![[icon]](http://l-userpic.livejournal.com/12767122/2327166) |
Play hard, work..?
|
| This is my log for the web, so I don't plan to apologise for noting a recipe found somewhere else in the Inters. But it's a recipe for Muesli. What has he done? Sadly it is a sure sign of time creeping up that I'd wind up creeping aged before it inters me.
But Madduck's posted an interesting fruit-and-nut muesli in the same week that I'm painfully made aware of Bill Granger/Tom Waterton's recipe for oat Muesli in Bill's Open Kitchen. Just in case I actually wind up making either of these recipes.
Take care.
K3n. | comments: Leave a comment   |
| I saw someone write "bicurious about OSX" and just want to note the phrase.
(On a personal note, I have a system with SSE3 extensions and could probably force an OSX86 install, but really am not bothered.)
Take care.
K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| I'm writing up, and so bloody glad for a Document Processor that makes my my document look beautiful, makes equation-writing a joy, and which looks after all of my document references. That last bit's extra sweet (dude!), as I get to be part of the finalisation process of The Girlfriend's Thesis 2.0 -- Corrected Edition, which will involve persuading Microsoft Word to get her page numbers right. It's not too bad, just tedious.
But LaTeX does it for free. On Page 114 (at the moment, who cares where it ends up?), I use the following to refer to an equation on Page 45 (for now):
Equation \ref{eqn:engbeamcurv} (see Page \pageref{eqn:engbeamcurv})
That's just another bit of procrastination out of the way for the day. Thanks for listening.
Take care.
K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| The CA has it best: And the son of man, hatched from a chocolate egg which dropped serendipitously on to the lap of the Madonna as the easter bunny hopped by.
That's the authoritative word of supermarket Somerfield, from a questionnaire they put out to publicise their two-for-one deals on religious ignorance. See the article at the BBC.
Chocolate face-mouthed,
K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| | Current Music: | Aren't Snow Patrol on Soul Survivor records? | | Security: | | | Subject: | Love your enemies? | | Time: | 12:45 pm |
|
| Because I've elected not to do politics or religion here (do you remember post #2?), I'll put the link to an article in today's Grauniad as a memo-to-self so that I can sound intelligent and smug in polite company. It's Max Hastings on the War-on-Terror's 'single Muslim opposition to Western freedom'. I'm looking forward to mumbling something about the religious convictions of both George and Tony not reaching far enough to Jesus Christ's saying along the lines of 'love your enemies'. I also look forward to the hypocritical high ground of criticism ("well, of course they've got it wong...") without need to actually do anything to make things better. Fortehwin!
take care.
love k3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Today, we have the sarcastic kind people at ukresistance.co.uk for answering a question I hadn't thought to ask: Whatever happened to Andy Crane?
Their diligent searching yielded these results.
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: Leave a comment |
| Today's update from our TechDesk. Have you guys fixed the printers yet?
K3n Brockman here, from the techdesk. I've been fiddling around with the disks on my new notebook computer (it's nice enough, I'm not going to show my conceit for having a 15.4" wide-screen, Turion64 processor, 1GB RAM and a Mobility Radeon X700 graphics device). I got an external USB disk to back everything up on, and wanted to add a Linux or two the notebook to play with, so had planned to copy the disk to external storage, mount the external image and copy ever single file and directory back over. However, a quick googling found me GParted, which has a 25MB LiveCD and can handle most filesystems you'd want to throw at it. Its resized my NTFS partition down from 70GB to 35, and did it beautifuly, calmly quietly and nicely. I love it.
But, having finished the resizing the partition, the front-end program crashed with a segmentation fault. That scared me like having a great lover ditch you by text message. After such abuse, I'm in thrall to the program, and highly recommend their LiveCD to your arsenal of computer recovery tools.
Edit: Obvious spelling fixes and edits for clarity. But the big thing: one of the temps found that GParted is on the far-more-stable and nicely-pretty Ubuntu 5.10 Live disk, which is a 643 MiB disk image, instead of 25, but it hasn't crashed out at all. Which is much more reassuring.
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| Finally, something blog-worthy. (I say this as an aside: we had an internet activist and fearsome blogger stay at Castle Firewood this last weekend who is an Anglophile American -- or possibly just 'not xenophobic' -- who received the beans on toast* I had prepared with the line "this is almost blog-worthy". I didn't know whether that was high praise or an indication of the worst of blogging. I decided later that the marvels of Baked Beans in Tomato Sauce atop Malted Farmhouse Wholemeal Bread with Olive Oil Margerine, to those alienated from the key ingredient of Baked Beans, are justifiably blog-worthy and I was being a snob to suggest that blogging is anything other than a serious thing.)
And to tonight's main story: Microsoft have announced a DVD that you can play only once and then throw away. This silliness won't end. It's intended as a means to stop people copying movies and sharing them but is actually a desperate attempt for an old distribution method to cling on in a new market.
You know about podcasting, right? It's the thing where people record audio to their computers and let other people download it when they wish and listen to it when they wish. I see it like Wireless Radio broadcasts before Television caught on. Eventually we'll have a system where you don't watch TV when it's broadcast but when you want, and shows have release dates and times so that people can watch them when they're newly available. So broadcast television has a new mechanism. Why not movies too? The internet will eventually come to our homes and offices in a way that we can pick a movie and watch it soon after, possibly just once, possibly to keep.
So why create wasteful land-fill with play-once disks? And what happens to the anti-piracy measures when someone extracts the movie to a standard re-writable disk? It strikes me of a complete step in the wrong direction... ...and we haven't talked of the 'fair use' provision of copyright law that means it's okay to tape a CD you own so you can listen to it in the car or elsewhere. These new disks will probably have some encryption on them so that only registered players can access the movie, and the U.S.A. has a law that says that sides-stepping any encryption is a felony; what of the fair use of watching the movie in two stages, not in one sitting?
The original edition of this entry didn't include acknowledgements of the death knell of the plans: that another company has already tried to do this before. A U.S. company, Circuit City, sold disks called DIVX which allowed people to play the disk freely for the first 48 hours in a special player which telephoned an account system for subsequent plays of the disk. Early adopters disliked the format and protested the film studios against their use of it.
This new product may provide a better film experience, but at greater cost to the environment and with unnecessary inconvenience to the user. The silliness of trying to stop digital transfers of files will continue, but the paradigm (of halting something that digital computers excel at) is wrong: the horse has bolted the stable.
*: I had difficulty typing the name of the dish as my fingers wanted to indicate that the bread products were replaced with a Chinese faith practice: Beans on Taoist. I'm sure that there's a joke in there somewhere.
Take care.
love K3n. | | comments: 3 comments or Leave a comment |
| |
|
Play hard, work..?
|
|
![[info]](http://l-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif?v=92.2){kind=small}
k3ninho's journal