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Useful Windows XP Commands | Gatzet.com
Apple is even more evil them Microsoft.
It is a well understood truth that Microsoft are evil (or at least it is within the Apple and Linux fanboy-sphere). This is because they have lots of money are attempt to get a monopoly on various technical fields. Which may be true, but they don’t attempt to force you to only run their software on specific hardware. Apple, on the other hand, do. This has lead to good news and bad news.
Good news: The people that make the operating system and the software also make the hardware, so they no exactly what to write when they are coding their software, there is no excuses for any sort of compatibility problem on a Mac.
Bad news: they cost a bleeding fortune, and are a nightmare to get repaired or purchase components for. Lets do a little Apple vs. Microsoft comparison.
(it should be noted that you don’t have to run Windows or OS X (apples equivalent to windows) on either box, but they are included in the price, it should also be noted that you cannot buy Apple hardware without buying OS X, you can with non Apple kit, which is good if you want to run Linux (which is free) like me).
Lets start off at the budget end of the spectrum, the Mac Mini vs a cheap “windows” box. Bare in mind that the Mac Mini is very small (hence the name)
Apple Mac Mini Core 2 Duo 1GB 120GB DVDRW
£495.42 inc vat
Acer Power FH Pentium Dual Core 925 1GB 250GB DVDRW Windows Vista Home Premium
£239.98 inc vat
That is a difference of £255. I guess if you really want a small desktop. But then, you could go for a Shuttle small form factor desktop.
Now, lets have a look at the higher end of the market in laptops. Interestingly, I am using Dabs.com to get these prices. Dabs stocks 11 Apple PC’s and 313 non Apple PC’s. which one do you think I will find the best deal on?
Apple MacBook Pro Core 2 Duo 2GB 250GB DVDRW
£1,608.79 inc vat
This is the most powerful Macbook on the site, lets have a look at some of its stats:
Processor
Clock Speed 2.5 GHz
Multi-Core Technology Dual-Core
Type Core 2 Duo
RAM
Installed Size 2 GB
Storage Hard Drive
Capacity 250 GB
Display
Diagonal Size 15.4 in
For a similar price you can get this:
Sony VAIO AR61ZU T8300 4GB 500GB
£1,629.99 inc vat
Loads of money again, but lets see what you get for your pennies.
Processor
Clock Speed 2.4 GHz
Multi-Core Technology Dual-Core
Type Core 2 Duo
RAM
Installed Size 4 GB
Storage Hard Drive
Capacity 250 GB
Storage Hard Drive (2nd)
Capacity 250 GB
Display
Diagonal Size 17 in
Ok, so you get twice the ram, twice the storage (and an actual second disk) and a much larger screen.
I am not even going to start on the Macbook Air, largely because I don’t think I can compare it to anything, apart from a stack of porn mags, or the emperors new clothes or something. (incidentally, the macbook air is £1,189.96, that is more expensive then the Sony desktop replacement laptop above *sigh*)
Ok, so apple have products that are more of a fashion statement then a good computing product (iphone anyone) but the real evil bit is yet to come.
Since apple started using Intel processors (the same a s windows computers) in their Mac products, the way has been opened up to potentially sell computers running OS-X (which the fanboys all think about when relaxing in a gentleman’s way) on non apple kit, this, of course, makes it much cheaper and much more expandable. Infact, the OpenMac as it was called weighed in like this:
Psystar Open Mac:
• 2.2 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo CPU
• 250 GB Hard Drive (7200 RPM)
• 2 GB DDR2 667 RAM
• Intel GMA 950 integrated graphics
• DVD+/-R Optical Drive
• 4 USB ports
Ok, that’s better stats then the Mac Mini, what about the price:
$399 so, I guess about £200. That’s a saving of almost £300 over the Mac Mini. Obviously, Apple didn’t like having their monopoly challenged, so they got them shut down see this story
http://www.news.com/8301-13579_3-9918069-37.html
how evil is that.Labels: apple, geek, soap box
I still *heart* Ubuntu .
I just had one of those "I love Ubuntu" moments.
I had just hooked up a cd writer to my Ubuntu box at work (incidentally, this was a SATA drive hooked up with a weird SATA to usb cable that I have) I thought I would test it by burning an ISO. I had not burned a CD in Ubuntu as yet and was unsure of how to do it.
