Volume 61
30 Mar 2005
As has become the norm for this time of year, I am unpacking the trusty Cone of Silence, giving it a quick polish and lowering it for just over a week. It is always possible that I may run in to connections to these Internets but I won't be out there actively hunting for them.
29 Mar 2005
I wonder how I can remain trendy and add Ajax functionality to these pages? Musn't slip off the bleeding edge you know.
The easiest way to get a random set of stuff onto the iPod is to make a smart playlist and ask it to pick random songs up to the size limit and then only add that list. Haven't worked out how to make it re-pick the list though, so it may be that I have to make it every time. Or simply not bother.
Oh, the previous clip is even better if you set the play speed to fast.
28 Mar 2005
27 Mar 2005
Nasty day today - all wet and horrible. Haven't seen any good links today either. Might have fixed the PC though, or at least found the problem and finessed it.
26 Mar 2005
RIP Jim Callaghan
What I want to be able to do with iTunes is for it to do the shuffle thing for my iPod - I have more music than will fit and I want it to make a random choice and surprise me. All it does is pick play lists that I think will like rather than a selection of songs. I suspect it probably isn't hard to write a program that takes the iTunes library and picks some random songs, writes them into a known playlist that you can then sync, but I don't know if I can be bothered. Surely someone has done this already.
25 Mar 2005
Been gardening all day and am very stiff!
I have been sent the "finger in the bowl of Wendy's Chilli" story by several people and it is popping up all over the place. I wonder what it is that has caught people's eye about this one - this kind of thing happens quite regularly meat packing not being a well regulated industry, particularly in the USA.
24 Mar 2005
A write-off I would assume. I was down at the car breakers last weekend trying to get a rear parcel shelf for my car (didn't have one), and there were a lot of very mangled and burnt out cars which was quite creepy I found.
23 Mar 2005
22 Mar 2005
Papercasting - I was considering making a rivets podcast with me reading out links slowly and carefully in my whiny Edinburgh accent. : "aytch tee tee pee cohlon slaash slaash...". Perhaps with musical accompaniment.
21 Mar 2005
Our media (I wonder if I should start a Scottish, male porn sharing site called Oor Wullie?)
The firefox spelling check extension works well.
Here is a link to the ordinance story, though it doesn't have the quote in it I was commenting on. However it does have some other rather fine remarks : "We were friends with them at the time" for instance
I want one of these (It's an IDE to USB adaptor - could be very useful given the price of IDE discs)
"Either the Army or the Navy dumped the ordnance into the sea" - perceptive. Oh blast, I've lost the link for this - it was about first world war ordinance (grenades, mustard gas shells...) appearing on people's drives that had been covered in clam shell debris that was dredged from 20 miles out to sea.
20 Mar 2005
Oh, a whole cluster of searches for "lindsay marshall nude". I assume this referring to the (not very famous) porn star lindsay marshall rather than me!
I just grepped through my referrer logs for this month. Why is someone searching for "gay nudist" ending up here? Or "sexually erotic pics" for that matter? "love rod mpeg"??? What a strange place these Internets are.
Good rant about google ads at Fishbucket. Of course, greasmonkey is your friend here - eliminate the ads that other ad-eliminators leave in!
Fascinating programme about Francis Bacon (the painter) on BBC2 last night.
Letter James - I'm pretty sure I've done this one before but it's come up several times recently so clearly it wants to be seen.
19 Mar 2005
There seems to be an awful lot of sites going on about how to use Powerpoint more effectively at the moment (no links - you'll have seen them already if you are interested in this kind of stuff). I'm sure that much of what is said is good, but everything I've seen seems to be geared for people selling things or presenting business ideas. Nothing about teaching people stuff at all : I'm sure all the writers will say "Oh it's just the same", but it isn't obvious to me that it is. Maybe I need to see a powerpoint presentation that explains it all to me.
I had to cut the grass in the back garden today. It's March! That's ridiculous. The pond is filled with frog spawn, though the frogs seem mostly to have departed. Miniature daffodils everywhere and crocuses. The Rhubard is coming along nicely int he forcing pot and there are leeks to dig out. I bought a new tree fern to replace one that died last winter - a most attractive plant.
I was at a workshop with John Rae's Celtic Feet this morning at the Sage, Gateshead which was a lot of fun. It wasn't really what I was expecting but playing a load of tunes with a good swinging rhythm section was great, and they are really nice people.
