Sorry about the thin posting at PooterGeek lately. The crossed keyboards and trousers rampant are flying again over PooterGeek Towers because I am now back in residence, having spent a few days scouting around Brighton for a new place to live, meeting up with collaborators on my next big thing, music making, and generally socialising […]
Read MoreIf you’ve got the bandwidth, this sharp computer-animated film from Taiwan is worth the download.
Read MoreFile this one under “Amazing If True”: “Cornell University and Tel Aviv University researchers have developed a method for enabling a computer program to scan text in any of a number of languages, including English and Chinese, and autonomously and without previous information infer the underlying rules of grammar. The rules can then be used […]
Read MoreI occasionally use a cheap-and-cheerful piece of computer music software called “FLStudio“. Its publishers changed the package’s name from “FruityLoops” a few years ago. Today was the first time I read the explanation for the name change given on the Website of Image-Line Software, the German company that produces FLStudio. The company offers three reasons: […]
Read MoreI noticed this story a little while back and it made me smile. It’s like John Major sacking one of his cabinet members for screwing around (or the Independent having a go at the Guardian for printing the views of an extremist): Oasis fire Pete Doherty for lack of work ethic. Those “working class” Gallagher […]
Read MoreDont you just hate the way when you are googling for someone and you type in, say, “Laurence.Rittenour”, Google thinks for a microsecond, comes back with no hits, and asks “Did you mean: ‘Laurence.Ritenour‘? And you think, “Yeah, I probably did”, and you click on the corrected link that Google so helpfully provides. Then Google […]
Read MoreThis, however, is not only not one of my spoofs; it isn’t a spoof at all. It’s a direct quote from a New York Times article about the Captain of the next Space Shuttle mission: Capt. Wendy B. Lawrence of the Navy looks at her first space shuttle flight in 1995 almost as a vacation. […]
Read MoreThis is a stunning image. Was it Photoshopped to get like that? Does it matter if it was? If the image was shot onto an electronic sensor rather than film is it really a photograph anyway? And how many “genuinely” photographic images are created with filters and artificial light and darkroom dodging-and-burning? Whatever its provenance, […]
Read MoreMMR vaccine chancer Andrew Wakefield, Arpad “poisonous GM potatoes are poisonous” Pusztai*, and Gilbert “100 000 dead in Iraq war” Burnham go hunting together for rabbits. After only a few minutes walking, all three of them simultaneously catch sight of the same bunny in the distance. Wakefield shoots a tranquilizer dart from his rifle, but it […]
Read MoreThe breadth and depth of Noam Chomsky’s wrongness must be marvelled at. Within and without his professed area of expertise he is so skilled a sponsor of untruth that, in some future world, whole virtual shelves will be devoted to studies of how it happened that so many of his peers were willing to stir […]
Read MoreBecause of a bug in the “Truth Laid Bear Ecosystem”, an extremely obscure site called Blogesque (2 944 978 citations) became the biggest ‘Blog on the planet yesterday, one day after registering with the Ecosystem. I’d have paid good money to see the look on Instapundit‘s (5 451 citations) face when he saw that one appear out of […]
Read MoreFurther to my iPod-bothering post about content freedom, read about Friday’s US Federal appeals court ruling against media industry requirements for built-in hardware anti-piracy technology and marvel at this rant today against the iPod’s DRM (Digital Rights Management) from Hilary Rosen, a woman who took the music industry dollar for years.
