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Stop Motion: Puzzle One
Recently I ordered a couple of Playmobil and Lego Bionicle figures as I want to have a go at creating a storyboard stop motion animation. It’s probably going to take a while to put together, but for now, check out my latest animation: Puzzle One. … Read entire article »
Filed under: Projects, Stop Motion
Ditch Windows 7 Starter and Send Microsoft a Message
Anyone else get a netbook recently and have you experience stunted by Microsoft with their crippled version of Windows 7? As you know, recently I bought a new Samsung n210 netbook. The trouble is that it came with Windows 7 Starter Trial edition installed. Of course, I planned to install UNR anyway, but I still wanted to play with Windows 7 6.1 and see how it compared to Vista… boy was I feeling sorely ripped off when I discovered that this is basically some kind of crippled Trial version of Windows. I mean, you can’t even change the wallpaper on it! All because Microsoft wants to upsell you a copy of Home Premium so that they can subsidise their OS on a system that is just not cost efficient to run it. Well, … Read entire article »
Filed under: Linux, Troubleshooting
Book Review: World War Z by Max Brooks
I recently finished reading this book so I thought I’d share my opinion. Now I must declare my bias, I really like zombie stories, but I tend to go for the movie/graphic novel kind so this was a first to read a zombie story in book format. I also haven’t read the Zombie Survival Guide (the other book by Max Brooks) but it’s had good reviews. That said, I have mixed opinions of this book on the whole so I’ll start with the good. The fictional story is set sometime in the near future (from what I can tell) after a worldwide apocalyptic war against the undead. There are only hints of how the infection came about, but this is not essential to the plot, which is more a collection of survivors … Read entire article »
Filed under: Books, Bookshelf, Worthwhile Reading
Recover Your Data with Photorec
Recently my wife had a crisis – she deleted a huge amount of files in a directory all in one go, worse still, she had committed the fatal no-no of saving and working on these documents from a USB flash drive. For anyone who is doing this – STOP IT! NOW! Flash memory has a limited lifespan, and if you don’t use up the whole memory block each time the parts you do use will wear faster*. What this means is you’re eventually going to lose those files if you’re relying on it effectively as a mobile office! That is of course, assuming you don’t lose your USB memory stick on the bus or the tube on the way to work… Bottom line USB memory sticks are really for moving files around, … Read entire article »
Filed under: Troubleshooting
Book Review: Charles Mackay’s Extrodinary Popular Delusions & The Madness of Crowds
“A modern-day interpretation of a finance classic” That was a long title for a short book. It’s not the actual Charles Mackay work, it’s a modernised version written by journalist Tim Phillips that basically summarises the important details and lessons that apply today, as much as (if not more than) they did back then. “Here’s the catch: we rarely spot bubbles as they occur. We can identify them with hindsight, but that’s not a lot of use if you’re investing. It takes a strong stomach, when a price keeps rising, to hold fast to your belief that it was fairly priced at half its current price.” Ch. 22 p. 45 Each chapter is broken down in to two concise pages and covers everything from the crusades to witchcraft and the dutch tulipomania to … Read entire article »
Filed under: Books, Bookshelf, Must Read, Worthwhile Reading
Cache Maggot Arrested!
Geotards cry “Let his blood be on us…”! Another frenzy has been whipped up over on Groundspeak forums over the arrest of someone who has been allegedly plundering caches for a long time. Speaking as someone who’s had 2 caches stolen, I’m not really feeling the urge to grab my pitchfork and join the lynch mob. Yes it was frustrating that my cache went missing twice, but I treat it as an accepted risk of the game. The third time I re-hid the cache I put in a shocking electric lighter (with a note on the cache page). But my third hide has been much more successful so far – the cache maggot has not found the new one yet. There’s a lot of discussion about the legal position of caches placed, abandoned … Read entire article »
Filed under: Geocaching
Graphic Novel Review: Zot! The Complete Black and White Collection
Zot! is another one of those classics that I missed at the time when it wasn’t a classic, it was new. Thankfully, a couple of years ago Scott McCloud brought out the complete black and white collection so that guys like me could become new fans and get completely engrossed. When I first spotted this book on the shelves of Borders (aah Borders, remember them?) I knew it was one I wanted to pick up at some point and read. It went on my mental wishlist. I had flicked through it a couple of times, inspired by Manga and a popular Japanese superhero, but not quite all Manga, just enough of Americana and Manga to make it a perfect blend. It just so happened that I was browsing through Borders during their … Read entire article »
Filed under: Bookshelf, Graphic Novels, Worthwhile Reading
Stop Motion
I have now made two very, very short clips hosted on YouTube with stop motion using my webcam. The video quality is not great, but it’s a start, I may switch to using a digital camera instead. Here is my 2nd attempt – Bearactacus: … Read entire article »
Filed under: Projects, Stop Motion
Headless Recovery with Persistent Ubuntu Live USB
As some of you know, recently my Samsung NC10 netbook screen was smashed in an unfortunate accident. I have since replaced this with the excellent Sammy N210 but was at a loss where to begin recovering data from the NC10. Of course, the obvious solution was unscrew and take out the hard drive, however these Netbooks are tightly built, and since I’m still considering the possibility of replacing the screen, I don’t want to create any superficial damage to the case. So I googled for options, initially hoping to snag a Linux liveCD that would automatically boot with sshd in order for me to log in remotely. Aside from some vague forum references to Knoppix and editing configuration files, I got nowhere. However what did occur to me was that Ubuntu LiveCD on … Read entire article »
Filed under: Linux, Troubleshooting
Praise for HP Source!
As some of you may know, our 8 year old printer died last weekend. This was unfortunate as it is during a time I’m heavily relying on printing and scanning for various goings on. It was a HP psc 1200 series and so I opted to go for HP again and get wireless printer. So I just picked up a HP Deskjet F4580 All-in-One Printer for £49.99 from Comet which is quite a good price – I needed it for today so I couldn’t order it online and get it cheaper. Anyway I got it home and unpacked, noted the typical Windows/Mac install disk so before I plugged it into my ‘buntu pc I checked online for any known issues. Now I knew HP supported Linux but didn’t realise to what extent. Support … Read entire article »
Filed under: Linux, Troubleshooting
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