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Where in the World is Jacques d’Azur?

I’m quite shocked to hear that a lot of people have never heard of d’Azur, or Jacques, as his friends called him. The well loved international man of mystery has gone missing! Video after the break… … Read entire article »

Filed under: Distractions

Full Episode of Superted on Youtube

Anyone remember this kids show from the 80′s? I used to love watching this just never felt it lasted long enough… Apparently, to this day Superted’s secret magic word remains a mystery. This definitely needs to become a kids movie! … Read entire article »

Filed under: Distractions

The Biggest Pirates of All: Stealing from the Public Domain

I was reading a topic on Slashdot the other day about the public disclosure of Google’s internal emails in its court battle with Viacom, that seem to take the shine off Google’s “Do No Evil” image. I’m not particularly invested in this news itself, but what cause me to stop and think was this comment from user drDugan (emphasis mine): What’s more evil? You know what’s evil? Copyright term of “70 years + life of the author”. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Copyright_term [wikipedia.org] Almost every single thing creative that someone creates today will *never* enter the public domain within our lifetime. Nothing. The owner of the copyright must explicitly grant it to the public domain, or license it for other’s use, distribution, sharing, mashing, basically anything more than fair use… Copyright is no longer about promotion of creativity, its … Read entire article »

Filed under: Books, Distractions

Not Geocaching

It’s not for lack of opportunities, life sure got busy this side of the New Year but I’ve had days where I’ve just looked out the window and decided it’s too cold, too wet, too windy. Is it just that it’s winter, or are we being lazy? I set a new cache recently which required a lot more thought and planning than it did to actually set, hence mostly indoors work. I’ve also got one or two more I’m planning but I just seem to lack the motivation to move at the moment. … Read entire article »

Filed under: Geocaching

Why I’m Now Using A VPN

If you keep on top of tech news (The Register is a very good site for this), you will have noticed a growing campaign by many politicians and even some media to seize control of the internet and monitor your activity online. This is quite unsettling for me. For one, I think that ISPs should effectively be a dumb pipe. Just like the post office, your water, gas and energy suppliers, they bring the internet to your home and charge you for it – no glamour or value added services – I just want my internet, thanks. Imagine if the postman opened all your letters before he delivered them through your door? This is effectively what the government wants ISPs to do with your packets. Furthermore it’s one big slippery slope … Read entire article »

Filed under: Distractions

Command Line Fu

My new favourite site. … Read entire article »

Filed under: Linux, Troubleshooting

Is Symantec Anti-Virus Malware?

Not quite going by strict definitions of malware, but it skates pretty close to annoying and intrusive software in my humble opinion. Recently I had to work on a Windows XP based machine with a Symantec anti-virus ‘solution’ installed. As with most Windows PC’s, the system had ground down to a halt and was complaining of a full hdd. I was trying to troubleshoot the problem that disk-cleanup would not fix. I installed Treesize, ran it and discovered in the ‘All Users’ profile the source of the problem. The Windows partition was approximately 70gb. 46gb were taken up by temporary files created by Symantec in “C:/Documents and Settings/All Users/Application Data/Symantec/Symantec Antivirus Corporate Edition/7.5/xfer_tmp/” I solved the problem by deleting the temp files and the xfer_tmp directory. I didn’t even check this was the right … Read entire article »

Filed under: Troubleshooting

Password Protected Posts

I am experimenting with password protected posts in WordPress. There are some things I want to write down and publish, but I’m not necessarily sure I want it ‘out there’ for everyone to read – particularly if it touches on sensitive subjects. Maybe I’ll free the posts at a later date. … Read entire article »

Filed under: WaFiTz!

Protected: The Wisdom of UK Driving Law

There is no excerpt because this is a protected post. … Read entire article »

Filed under: Distractions

Creating A Separate Home Partition

Having a seperate home partition on Linux makes it easy to install not only different distro’s and new releases of the same distro, but to have multi-boot distro’s running on the same ‘puter. Of course, having a home partition on the same partition as your OS hinders this flexibility. When I made the move to Linux (specifically Ubuntu) I approached it as a typical Windows user and installed on a single partition, I didn’t understand or see the usefulness behind creating separate partitions on my home PC. Windows only release a new OS every few years, and since their upgrades tend to only affect the Windows default directory, a simple backup is all that is needed to ensure continuity. If you’ve come to the same situation and want to create a separate home … Read entire article »

Filed under: Linux, Troubleshooting