[my][home][toon]
previously known as [cold][wet][durham], [dirty][grimy][london],[busy][shiny][toon],[frantic][crowded][south]

ATP line-up, amazing, and all gone

September 30th 2007

Fuck monkey and chuff weasils – I’ve just seen the lineup for Portishead curating ATP, and it’s just amazing, and completely sold out. I’d have bought 7 bed villa and worked out how to pay for it later, but even they have gone. Anybody got a spare ticket? Will exchange for anything you want. Anything. [...]

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modblog, bme and zentastic

September 30th 2007

editted: It would appear the situation is somewhat unclear, so I pulled my original post.  I have re-opened it because people seem to have found it and been 404′d into confusion.  I offer no judgement, make no calls, I just hope it all works out ok. original post: My many and various vanilla friends, don’t [...]

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How to look like a tit in front of the whole country

September 28th 2007

A good start – get arseholed on a plane, start smoking, fight and then live off scraps of left over food and have to get a charity to pay for you to get home because you’re skint and nobody in the UK will lend you the cash. Well done Stephen Robinson, for looking like a [...]

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Mafia connected estate agents?

September 28th 2007

Whilst looking at houses online I came across this gem of easily misinturpetable legal wording: “PERSONAL INTEREST VENDOR: We are required under the Estate Agent Act 1979 and Provision of Information Regulations 1991 to point out that the client we are acting for on the sale of this property is a ‘Connected Person’ as defined [...]

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Tim Hunkin is a God amongst me

September 28th 2007

He does not fear the health and safety Nazis! He is a geek and proud! He makes and burns things! His Secret Life of Machines remains my favorite ever peice of TV. Whom else could say “

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Plants make me happy

September 28th 2007

I love the work being done by the crew at Guerrilla Gardening. In a world of red tape, beurocracy (spelling?), and health and safety, surely planting up waste ground and “social spaces” is a great thing? The planting that goes on in social spaces is generally terrible. If I see another greying bank of scrubby [...]

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Fasting

September 27th 2007

Somebody I’m working with is fasting, not because of his religion, but because his flatmate is fasting and he’s showing him support. As part of his fasting, he is only eating biscuits and fruit during the day, and a sandwich at lunch. Possibly Related Posts: Homemade flavoured spirits Cold Water Swimming Trailing : One Slow [...]

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Synology CS407e

September 26th 2007

I posted a while ago about my proposed storage strategy. Well, I’m three days into trying it out, and I’m about to go off travelling around for a bit so I thought I’d throw a bit of quickie review. I bought a Synology 407e with 4x250Gb SATA drives in it. RAID5 formatted when I got [...]

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Living in Tellytubby land

September 26th 2007

I was about to write a huge ranting post about shit awful design of modern day products after my evening of fighting with a flimsy and knackered dishwasher, but instead here is a link to a website about living in domed houses. They look wonderful, truly wonderful. Possibly Related Posts: Cold Water Swimming Trailing : [...]

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AIDS – it’s not complex people

September 26th 2007

It breaks my heart when people come out with such complete rubbish as “Condoms are not sure because I know that there are two countries in Europe, they are making condoms with the virus on purpose” (Archbishop Chimoio). HIV will ravage and rape your entire flock is you preach such complete tosh. Interestingly though “Archbishop [...]

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DRM free mp3s from Amazon

September 26th 2007

With their existing customer base, who are used to using their payment system and front end, I can’t imagine Amazon can go wring with serving up DRM free mp3s which you can then use on any device (and backup etc etc). I wonder who’s tunes they are serving up, and what the payback for artists [...]

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Tea tea tea tea bring me more

September 25th 2007

tea! Possibly Related Posts: Homemade flavoured spirits Slow baked ham with cider and spice Give us this day our daily bread(maker) Home-brewed time-lapse fungus growing 101 Jerking it

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Train, planes and social commentry

September 18th 2007

Elitism is alive and well One of the perks of my job is that just occasionally I get to travel first class on the British Train network.  This afford plenty of opportunities for a spot of people watching. First Class travel by train not like first class air travel.  The cost is roughly double, rather [...]

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Another nail in Words coffin

September 14th 2007

As I have noted beofre, I really don’t like Microsoft Word. It does everything, badly. I’ve just written than last post about storage using JDarkRoom, saved it as plain text (6kb for 1000+ words) and normally would have then pasted it into Word to spell check it. Luckily remembered I’ve got ASpell install so I [...]

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Developing a storage strategy

September 14th 2007

I own a lot of things digitally, and have a highly mobile lifestyle. My CD collection must be 500+, my DVD collection pushing a 100, and I average traveling 300 miles at either end of the week (give or take a hundred depending on where I am). I can pick up a handful of Cd’s [...]

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Gaiman + Henry + BBC = perfect?

September 13th 2007

Yes, this got me very excited. Very. “In a couple of weeks the BBC World Service will be recording a dramatisation of ANANSI BOYS, starring Lenny Henry and Matt Lucas” Possibly Related Posts: Multiple photo fails A little bit of webcam trickery wiiPong (or, how to make a crappy games from exciting technology) A week [...]

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Catcam is back!