You right click on the iso file and say "write to disk"…. that’s it, it just worked. I didn’t install anything, I didn’t configure anything. I just plugged in the drive and it all just worked.
Brilliant.Labels: geek
“Review” of the Mac Book Air
Apple have just release their “ultra portable” Mac Book Air, which is basically a very, very flat Ibook. You cannot change the battery and it only has one USB port on it, only got a 60GB disk. Like a lot of Apple stuff, it looks really nice, but has some pretty major usability issues.
This video is of its launch. Unwired, for it is they who made the video, review a bunch of things in a normally pretty even handed way. Unfortunately they decided to send a guy who owns an iPhone to this event. QED, a Mac fanboy.
The Mac fanboy is a particularly obsessive creature. If Apple released the iTurd, a white, shiny, plastic covered dog egg, the Mac fanboy would still rush out and buy it by the truckload. This kind of almost religious fandom is demonstrated when Steve Jobs (their messiah) opens an envelope (containing the as yet un revealed mac book) to which the crowed cheer and whoop… the opening of an envelope.
The unforgivable thing is the guy from unwired is pretty much knocking one out over this laptop all they way through his little demo, not exactly impartial. I love the bit where he ask how much it is, they say “£1199” (baring in mind that the EEEPC ultra portable is only £200) to which is says “wow twelve hundred quid is pretty impressive” implying that its reasonable price.
He then signs off with “I’m going to have mine on order very soon”. This makes me hate Apple in an irrational way.Labels: apple, geek, soap box
They physics of Crysis
I have just started playing Crysis (the follow up to far cry). I am please to say that my new games rig will run it at a nice speed with high res textures and a reasonable resolution as long as I keep the fancy shadows turned off.
The process of tuning the game has been to run it with most of the bells and whistles turned down, periodically increasing some of the settings to see how the performance is affected. The most recent setting that I updated was the “physics”. In a computer game the physics refers to the realistic movement of objects within the game based on gravity, buoyancy and friction. i.e. wood floats, metal sinks. You throw a tin can and it goes a long way, you throw a light rubbish bag it doesn’t.
The physics of the game and already impressed me when at one stage I was hiding behind a palm tree to avoid the bullets of a jeep mounted machine gun when I saw trees started falling over in the direction of the jeep. I thought this must be some sort of scripted sequence until I realist the trees where being mown down by the machine gun fire. That’s when I realised how “physicsy” the game is. I obviously then stole the jeep and spent 5 minutes mowing down trees, then driving over them to make them snap. Very cool.
This was all with the physics turned down to “low”. I was intrigued to see what would happen when I turned them up to “high”. How could physics quality be improved. Well, its not, you just get loads more of it. Everything becomes moveable and destructible. Shoot your machine gun in to the branches of a tree and you are showered with leaves and branches. Run your jeep in to a shanty town style shack and the thing comes crashing down. Some of these shacks have window shutters that are helped open with wooden supports, if you want to shut the windows, knock the supports away. You can have hours of fun just making things fall over.
In the game you can fix it so you have super strength (I won’t bother explaining why, but it is very cool). Also in the game you can pick the bad guys up by the neck and throw them. What’s really fun is to throw a bad guy though a house with super strength. He dies and the place falls down, W00T.
The reason that I have written these words is because the physics is a little out of sync with reality. Things fall over far to easily. The specific example that I am thinking of is a water melon that I saw in one of these shacks. I had already sent that if I shot the melon it would split in to various juicy bits. I thought “I will throw it at the wall to see what happens”. What happened was, I knocked one of the walls out and the ceiling fell in.
I had knocked a house down with a water melon… which remained intact.
That aside. If you have computer that can handle it, and you only play one first person shooter this year. Make it Crysis, its amazing.Labels: geek, soap box
Flock
I have been having a look at Flock. Its a browser based on Firefox with a bunch of addons designed to make it easier to keep up to date with your social networking, bogging and other web 2.0 systems.
For instance, to write this passage, I have just pressed the "write" button on the too bar, a window has popped up, much like when you type an e-mail. When I press the publish button, I will select a few options and it will be posted, very easy.
The other systems that I have tried on this are Face Book, flickr, the photo sharing site and You Tube, same thing, only for video. when you have logged the browsers in to these pages you get a side bar which yopu can switch between the systems that you use. It is pretty handy for face book, you get a list of all of your friends in the left hand column which updates automatically, so if someone changes their status, they appear at the top of the list. It has special options for seeing the media that your friends are sharing and has options for messaging and poking them with one click.
