A simple matter of…

Driving past a white van earlier today, I saw a message scrawled on the back. Not the usual “also available in white” but “why are they called stairs inside but steps outside?”

Just to show I’m as easy to amuse as I am to get worked up over something

Maybe we should just limit fog lights to only 6 hours use a year.

Should help stop the twats who drive around with them all the time. Particularly the ones where their normal headlights are not working properly.

Just watched the amazing La Antena. An incredible Argentinian film, it’s a silent movie, but filmed in 2007. A cross between “Metropolis” and “The Matrix” it’s a fantastic film (if you like Metropolis that is!). As Film4 (who showed it) say: “Great films you know and great films you don’t”.

So the hard disk in my Humax PVR died

Fortunately, just replacing it with another one fixed it - it recognised the new disk, asked me to format it, job done.

The fact that I’ve shuffled a few disks around my systems to accomplish this in the best manner (\o/ for RAID-1) is by-the-by

Shame the disk is a fair bit noisier than the old disk. I wonder if I should have poked it with appropriate ATA commands and set “keep settings”? Probably wouldn’t have made much difference I suspect.

Update: The old disk was a seagate DB35.2 and does have a few tricks up its sleave - OTOH most disks I buy with those features (namely FDB - fluid dynamic bearings - quieter) - it does mention different firmware, though hopefully that’s just performance/quiet tuning.

So, taxes. From the BBC:

And the bulk of the tax cuts will be directed at those on lowest incomes, partly because they have the highest propensity to spend - for the good of the economy

So, the tax cuts will be aimed at the poor since they spend more. Er, if they are poor, shouldn’t they be spending rather less? It’s like giving a young child more pocket money since they have spent it all rather than teaching them the value of saving. Kudos to Rob and Jane, Sydney does indeed save for months so that he can get things he really wants - and he’s only eight.

Yes, I do get more than a little rankled that by being financial prudent, I get stung by higher taxes for those who not only aren’t so careful, but have less money to be careful with in the first place.

It reminds me of all the council homes with Sky from years ago. I’d have never bought Sky - too darn expensive.

Well, the hard disk in my Humax 9200T (freeview box) has died. Didn’t lose much fortunately, those I hadn’t watched will be repeated - other programs were just good films from a while ago.

So I’ve temporary put in a 16GB disk (it “reserves” 8GB for MP3s so I only have about 5 hours of recording).

I’m looking at getting the new Humax HDR freesat to get HD television. Should be about £300.

I’ll need to replace the single LNB on the dish with a quad port one, then run the cable all the way around the house. What fun - particularly in winter!

PayPass is a contactless (NFC - Near Field Communications) method for making payments of up to £10. Such as a coffee.

No need to enter your PIN. So, rig up a reader with wi-fi (or some other wireless network), then just “brush” up against people on the tube. £10 per person. Yes, it _is_ trackable, but really, it’s not very clever is it?

Well after many, many years of waiting, we finally have a 64-bit flash plugin on Linux. More staggering than the fact that it’s taken so long, is the fact that this is the first 64-bit version on _any_ platform.

Anyhow, the point of this post (other than to say thanks Adobe for _finally_ doing this - though really I’m not sure such a long wait deserves _any_ thanks) is to help anyone else who tries it.

Basically I installed it and then went to youtube to try it. Firefox hung for 10 seconds (no CPU used), each and every time. I then purged nspluginwrapper (I’d previously removed gnash and libswf). I also went and manually removed any flash or swf file in /usr/lib/mozilla/plugins. That fixed the problem.

Yes, really. I’m not kidding, or being sarcastic.

Microsoft might, _finally_ (large pinch of salt required given past embrace and extend behaviour) have decided to use open protocols.

Not for MSIE - that would be the icing on the cake - albeit thick, crunchy icing.

Yesterday they announced they are going to join “AMQP” which is a middleware standard whose biggest supporter is Redhat.

Today, they announced that Windows Live ID was going to join OpenID.

Oh, and there is also a glowing report from the SAMBA folks.

Keep up the good work and _please_ don’t go back to the bad old ways.

I wonder if the MSN protocols have been opened up yet?

Then you need Skype plugin for pidgin.

Finally - tabbed window support

To install:

• just install .deb, restart pidgin, then “add account”, “Skype” (or “Skype/DBUS”)
  

• for me it always crashed on startup if I had skype running and I use “Skype/DBUS”
• it also crashed once with “Skype” today