Hardened Shimmering Ring of Stealth - +6 to Thief Ability, also reflects Medium-Range Magic Attacks
18 Mar 2005
Happoshu bought by "emaciated foreigners who have no clue what they are buying, along with the dubiously-jam-filled-looking, fish-mayonnaise-filled donut they are also about to purchase" Make sure and watch the video review!!!!
Green and Black's Organic Fair Trade Espresso choclate is rather fine. 95% chocolate too which would normally be inedible but the coffee makes it smooth. Definitely recommended.
17 Mar 2005
16 Mar 2005
Having said that I just found a copy online and have bought it.
Horsemusic - I'd really love to get my hands on a copy of the original album but ist seems to have vanished from the face of the earth.
I was just listening to "Anarchy in the Ukraine" by Yid Vicious.
15 Mar 2005
I do like Keith Jarrett's trio recordings.
Is it just me or all the gadget sites (with the honourable exception of the Red Ferret of course) becoming entirely filled with mobile phones that none of us will ever see/buy/afford? Where are all the electric spoon polishers and stuff?
A Worm Harvester - that's the bit I don't like : getting the compost out. All those worms give me the creeps.
14 Mar 2005
Chy asks for a link on how to make a worm bin. Link not needed - acquirte an ordinary dustbin, punch some drainage holes around the bottomn. Put about 6" of gravel in thebottom and a couple of pieces of wood on top (these are to tell you when to stop digging when emptying). Now get your worms (fishing shop) and put them in = the bin with some approprriate material that they can feed on. Don't let it get too cold or too hot.
Well, here's a weird problem for someone to solve for me. I have a page where there is a button that you click that loads another page over the top of the current one using javascript. When you change the CSS, nothing else, just the CSS, it stops working and the page hangs. This, needless to say, is with Internet Explorer, and it only happens on one person's machine that I know of. *sigh*
This would be useful - though in fact I put all my kitchen waste into my worm bin, so it probably wouldn't be that much use.
13 Mar 2005
12 Mar 2005
I made some chocolate chip cookies today from the recipe that was in the Guardian last week. They are very good. I've been making pizza rather than buying takeaways for the last few saturdays and they are getting better each week. I cheat and use a bought (Tesco's) white bread mix in my bread machine (with added olive oil of course) but the end result is tasty.
I'm playing with Basecamp and I think that it is rather good. (I am using the one free prjoect scheme of course)
Thanks Braincast : "Because you were born on the 16th, it's probably no surprise to you that your life is full of surprises! Unusual strangers are drawn to you like magic and it sometimes feels as if you have known them all your life. Don't worry if people don't always understand your career or lifestyle choices. Just make up your mind today to stop putting things off until tomorrow!" That explains why panhandlers always single me out.
I bought a Skype phone from Maplin today. I haven't tried it on a PC yet but it works fine on the Mac - I suspect there may be more "features" on the PC though.
11 Mar 2005
Spotted on Music Thing : "I know there has been a debate about the original Dalek voices being true ring mod or just a fast-gated VCA but I thought..." Possibly the geekiest sentence I have read in a long , long time.
10 Mar 2005
I skyped my PC from my iBook. You get an interesting echo. Typing sounds very odd.
I do Bloglines an injustice - they hadn't lost my subs, it was some very weird problem with firefox that was just not displaying the data.
I was just playing with skype and called my father. Count me impressed. Definitely going to use it.
9 Mar 2005
Seems to be working again. I hate when that happens.
Hmm, looks like something is screwed up in the comment code. I'll have to look at later though.
I just added two more pictures to my "See Me gallery" - one of me as a very small baby and another of me with my father on the island of Jura where we look refugees or something.
I've been playing with Bloglines and this morning they seem to have lost all my subscriptions. I also had a look at Rojo which seemed to me to be painfully slow with a failry hard ot use interface (they also want me to pronounce it to rhyme with mojo when it is clearly pronounced roho) I'm not that enamoured with the Bloglines interface either, but I do want a service that I can get at from multiple machines so a local reader is not really useful unless it stores its data on a central place of course, but I don't think any of them do that, though it would seem to be a mighty simple thing to organise.
The Brendan Power CDs arrived this morning. Superb. Definitely a must have if you like modern traditional music.