Blogged with Flock Labels: geek
the brownhaze is laughing at eComStation
I am all up for new operating systems. You may have noticed that I quite like Ubuntu. Each new iteration of these new operatins systems presents new opportunities and ideas. However, I don’t credit eComStation with any of these benefits. Here is why.
In the dim and distant past, a little while before Microsoft came out with Windows 95, IBM released and operating system called OS2. I am not going to go in to weather or not this was a good o/s, we just have to know its old.
eComStation is a new distribution of OS2, which is fine. There has been a small community using OS2 since is conception (and subsequent shunning by most of the world). The part that makes me laugh, is that they want £185 for it. Its like selling a tarted version Windows NT 3.5.1.
I have been attempting to understand what the benefits eComStation presents that is worth £185 (baring in mind Windows Vista is £95 and Apple’s OS X is about £80). I had a look at the “Why eComStation” page. Apparently it has a nice GUI, you can drag and drop stuff, you can tailor the GUI to your own needs, its multitasking and multi threaded and is, by design, malware and virus resistant. OK, not bad, and if you had gone through this list in 1995 it would have looked very impressive, but it is now some 12 years later, offering these “benefits” for the best part of £200 is ridiculous.
I particularly like this exert form the page “With eComStation and its Workplace Shell you have, without doubt, the most versatile and user friendly graphical desktop at your fingertips.”. Lets compare. This is the eComStation £185 desktop, while this and this is my free Ubuntu desktop.
If anyone can explain to me why this would be useful in all but the most niche of cases, I would love to hear about it.
Also...
…. and I thought Ubuntu was a stupid name.Labels: geek, soap box
why I *heart* Ubuntu
Yesterday I was attempting to find a solution to a problem with one of my Ubuntu box’s and found myself in a general Linux forum. A user had posted a script which may have been of use. Another user replied saying that it looked like what he was after, but it would need some changes that he didn’t know how to make. The first user replied to this with a comment along the lines of “what, you don’t know how to code, what are you doing using Linux”.
This reminded me of one of the main things that sets Ubuntu aside from the other Linux distro’s . The community. In my experience the Ubuntu community is inclusive and helpful to a fault (the polar opposite of my experience of general Linux fan-boys). If it where not for this, I don’t think I would have embraced Ubuntu in the way that I have and subsequently would have missed out on all the learning that I have achieved over the last year and a half which has benefited my professional and home life.Labels: geek, real world, soap box
I can like Linux without pathologically hating Windows
I like tea.
I can say “I like tea” without immediately saying “I don’t like coffee”.
I can talk about tea and how much I like it without sounding like I am the follower of some weird religion.
When I write about coffee I don’t write it “kofeee” or some other purpose miss spelling to make sure everyone knows that I hate it.
I don’t think that all those that like coffee are evil\stupid.
I can see that coffee is not to everyone’s tastes and has stuff wrong with it. This does not make tea any nicer, nor dose it give tea magical properties.
I can do this with tea and coffee, I can also do this with Linux and Windows.
In my house I run several Ubuntu PC’s. I also run a few Windows PC’s. At some point in the future I imagine that I will no longer run any windows PC’s. Even when this happens, even if Ubuntu has become as end-to-end user friendly as Windows, even if windows still has the security problems that are forcing me off of it, even if Ubuntu is just as good for gaming as Windows I will not call it “M$ Windoze”.
I will not be found to make a statement like “I just did this cool thing with this new software on my Ubuntu PC….. YOU CANT DO THAT ON VISTA BECAUSE VISTA IS BAD AND INHERENTLY EVIL AND YOU GET BAD AIDS IF YOU USE IT AND, AND, AND IT SMELLS OF POO *foam at the mouth*”
This is because I am a grown man and not a child. As a child I had a Sega games console which meant I had to hate Nintendo. Luckily I went through this process called “growing up” whereby you get to do cool things like not being 100% polarized on issues such as brands that I like.
