A taste of the kind of odd scene you come across around our house:
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Next up on my list of old hardware to put to some kind of use is a Commodore Amiga. This means I need to have some kind of usable development setup. Back in the day, the development kit of choice for the Amiga was SNASM, a PC-based cross-assembler with custom hardware allowing the assembled code to be ‘squirted’ straight into the Amiga’s memory to be executed and debugged. Unfortunately, although I still have a copy SNASM 68k manual (exhibit A, right), I don’t have the hardware or software, so something needed hacking together.
Heath Robinson would be proud of this one I think – a digital photo frame constructed from a ZX Spectrum, an old portable TV and an audio cable linked to a Linux box which is the source of the actual pictures. Here’s how it works:
Here is a clue for server providers – if, on the third time of being asked how much the secret fee is for opening a firewall port, you still use the words “usually” and “around” – guess what? I am going to run a mile.
I would have tolerated a firewall I didn’t want in my way, so long as I could have it disabled or ports opened – but not for a fee you’re not even prepared to reveal!? I’m not quite sure why I didn’t run away as soon as I found the secret fee buried in the small print on the web site, but you live and learn I suppose.
I was amused to hear that even amidst a story about plummeting property prices and a stagnant housing market, the folks on the lunchtime BBC News show still can’t help referring to “getting on the property ladder”.
How does this ladder work again? Borrow more than you can afford in order to pay for something that will immediately be worth less than you now owe? And that’s if something you can’t actually sell has a value.
Don’t they recognise a snake when they see one?
Stand in front of our house on a sunny day and you’ll hear the clip clop of hooves, the sound of a tractor at work, and some very strange excerpts from cyclist’s shouted conversations as they pass by. You might even hear someone say “Can you believe that? He’s out there taking pictures of the bloody wheelie bin again!?”
Luckily whoever would be saying that isn’t in the house, or they’d have something to say about me sitting here writing about it again. So 240L, I assume, is the capacity of the bin and helpfully it’s there in braille too, which is only fair because the blind should obviously have as much access to useless information as anybody else.
However, the only really useful bit of information on a wheelie bin is not the capacity or how loud it is, but the colour. We are lucky enough to only have two – black for stuff that goes to landfill, and green for stuff that they pretend to recycle, but actually goes to landfill. Some places have three or four, along with a strange assortment of bags and boxes that go out on the road on particular days. These are apparently policed by an army of stab-vest wearing hitlers who take great pleasure in issuing crippling fines to the elderly for accidentally putting a normal tea bag in the bin reserved for herbal tea bags. The proceeds of all these fines, after the hitlers’ wages have been paid, are stashed away in Icelandic banks to pay for the local councillors’ next “fact-finding mission” to Barcelona or Florida. Anyway, back to the bins themselves…
You would think then, that they might have put the colour on the bin in braille instead of the capacity, but no. If you’re blind, I guess you must go out to your bins and (by somehow managing to get your finger in the right place) discover that you have three identical bins, all with 240L capacity, but no clue as to which one to put your cardboard in.
What’s the difference between these?
I never did figure out who the previous imposter was on the much maligned Cuil search engine, but while pondering it I wondered why there wasn’t a search engine where I could upload an image and find where it came from.
Lo and behold, along comes TinEye to save the day. Unfortunately, when I went to grab the image, one imposter had been replaced by another as you can see from the screenshot on the right. But thanks to TinEye, I’m not left wondering who I am this time. I’m a character called Lucas, who seems to be from a soap opera I’ve thankfully never heard of called Another World.
I tried carefully cropping the image out of my previous screenshot, but that wasn’t good enough – perhaps TinEye just fingerprints the image’s binary data, while my version had been re-encoded a couple of times. On the other hand, I get the impression from the TinEye FAQ that it should be able to handle that. Maybe when I’m not as busy I’ll have another go. In the meantime the previous imposter is still on the loose, so answers on a postcard please if you recognise him.
So everybody is talking about Cuil, the latest Google-challenger on the block. From what I’ve seen, they have a lot of issues at this early stage (understandably) and they might come to regret getting so much publicity so early. But more important than all that, is this:
Disclaimer first, yes I know it’s terribly unfashionable to “google” yourself, but it’s always a good test of a search engine, and everybody does it whether they admit it or not. Now, back to the subject, who the hell is this in the picture?
And, for bonus points, by what insane algorithm did his picture come to be placed there?
As I noted previously, I have Merlin Mann to thank for my current level of inbox efficiency. To add to that, today he was responsible for a very hearty chuckle indeed, when I stumbled across this, which is ridiculous in so many ways I don’t even know where to start. From what I can gather, it isn’t meant to be funny.