If 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 MoreSomewhere in a box I have a copy of Dire Straits’ Love Over Gold on cassette. I bought it when I was a kid and listened to it on the Sony boombox that I won when I was thirteen in a competition to come up with a new advertising slogan for Pot Noodle™. Dire Straits’ […]
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 MoreDuring the dying months of my doing bioinformatics for a living, I attended a scientific conference in Scotland. I helped to run a few of the seminars there, but had nothing to do with their planning. At one, I marched to the front during a student’s presentation and told a member of the audience to […]
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 MoreSeriously.
Read MoreA little while back, someone linked me to the Geostationary Banana Over Texas. I thought it was just a Web meme / bit of conceptual art fun. It turns out it’s both of these, but it’s also a real project to launch a gigantic inflatable banana into orbit. It’s worth reading that article right to […]
Read MoreToday, via Photo Matt, I discovered a phrase that I wish I had known about years ago: “The adage, “Why should I care what color the bikeshed is?“, means: just because you are capable of building a bikeshed does not mean you should stop others from building one just because you do not like the […]
Read MoreYou can download a series of Glasgow University lectures about Kant on MP3.
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 MoreiPHONE: Hi, Steve. Who do you want to talk to today? STEVE: I’ve told you before not to say that. iPHONE: Sorry. My little joke. Who should I ring? STEVE: I’d like to speak to my broker. iPHONE: Are you sure you want to do that? STEVE: Of course I’m sure. Don’t get sma… Just […]
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 MoreFirst you can watch the “killer attack on the bees” photo-story. Then you can see a video of what happens to Tickle-Me Elmo TMX (a toy that amused my nephew and niece this Christmas) when he is set on fire: he keeps on laughing while the flames are a-lapping.
Read More[stolen from here]
Read MoreIf you are familiar with the official French attitude* to the use of English in academic (and other cultural) settings, the appearance of a state-funded TV station, “France 24”, with an English-language feed might surprise you. It did me when I watched one of their online English-language video ads a few days ago. They also broadcast […]
Read MoreBlogger Mr Eugenides displays courage to rival that of Leonidas (the chocolatier rather than the king of the Spartans) as he takes on intellectual giantess Polly Toynbee in the argument over government surveillance and points up classic fallacy after classic fallacy in her defence of ID cards and CCTV cameras. What case does Mr E […]
Read MoreLook at these fascinating slides of a 1959 lecture made about plans for the moon landings.
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 MoreThis lovely image began in a Samsung D600.
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: […]
Read MoreA couple of times in the past I’ve linked to snippets of multi-part vocal harmony [MP3, 770kB] here. Thanks to digital audio workstations like the marvellous Sonar and audio interfaces like this, I can record myself singing the various parts of the arrangement, overlay the harmonies, set them in an artificial space, and create my […]
Read MoreI haven’t had time for a proper post for the past few days and I still don’t, but Leasey recommends that you explore the platypus genome by hovering your mouse pointer over the little image of a platypus on this page and reading the pop-up that appears. Genomics: an unrecognized mine of comedy gold.
Read MoreI’m smart enough to appreciate just how much smarter than me my friends are. As I always say, talent recognizes genius. Talent should also recognize its own limits. I’ve reached that stage in my life when I’ve had to accept that I won’t be able to do the things I dreamt of doing when I […]
Read MoreOne of the discussions I had at Jackie’s party was about government incompetence in IT procurement and management. Gazillions of pounds of our money goes to buy BMWs for “consultants” who I wouldn’t trust to format a floppy disk and the results are exactly as you would expect. Of course poorly thought out and chronically […]
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