It’s an operating system, use it, enjoy it, then get out of the house and enjoy your life. It makes me ashamed to call myself a geek.Labels: geek, soap box
Controlling windows from the command line
I had a window control problem on my metacentre PC. I have a bunch of programmable buttons on the remote control for it. When I press them I wish to switch between useful programs such as digiguide (tv guide) the TV software and the media centre software, which in this case is sesam TV. The problem was that when I pressed the button to switch to sesamTV, it would launch another instance of the program, very annoying.
I have found an answer in the form of NirCMD. It’s a command line program that lets you do a whole bunch of useful stuff from the command line. Because you can do it from the command line, you can script it.
After I downloaded the EXE and chucked it in to my windows directory (so it would run from anywhere) I wrote a little batch file that looked like this:
Nircmd win activate title sesamtv
I programmed a button on the remote to run this batch file and my problems are over.Labels: geek, my life, real world
I am officially a geek. I have made my first post on the Ubuntu forum and I’m not even asking a question, I am filling people in on setting Ubuntu up on a tablet PC.
Getting stuff to work on a tablet
Anyone seen my 20 sided dice? Labels: geek, my life
Search in private There has been a lot in the news recently about how Google and other search organisations are going to have to disclose records of which searches have taken pace to various government agencies if required. On the face of it, this sounds like a good idea, you can identify people searching for bomb making kits and researching suicide bombings and the like. The negative side to this is that, of all of the groups of people in the world that I wouldn’t trust to use this kind of power in an ethical way, it’s a government agency, and we live in a comparatively free country at the moment, think how litte I would trust them is if we where somewhere a little more like Russia or China. Here is a vision of the future, it sounds very Orwellian, but you can imagine a world where you search for some sort of shocking\unusual (but not illegal in itself) content and the next thing you know, the thought police turn up at your door and cart you off to Paddington Green police station to be held for 90 days for being a suspected terrorist. In the past, I have searched for information on the KKK because I find their organisation bizarre\funny, this dose not make me a red neck, white supremacist. I think it would take a very clever person to be able to identify threats via what people put in to a search engine without stamping on all of the other no-threats that are going about their daily business and who may be curios about the world outside of which celebrity is too fat\skinny. The trouble is, you use Google all the time, using the web without using search engines would be pretty difficult, so it raises the question, short of becoming some sort of luddite, how do you keep your personal searching habits out of the hands of government agencies. I was thinking that some sort of distributed, peer 2 peer search engine where rather then having a massive server farm full of computers, you use computers in peoples homes (much like the SETI@home project). I’d like to see the government subpoena an unknown number of home computers from around the world. Working on the theory that I never have an original idea, I had a quick search on Google (hope no government spook was watching) and it turns out there are some project that are looking in to exactly this. YACY. This project is pretty far along, they even have a demo search page where you can try it. It requires special software to run, but it also runs in your browser using Java. I have had a little go and Google this aint. But it’s a step in the right direction. Wikia Search. This is being set up by one of the guys who created wikipedia. It s wiki based search system that looks like it could fit the bill at some point. If these systems ever did take off, my next worry would be; What if those geeks who have this search engine running on their home computers care see what I am searching for!!! Better then a government agency, but still…. Labels: geek, real world, soap box
Calendars I have a well documented and well known blind spot when it comes to dates and times. I never know what is supposed to be happening when. Recently, I started using the calendar feature of my yahoo mail box to keep track of this which has helped a lot. But after a little research, I have pimped out my calendar system, an as such should never forget anything again. This is how it works. Central Calendar:
For my main calendar I use the one that comes built in to your Google Mail account. Its light-years ahead of the Yahoo system, I think its as good as any groupware system such as Microsoft Exchange, except its free, and it runs in your web browser. I have set it up to e-mail me to remind me of people’s birthdays and the like. Desktop Calendar:
I my main desktop computer at home I use the Linux Microsoft Outlook knockoff Evolution. You can synchronise your Google calendar with it, follow these instruction. If you use outlook, you can do it too, follow these instructions Mobile Calendar:
I recently got myself a new phone. It’s a Nokia N76 smart phone running the Symbian operating system. Any Symbian phones can have their internal calendar synchronised with the Google calendar by following these instructions. Labels: geek, real world
Ad non-Sense Out of interest, I wanted to see if I could earn any money off of the Google ad-sense system (you know, the Google ad-words that you see on some web pages). I have just found out, they don’t want me: Thank you for your interest in Google Ad Sense. Unfortunately, after
reviewing your application, we're unable to accept you into Google
Ad Sense at this time.
