A simple matter of…

[http://uk.imdb.com/title/tt0373074/ This film] was on television last night and the review said “funnier than most comedies, more action than most action movies”. They were right – I thought it might be just about watchable but it was actually very good – highly amusing with superb action sequences. It never takes itself seriously – the use [...]

Well it’s the time of year to disappear “up North” to see the family for a week. It’s certainly a little colder in Cheshire, but it’s a price worth paying! Train was only half full on the way up, shame it was delayed by a good 20-30mins – taking the time for the bus and [...]

Two talks at HantsLUG in two months Hugo had problems with openoffice crashing on several machines during an animation (64-bit issue by the looks of things) and so couldn’t finish preparing his talk in time. So I decided to extend my demo on the [http://hants.lug.org.uk/cgi-bin/wiki.pl?TechTalks/8thDecember2007 Soundbridge] to something a bit longer to fill the gap. [...]

I’ve been busy setting up a Roku/Pinnacle SoundBridge (the cheap one) as a wireless music player. I’m very impressed with the initial setup: * it scans wi-fi to see if it can see a music server (which it will prefer to use) * failing that it will prompt you ** it also supports WEP and [...]

James I share your pain. Fortunately it’s been pretty quiet recently, however I generally get a batch of people phoning every few months. It was particularly bad after I started my job. “Oh, but I found your CV on $random_job_site”. Which really really annoyed me – I had put my CV up on two sites [...]

I listen to music in the kitchen a fair bit – normally whilst cooking (or washing up). I currently do this using my old discman and swap the CD occasionally. I think it’s time to enter the 21st century – particularly if I hook it up the hi-fi which I plan on doing eventually. I [...]

First of all I should make it clear – I loathe adverts and advertising. When I go and buy something I like to make an informed decision, advertising is rarely aimed at providing this. Just “we are cool”, “nothing is more effective” or just complete abuse of science and statistics (which IMO should be banned [...]

As the government announces that 25million records have been lost including social security numbers, bank details etc, I can only shake my head at the reports and comments. “It was sent by someone at a low-level”. So someone at a low-level can get _hold_ of this information in the first place – that shows an [...]

Works very nicely thank you. However I’ve just spent some time trying to optimise it a little for my laptop (Dell D630). Currently the suspend timings are: * press power button and select “suspend” * T+2secs /etc/acpi/sleep.sh is called * console switch causes 2 sec delay * alsa stop causes 1 sec delay * T+5secs [...]

It looks like my wish was correct – using the _non_ static 32-bit skype means that Skype logs into D-bus (at least when you start it using “skype –enable-dbus”). So now I can test my program – which logs into D-bus and talks to Skype to update the mood-status. Why am I doing this? Well [...]