, I can now mute, unmute, change volume, change channel, go full screen, and back to a window, and other things... Aaaand, it then occured to me that this bit of software also plays DVDs. So I've also added buttons for the four direction arrows, and the "OK" button. So now I can navigate DVD menus with the remote control as well. This made me happy.
I've also ordered a new graphics card with two outputs on it. I plan on getting a second screen by the end of the week. Then I'm going to basically have a single desktop spread across two screens. This'll give me a screen resolution of 2560x1024. Good stuff.
Sunday 4th December 2005
Song: The Ataris - Takeoffs And Landings
Saturday morning, I had to get up at a rather hellish 8am. That's not technically true though... It was partly my fault. I was giving Marc a lift to Salisbury, as he was buying a new car. As it would mean missing breakfast and probably being late for lunch I decided we should leave about an hour or so earlier and have breakfast at a service station on the way, and so, we did. I don't know why, but I really love stopping at service stations on motorways. They're always really neat, and have a shop, and a few resturants, and an arcade! Okay, so I don't really know what's exciting about them at all. I think it just reminds me of when I was young, going on holidays with family that involve long drives. Anyway... The drive there was ultimately a bit boring. We didn't get too lost, and I was driving fast than I typically do, but on the whole it was just a really long boring drive for me. Amazingly, we arrived at Salisbury about 3 minutes before the arranged time. Given the long distance and the planned stop of an unplanned duration, I thought that was pretty good.
The drive home though, proved to be a bit more exciting. I'm not sure if only two cars really constitutes a convoy, but I'm going to use the word anyway. It was my first time ever being part of a convoy, driving down a motorway. I'd been a passenger in one before, but driving made it a bit more fun though. Once again though, I really don't think I can explain what was fun about it, it just was. It's just the way you kind'a follow each other for a bit, then one over takes the other, then the other over takes, then the other overtakes, and so on, and you're constantly watching the other car(s).
The other thing I was going to mention was speed limits... I'm generally not a big speeder. Through small towns, contraflows or narrow bendy roads, I'll generally stick to the limit. However, going down the M3 this weekend was a bit different. There were times when I was doing at 90mph in the middle lane, overtaking a car in the left lane. Now, more often than not I was only barely gaining on this car to my left, meaning they must have been doing at *least* 80 mph. In all fairness, before this weekend I'd never really broken the speed limit much on motorways at all, though only through fear of undercover police cars. I was still too scared to go past 100mph though (apparently if you get caught at >100mph you'll lose your licence). Anyway... the point was that after a few minutes of doing around 90mph it feels very comfortable, in the same way doing 30mph through a town does. Also there was a few times where I hadn't looked down at my speedo for a bit and thought I was going at a fairly normal speed, and looked down and it was >85mph. I'm not suggesting that all speed limits are bad, but I do think motorway and some dual carriage-way ones are a bit outdated. I wont even get in to the whole car safety argument about that...
Spent today round a friend's house. He's bought a projector, and has surround sound. He was just setting it all up today. It's like a mini cinema in his room. Very cool. :)