Here’s an excellent, concicse blogpost that outlines both how identity thieves can scrape sensitive information from your discarded computer and simple steps you can take to make it harder for them to do so. Stealing someone’s identity doesn’t take a lot of intelligence or even a lot of effort. The bad guys only need you […]
Read MoreFoes of President Barack Obama and his policies can vent their frustrations by engaging in fictional warfare, thanks to a new online strategy game with a heavy political component. The satirical game 2011: Obama’s Coup Fails, launched last month by a group of Ron Paul supporters that call themselves The Founders, throws players into combat […]
Read MoreAs Dickens himself once wrote, this is both the baddest and the bestest thing ever: eighteen quid buys you one hundred classic works of literature for your DS. Devoting a nearly quarter of the content to Shakespeare’s plays is a bit of a cheat, though. That’s like padding out a collection of scores from great […]
Read MoreSome time back, I raved about the freedom my fat, ugly iRiver gives me compared to an iPod. Now you can make your iRiver free-er or liberate your Apple MP3 player with the marvellous new version 3.0 of Rockbox, the open source firmware replacement. It works with lots of other models of portable music jukeboxes […]
Read MoreIf you are scared of spiders then please don’t follow this link [requires Flash].
Read MoreYou don’t have to be a restaurant boss to be shocked by the size of this packaging.
Read MoreDo you remember Wei? Well, Wei… …wed… …Bobby… …in Edinburgh earlier this month, and I was hired to shoot the event. It wasn’t my first tri-lingual wedding, but it was my first Cantonese/Mandarin/Scottish one. And it was the first one from which the happy couple excused me in the small hours because the tea ceremony […]
Read MorePooterGeek is now running version 2.5.1 of WordPress and has a new theme, officially “PooterGeek 4.0”. (I’d planned this makeover long before the Harry’s Place mob moved into their nice new place and the redesign of their site was not my work, but I congratulate them on their choice of blogging software.) Most of my […]
Read MoreWhile I’m on the subject of Tories, this evening, I finally got round to watching the second part of the very good Michael Portillo documentary about Thatcher and the Conservative Party (The Lady’s Not For Spurning) that I downloaded from the BBC’s excellent iPlayer site. I put it off for so long because I was […]
Read MoreAs I admitted yesterday, I’ve taken part in Talk Toshiba‘s blogger outreach programme. I thoroughly approve of this sort of thing. Not only does it make bloggers feel even more important than we already think we are, but it allows us to play with shiny things for free. (It’s also a boon to those with […]
Read MoreTom Hamilton complains about being spammed by Naomi Klein’s people, looking for publicity for her latest volume of designer politics. (Exactly as I didn’t with Peter Cook’s book back here, I am going to divine without reading it that Klein’s book will be rubbish.) From Tom’s comments, it seems, they also pestered Tim Worstall, Mr Eugenides, and […]
Read MoreThis is another one I’m over a month late to, but it’s magical, just the sort of impossible cleverness that computer games could do with more of. Via plasticbag.org, to succeed playing Echocrome [Flash video demo] you have to accept the physics of Escherworld.
Read MoreIt is an important day for Britain. Since the abrupt collapse of our manufacturing base, our economy depends heavily upon fictional characters. Together, Lara Croft, James Bond, The Teletubbies, Simon Cowell, and Harry Potter now account for 43 percent of GDP. From time to time, J K Rowling dials 141, calls Buckingham Palace, and mutters quietly: “I […]
Read MoreI took my time noticing it, but in this blog post Tim Almond fisked a particularly stupid article about the iPhone and gave a more accurate assessment of the significance of the device. And this was a good spot too.
Read MoreThis civil engineering computer simulation [YouTube video] of one of the September 11 impacts is all the more shocking for being created without factoring in the explosions or heat damage. It also omits the fleeing spectating Jews, holographically concealed missiles, and shaped charges planted in the tower by giant lizards. Scientists and engineers, eh? They’re […]
Read MoreThe last time I tinkered ever so slightly with the layout of PooterGeek the email and comment complaints were such that I gave up and returned to the current look. This is something like the fourth design of PG since it started five years ago, but when I changed it previously there were no readers […]
Read MoreIf you are a fed up with Windows and/or would like to try out Linux, one of the best and most popular free and open alternatives, then now is a better time than ever. Yesterday Dell confirmed that they would be pre-installing Ubuntu, one of the friendliest forms of the operating system, on some of […]
Read MoreInternet old-timers are not necessarily more polite than newcomers. They do, however, tend to know the rules, sometimes as a result of having been slapped down more than once by even-older-timers. Beginners in online communication often don’t even realise there are any rules at all. Hardcore open source geeks, for example, that is people who […]
Read More…because I stupidly fried my archiving PC on Sunday evening: melted plastic, smoke, the works. I’m boring about these things so I lost no data, but I did lose too many hours to re-building and re-configuring hardware and software and restoring files. And now I’ve just rounded the tedium off by fishing the last couple […]
Read MoreIn my kitchen I have a PC made from bits of other, now dead, computers. It’s a sort of Millennium Falcon machine: looks crap; runs fast. Partly this is because it’s running Linux of course, but I haven’t had time to tweak the installation properly so it does have one or two wrinkles. One of […]
Read MoreIn 2004 a US teenager murdered a homeless man. The teenager blamed his actions on his having played violent video games. Penny Arcade is a blog comic about video games. Gabe, one of its authors wrote a response to the story that ironically(?) blamed the kid’s parents. Gabe then received an extraordinary letter from a […]
Read MoreIf this entry also appears at Bloggers4Labour then thanks to Andrew Regan, the evil genius behind that site, and to the cunning Andrew Skudder for restoring PooterGeek’s feed to the collective. UPDATE: I’m boring, I’m beige, I’m back, and my pants are as tight as a Scissor Sisters track.
Read More[Brace yourself, dad.] I’m shopping around for a colocation service—crudely, a secure shed with a big pipe to the Net where I can install a server. As you’d expect I’ve been checking out local companies. One I won’t be using is Intramedia. The front page of their Website is dominated by what I suppose I […]
Read MoreTalking of recycling, it looks like producer Timbaland has some explaining to do to a Finnish computer musician about a backing track that Mr Land laid down for Nelly Furtado. [The previous link goes to YouTube, but you can follow these links to MP3s of the tunes.] There’s something amusing about a deep-voiced multimillionaire hip-hop […]
Read More[Warning: This post is slightly geeky.] I have to clean up and transfer all my mobile phone contacts from my old to my new phone before I move to a new provider tomorrow—thereby saving about two-thirds on my mobile bill. For Friends of the Geek (and clients) reading this, my mobile number will remain unchanged, […]
Read More[stolen from here]
Read MoreAnd, whatever you do, don’t click! [requires Flash, via Slashdot—so by the time you read this you probably won’t be able to access the site.]
Read MoreOver the past week or so I have grown a beard. I’m going to chop it off today, but it’s not bad as beards go: short, thick, dark, and slightly curly, with flecks of grey in it. It’s grown while I’ve been locked indoors doing Web design on my Sepial site. The design isn’t even […]
Read MoreFlickr is amazing. I got an email overnight from a US political magazine asking to use one of those Darfur demo photos. A couple of days ago Norm sent me a link to an article about the death of the photographic original. You’re bored already by my “real film” fanaticism, but even in the days […]
Read MoreCommenters here might have noticed that, this week, PooterGeek acquired a new CAPTCHA, that is a test to check that you are, er, “human” before your comment is accepted by the system. It’s to discourage spammers from clogging up this blog with links to their poker, porn, and Viagra sites. The PooterGeek CAPTCHA is basic: […]
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