We did not approve your application for the reasons listed below.
Issues:
- Inappropriate language How rock and roll am I? Labels: geek, my life, real world
The age of the interactive movie
Once upon a time there was a games console called the Sega Mega Drive. One day they created an ill conceived add-on for this games console called the Mega CD. This add-on allowed the gamers of the time to play a range of terrible, terrible games known as interactive movies. Let me explain further: The big brains of the computer game industry looked at the vast amount of data that could be stored on CD ROMs (600MB rather then the few megabytes available on cartridge) and decided that he only way they could fill this up would be with full-motion-video. So they set about making terrible, terrible movies with a just enough interactivity that you could call them games. One of the most famous (or is that infamous) of these genera was Night Trap. A take on the teen-screamer horror movie involving vampires. Due to the *scary-nes* of vampires and teenage girls this was given a 15 certificate (quite un heard of at the time). This abysmal pile of donkey sick apparently cost $1.5 million dollars to make. In the age of web2.0 and such we can now watch all of the video from this game, without having to put ourselves through the pain of actually playing it, or he shame of owning a Mega CD and I have to say, its bad… …real bad. Second on this list of terrible, terrible “games” for the Mega CD where the Make My Video games. As far as I know they only made two of these games, one staring the got-dressed-in-the-dark child stars Kriss Kross and the then naff-Calvin-Cline-new-kids-on-the-block-brother and now pretty good movie actor Marky Mark (nee Wahlberg) and the Funky Bunch. As the name suggests, in these games you have to edit bits of video together to make a music video. Is it just me, or does that sound like no fun what so ever? Aside from the Mega CD, numerous shocking titles on the PC, such as the bizarre half (actually quite good) space pilot shoot-em-up half live action movie Wing Commander games. Platforms like the ill fated 3DO and the Phillips CD-i where awash with these terrible, terrible excuses fro entertainment, but you can look for these yourself if you like. I am pleased to say that this genre died out by the end of the 90’s, only in games such as the Command and Conquer: Red Alert series can they get away with such awful scenery chewing performances, and only then because it’s a send-up of the dross that came before it. Labels: geek, links, real world
Unreliable weather
Apparently I can have a metcheck weather report on my website.
Bugger me, I can.
Labels: geek, real world
Google is a witch Burn the witch, burn!!! This is a new feature of the always-top-of-the-class Google maps, its Google street view. When you hit the street view button up by the usual “satellite” and “hybrid” buttons it highlights a bunch of roads. On these roans you can move a little man shaped marker, this them pops up a panoramic view of the area from this point. Such as: What’s left of the world trade centre Central Park Or even The middle of the Brooklyn Bridge Move the little man around for yourself, you will soon agree we need to get the eWitch Finder General on the case here. Labels: geek, links
Getting Stuff to Work with Ubuntu
[I am still working on this post....]
This weekend I have been Ubuntu-ing up lots of the computers in my house.
For those that dont know Ubuntu is an operating system you can use instead of Windows. Its free, and its good stuff. Its based on Linux, but luclky, its easy to use and there is lots of help on how to use in on the web.
The reason I started this was because I came across a new way to install Ubuntu. Typciall, to install Ubuntu you download and burn the CD, pop it in the CD drive of your computer and reboot. Your machine will boot off of the CD straigt in to Ubuntu without making any chances to your hard disk. This lets you check it out and see what you think prior to installing. Once you have decided that you like it, you hit the install button, it asks you a few questions and the installs to your disk. While Ubuntu “plays nice” with the install of windows that you have on your dirve, it does take over to some extent. When you stasrt your computer up, the first thing that youw will see is a boot loader screen asking if you want to run Ubuntu or Windows. This screen is created by Ubuntu, so as you may be able to guess, Windows starts to play second fiddle on the computer. This isnt a problem, but if you run in to problems with Ubuntu that you may have trouble sorting out, you cant rely on your trusty old install of windows. This is what has put me off installing it on most of my comptuers. That was beofre I discovered “Wubi”.