September 13th 2007

Lost from the net for a little big of timne, CatCam is back! Follow Mr Lee’s adventures. Possibly Related Posts: Home-brewed time-lapse fungus growing 101 Getting Redis and CodeIgniter to play together Mushrooms, live! Train + wifi + bored + guardian api + unix tools = …. E by gum

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Just call me an expert!

September 13th 2007

Wow – trustedplaces.com has had an overhaul, and it’s looking pretty bloody brilliant. The front end is faster and slicker, the reviewing process is much nicer (the last one seemed to suffer a little for session slip), and they now have some nice new features (recommendations based on your profile, etc). One thing I love [...]

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The Buffalo saga ends.

September 12th 2007

After many many hours of wasted time, numerous emails and some very rude phone calls, I have my money back from the piece of Buffalo kit I bought. They eventually sent me a product return notice, I took it into the place where I bought it, and they put the money back onto my creditcard. [...]

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RIAA backs foolish plan. Surprise.

September 12th 2007

Just when I thought the music industry was getting the hang of the new economic models that are around, they come up with a totally moronic idea. Did they thing they were being innovative? Maybe. Did they think this would kill downloading? Possibly (though I imagine even the painfully optimistic realized this was unlikely). Did [...]

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A modern day love tale

September 11th 2007

Now, this one will freak a few people out (on the whole), but the story of Gillian and Clive is a modern day love story of the highest calibre. They met, they fell in love, as a sign of their devotion they bite the tips off each others fingers, and then eloped off round the [...]

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Missing out on BBC love

September 11th 2007

I’ve just had a phone call from the production team of the brilliant “Kill it, cook it, eat it” asking if I could make the filming tomorrow of the Christmas edition (turkeys and geese). Annoyingly its too late, which is a real shame as I’d kill (probably without the cook and eat sections) to be [...]

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Getting Upcoming to talk to Google Calendar

September 11th 2007

Google calendar is great. I use it huge amounts, like theway it syncs with iCal on my iBook (and thus with my phone), and it’s neat and clean lines. Upcoming also seems like a great idea. I like it’s community feel, and I like it’s presentation. So, the only big question is, how do I [...]

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R.I.P Fenwicks Sandwich Counter

September 10th 2007

I went into Fenwick’s this lunchtime to buy a sandwich form their very excellent sandwich counter. As we found though the aisles of ladies fashion and then the chocolate counter, I realised I was facing the wrong way and had lost the sandwich counter. This was followed up by realising that actually, I hadn’t lost [...]

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RIP Amos

September 7th 2007

Your sideburns will continue to be my goal. Possibly Related Posts: Cold Water Swimming Trailing : One Forget the deli, find a German The strange and pale styling The magic of computing Two very important things

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Ten pieces of advice for old media

September 6th 2007

I loved this article called “Ten pieces of advice for old media” which interestingly enough was on badscience.net. I agree with every one of them, even the total ban on Flash on sites. It also makes a very good point about miniblogs and repeating content. Numerous times I’ve basically just re-written somebodies article to make [...]

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Taser armed police

September 6th 2007

I’d much rather that our police officers were armed with Tasers were necessary than guns (especially handguns), so seeing the North Wales Police Chief had to tested on himself is quite impressive – thats dedication to duty! He’s quoted as saying “I very strongly advise you, if faced by an officer and a Taser, that [...]

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Buffalo Technical Support continue to underwhelm

September 5th 2007

yesterday in the longrunning saga of me trying to have my very expensive brick replaced, I spoke to their UK based sales team. They couldn’t be directly helpful, but did give me a contact address for the “Helddesk careline”. I emailed explaining the back story and what i did for a living (and what my [...]

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Ditching Word makes you more productive and allows you to produce better documents

September 4th 2007

There are times when I have ideas, and I discharge them onto the page, without really thinking them through and making them readable. One such case is where just lately I splurged rant about open standards for documents. I’ve just finished reading this brilliant article by Steve Poole about why he stopped using Word (on [...]

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Rick Rubin interview

September 4th 2007

I’m waiting for some scripts to finish running, and they were taking their time, which has given me the time to read the whole of this brilliant article about Rick Rubin. If you don’t know who he is, he’s the founder of Def jam records, and it turns out, the producer (and guru like muse) [...]

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Buffalo continue to be…terrible!

September 4th 2007

Another day, another call to Buffalo technical Support (Ireland). After yesterdays confusing but fairly productive call, I thought I’d better follow it up. Today they explained that whomever delt with my case had been too busy yesterday to send me out the form (I assume it must be more complex that hitting reply and attaching [...]

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Schrodinger’s lolcat

September 3rd 2007

Schrodinger’s lolcat is pure genius. Possibly Related Posts: Cold Water Swimming Trailing : One Forget the deli, find a German The strange and pale styling The magic of computing Two very important things

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Buffalo trial continues

September 3rd 2007

So, my continuing trials with Buffalo technical support continues. I’ve now got them to admit the device is faulty (easy enough, as the box didn’t say “Extreamly expensive space age brick”). I’ve sent them the details of my purchase, and aparently they couldn’t work with those. So I sent them a photo of my reciept, [...]

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