Read MoreI have an iRiver. It’s fugly. Even its name is an aesthetically displeasing admission that the sole reason for its existence is to divert market share from the mighty iPod family. You buy an iPod from a smiley, smart-casual white person in an authorized Mac dealership where the shelves are cleaner and brighter than those […]
Read MoreI have been banging on about the advantages of open source software for schools for years, giving talks, writing green ink letters to civil servants, even (thanks to Patricia Hewitt) meeting some senior mandarins. Sadly, most politicians’ and bureaucrats’ understanding of information technology barely extends to email. This last fact, incidentally, might have something to […]
Read MoreIt’s my mum’s birthday in a few weeks and I am thinking of buying her (and my dad) a handheld DVD player. She won’t watch films on it, but it will be perfect for her and dad to browse through (CDs of) family photos I make for them without their having to heft albums about […]
Read MoreI met snappy Hak yesterday in London. She was only really snappy when, for example, a mad Islingtonian bint all but knocked her down, dashing across Upper Street to hail a taxi; otherwise she was a charmer. We had a nice lunch; discussed politics, psychiatry, and property; and fondled the shiny things in the Tottenham […]
Read MoreWhodathunkit? As well as being “destructive” and “ecologically catastrophic”, biotechnology is “racist“. I suppose that makes me some kind of sell-out: “This June in Philadelphia, thousands of wealthy capitalists and biological profiteers representing the Biotechnology Industry Organization will convene in Philly to celebrate and promote their dangerous manipulation of life’s very building blocks for private […]
Read MorePerhaps you have heard those George Gershwin player piano recordings, rendered from rolls of his original performances. Much as I admire Gershwin, his showy, overworked playing hasn’t, to my ears, dated well, even when recreated live by modern human mimics who are a more sensitive to contemporary tastes. It’s like listening to a blousey old […]
Read MoreThis is a thumbnail image of an unauthorised scan of Saturday’s Biff strip in The Guardian. After you have clicked on it to read the full-size version please visit BiffOnline and buy some merchandise.
Read MoreThere has been a (false) fire alarm at the Genome Campus. Tens of its employees are standing outside in chilly spring rain and wind. I am joined by my boss’s boss and the senior colleague with whom he is temporarily sharing his office. My boss’s boss turns to his officemate: “Have you read Damian’s ‘Blog?” […]
Read MoreI’d often wondered what computer people meant when they referred to one of their kind as a “systems architect”. This UNIX ‘Blog has the answer. There’ll be so many unused monitors left at our place when we shut down we’ll be able to build “Screenhenge”. [Thanks to Peter Tribble]
Read MoreI meant to ‘Blog this weeks ago. Readers in the UK might be interested to know that there is at least one way of circumventing those 0870 numbers that firms use these days to get us to pay to talk to them. Thanks to Jonathan Nicholson at the Sanger.
Read MoreI wanted to comment on a ‘Blog yesterday, but I couldn’t read the distorted characters on the security image clearly enough to type them in. Does this mean that I am really an artificial intelligence?
Read MoreIf you had developed an amazing new technique to see through your laptop, what would you do with that power? Set up a flickr gallery to show off your handiwork. [via Slashdot] cat scan [UPDATE: After you’ve browsed a few to get the idea, you should check out this one—truly the work of a geek […]
Read MoreScientists are almost as susceptible to a certain type of urban myth as the rest of the population. One popular one was that there are 100 000 genes in the human genome. When the first estimates of “the number of genes”—I use quotes because exactly what constitutes a single gene is subtle, complex, and controversial—based on […]
Read MoreWhat happens when inflation on goods goes negative and inflation on services stays positive? You get a free computer for signing up with a mobile phone network.
Read MoreReading a ‘Blog on the Web is like watching a swan on the water: you have no idea of the furious activity that’s going on under the surface. Within hours of my upgrading this thing, 57 varieties of annoying spamming scum and devious abusive snotbag converged on pootergeek.com probing and testing for weaknesses. Every five […]
Read MoreLast weekend, as I regarded the wreckage from my most recent computer system balls-up (again), I decided that I should at least squeeze some good from the bad and upgrade PooterGeek’s software to the latest version of WordPress. I stayed up late on Sunday night carefully moving my modifications from 1.1 to 1.2, and also […]
Read MoreJust over a week ago, Duncan Grisby, one of this city’s many alpha geeks, invited readers of the legendary “cam.misc” discussion board to pop along to his Website to examine his action shots of a burglar. The thief had been filmed by the video Webcam that was sitting on top of the four thousand pounds’ […]
Read MoreI am quiet because I am busy fixing a computer. Sorry everyone. I did take a brief break on Friday evening. During that interval I watched two young women hit each other very hard in front of a baying mob—not on screen; in the flesh. Naturally I’ll ‘Blog that. In the meantime, please feel free […]
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