Wubi is a program that lets you istall Ubuntu in sucha way that it wont distrub or upset Windows. After it is instlled, when you start yoru computer, you are greeded with the usual Windows XP boot laoder with two options:
Windows XP
Ubuntu
This works a treat. So far I have installed it on the latop that we use in the bedroom and on the tablet PC in the lounge. Some stuff works great straigt away (like the special stilus that the tabplet PC uses, much to my suppirse) and some stuff requires tweaking to get it to work (i.e. all of my Buffalo wireles cards)
The reason for this post is that I have worked out how to get a lot of stuff working this weeked and I feel I should write it down to use for refrence at a later date, if it turns out that this is usfeull to anyone else, brill.
Tip 1
My Bufflo wirelss cards in the did not work straigt away. But after a bit of searching, I came across this how to on the ever brilliant Ubuntu froum,
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=185174
My card is a Buffalo WLI-CB-G54S but this will work for any card with a broadcomm chipset. Bascially, if you have a broadcomm card, chuck this in to your terminal
sudo apt-get install bcm43xx-fwcutter
tip 2
Getting Ubuntu to work on a Tablet PC.
There are quite a few percularities of the tablet PC. It has a stylus (a radio pen type thing) to use instead of a mouse, the screen needs to be able to swtich from protrait to landscape and so on. As I stated earlytr, the stylus worked straigt away, although I am still unable to get the right click button to work as it should.
Getting the screen to rotate from portrait to landscape was easy, type this in to a terminal screen:
for portrait: xrandr -o left
and back to landscape: xrandr -o normal
once you have rotated the screen, you need to tell the stylus to roate also (otherwise when you move the pen up, the pointer goes left), for that:
portrait: xsetwacom set "stylus" Rotate 2
and back to landscape: xsetwacom set "stylus" Rotate 0
This article covers this and lots more in greater detail: http://www.gottabemobile.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=1012
Getting the righit click buttonon the stylus to work While the “pen” did work straight away, the right click button (the little button on the side of the pen that you press in when you want to do a right click) did not funciton as it should. This is because the default button map (what button does what funtion) was wrong. To fix this you have to use a little command line program calld “xsetwacom” To get the right click to work enter:
sudo xsetwacom set stylus Button3 "button 3" if ever a normal click starts to go funny, you can fix it with this command:
sudo xsetwacom set stylus Button2 "button 1" bear in mind that this is on my tablet PC, which is a HP TC1100, the button mapping may be diferent on yours so you will have to have a play to see what works for you.
Tip 3
Ubuntu has a built in password manager which keeps you paswords all encrypted with a master password that you set yourself. This inludes the passwordds for any wireless networks that you connect to. This means that when you swtich the computer on it will ask you for your master password before it will connect ot thenetwork. This is a bit of pain and can be fixed by reading this article:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=192281Labels: geek
Star Fleet
In a moment of nostalgia today, I found myself looking at a fan site for the 80’s, puppet based, Saturday morning sci-fi show Star Fleet. This is a Japanese show that was localised for a western audience, so obviously the main focus of the show is a big stompy robot, as I think all Japanese sci-fi is.
I recall enjoying this show a lot when I was a kid, so bare that in mind when you read my following statement.
Aside form the Japanese\manga styling’s of the show, it’s a appalling bunch of stolen or moronic ideas.
The shows name, “star fleet” stolen wholesale from Star Trek.
In the show, the universe is starting to pick up the pieces after the end of the “space war 3”. I guess they must have asked a two year old to come up with that one.
Just look at the state of the main characters
It looks like something you would see on a verity club bus.
Most cynical of all is the state of the main ship form the program, the X-Bomber, sound familiar? It should to, what on earth is this supposed to be? It looks like someone left an X-wing fighter from Star Wars on the radiator over night.
That aside, I am sure the show was brilliant.
Oh, and for added crediblity, Brain May did a cover of the theme song.
Read for yourself here:
Edit: oh, I forgot to mention, the whole thing is a thunderbirds ripoffLabels: geek, links
Pedestrian Crossings.
I know what youre thinking. Your thinking “you’ve been posting on the brown haze since 2002 and you have never done a piece on pedestrian crossings”. Don’t worry, I’m going to rectify that problem now.
Zebra crossings are called Zebra crossings because they are white, black and stripy, pretty obvious. But what about Pelican crossings. I never saw a likeness between two sets of traffic lights and some dots on the road to a pelican. That is because it’s a kind of acronym.
PEDESTRIAN
LIGHT
CONTROLLED
CROSSING
That sorts that one out.
And here is something else about pedestrian crossings I bet you didn’t know.
Some newer pedestrian crossings look like this
These are called “Puffin” crossings. This is not an acronym, I think it’s just a take on Pelican. The special thing about puffin crossings is that they have sensors to track if anyone is waiting to cross and if they are crossing the road. This means.
- If someone presses the button but doesn’t wait by the lights, they will not change red to stop the traffic.
- When crossing the road, the lights will not change to green allowing traffic to flow. This means you can take as long as you like while crossing the road.
Fascinating. Labels: geek, real world
Live Maps
Microsoft have released there compaction to Google earth. Apparently you can view the whole world in 3D. This didn’t work on my work PC, so I will try it form home tonight and see if its up to mustard.
http://maps.live.com/Labels: geek, links
You can’t legislate for the numpty
It will be interesting to see how may people attempt to sue Nintendo for their inability to hold on to the controller for their new Wii console. While swinging it though the air playing games like baseball or blowing they are letting go of the controller sending it flying in to objects in their homes. Nintendo have released a wrist strap to stop this from happening, but the are swinging the controllers so hard that it breaks the strap.
Here is a catalogue of Wii related disasters:
http://www.wiihaveaproblem.com/
And here is how Nintendo say you should avoid said disasters:
http://www.nintendo.com/consumer/wiiplay.jspLabels: geek, links, soap box
I love spam subject lines.
I don’t know what systems spammer use to generate their spam messages, but I imagine it is done in an attempt to circumvent spam guard software. This can lead to some quite amusing subject lines, such as:
“Relax with she-males with large C0CKS”
Tell you what, nothing helps me relax in the evenings like a she-male with a large cock. Some people like to have a little drink, others like to do some gardening, for me, it has to be a she-mail with a large cock, better than a hot bath any day.
I haven’t actually opened the e-mail so I am not too sure what it is advertising, I guess it could be an advert for some sort of coffee lounge. A place where you can go that has loads of bean bags, chill out music and she-mails with large cocks…
…perhaps not.Labels: geek, real world, soap box
Unix\Liunx geeks really get on my tits sometimes.
If you don’t know Linux is an operating system that will run on the same type of computer that will run windows (just like the one that you are reading this one). It is very powerful, but is also very complicated and hard to use, it helps if you are a programmer if you want to use it.
Some Linux users are quite fanatical about it, as if it where some sort of religion that if you believed in your would live in peace are harmony for ever. Or more realistically, these are the last reminence of a world where nobody understood computers and those that did acquired some sort of geeky kudos that went some way to recompense them for their total lack of sex appeal.
One of the main principles of the Linx heads belief system is “open source”, that means that you can actually look at the code of the software that you are using, and if you want to, alter it to better suit your needs. That is very nice for people that know how to read and understand code (not everybody then) and, funnily enough, no one ever does this.
Open Source software is also free, which is quite nice, assuming you get work out how to use it. To give you an idea of the elitist attitude of the Linux head, they would say “if you cant work out how to use it then you shouldn’t be using it”. Perhaps I should give this Linux head a ladies private parts and see if there theory is borne out.
Anyhoo….
A new peace of software has been released call 'Browzar', this is a little program that when you download and run opens a web browsers, it looks brand new, but is in fact just Internet Explorer is new clothes, this important this about this 'Browzar' thought, is that it doesn’t leave any trace of what pages you have been looking at on the computer, so, ideal for using in an internet café or for surfing for porn on your family computer.
This software is written by a company that doesn’t want everybody to see their source code so it is not Open Source, it is, as they call it, closed source. Apparently this makes it anything from completely insignificant to outright evil. That is, according to slashdot.com.
Slash Dot (or /.) is a news page for Linux and Unix heads, and as such is defiantly not for the rest of society, largely because you wont even understand what they are going on about (which is fine by they way, I don’t mind that, but just don’t post anything on the message board unless you are an uber geek, you *will* get flamed)
Anyway, to wrap this article up, because I actually have work to do…
It was posed on Slash Dot that Browsar may have some sort of AdWare component to it, queue much sabre rattling about the evils of closed source, Microsoft and the stupidity of everybody that has never written software is assembly code. Probably followed by masturbating over pictures of Willow from Buffy.
I may moan further about the attitude of Liux\Unix people at some point in the future, I quite enjoyed that.Labels: geek, soap box
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