Spotty Fishy

Finally got some more nice under water pictures up on Flickr.

NASA - Phoenix Makes a Grand Entrance

NASA - Phoenix Makes a Grand Entrance: NASA’s Mars Phoenix Lander can be seen parachuting down to Mars, in this image captured by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. This is the first time that a spacecraft has imaged the final descent of another spacecraft onto a planetary body.

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twistori

twistori: Very pretty, very cool, somewhat voyeuristic and somewhat geeky. Check it out. (It does help if you’re familiar with Twitter too).

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The Right Attitude

Recently there was a thread on one of the Linux user group mailing lists I follow about privacy concerns while traveling in Italy. Apparently Italian law requires you to show valid ID or passport in Internet Cafés. Add to this the fact that you need ID to sign up for a home connection and your passport for a hotel room (where you usually have internet access these days). In Italy, therefore, it is almost impossible to get online completely anonymously. Unless you can find open WiFi perhaps.

In any event, be that as it may, I particularly liked the reaction of a crazy ex-colleague of mine:

[ILUG] ID for Internet access

From: Conor Wynne
Date: Thu May 15 18:13:20 IST 2008

[snip]

You’re on holidays, feck t’internet! :-)

Drink vino, eat and shop is all that should concern you.
If your on business, then you will have a business laptop and use the hotel’s / business wifi.

Otherwise drink & be merry!

Conor.

See the full email and thread here.

Inventgeek.com

Inventgeek.com: This is seriously techy DIY stuff. And way, way cool.

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Ye Olde Upgrades

The pythonesque approach to a system upgrade conversation (as seen on IRC today):

      <vhata> in my day, we had to upgrade a thousand
              packages a day, uphill both ways, and
              then we'd go home and have a cold pile
              of punch cards for supper, and then our
              sysadmins would jump up and down on our
              graves singing "Hallelujah"

<cocooncrash> Upgrade? Count yourself lucky! We had
              to downgrade a million packages day on
              minix systems, stay up all night manually
              backing up the servers bit by bit, and
              then get slaughtered by our users the next
              morning!

Glad I wasn’t working back then ;-)

House Of Flying Awesome

I guess that pretty mush most people that might read this, at least in the near future, will have already seen House Of Flying Daggers. However I had not until this evening. It was one of those movies that you’ve been meaning to see from before it actually came out (in this case back in 2004) and somehow never got to and then it was off circuit and then never quite found the right time to hire or buy the DVD.

In my case I was even lent a DVD, but had to return it to the lendee before I watched it. But this time I did have the foresight to rip a  decent H.624 MPEG-4 copy (thanks Handbrake) which has since been sitting around using up 945 MB of disk space. Well tonight I got home too late to make it to gym and despite really needing to catch up on some sleep I felt like watching a movie.

Well I’m very glad I hit play on this one finally. It is just an incredible piece of cinema and definitely shot straight to my top 5 ever. If you, like I was, are in the sad portion of the population that has not yet had the pleasure to enjoy this movie: Do yourself a favour and change that. Simply amazing it is.

A Metal festival in a Serbian castle?

A Metal festival in a Serbian castle?: Including Helloween, Judas Priest, Adagio, Symphony X? Hell yes!

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Strange coincidence from my Facebook main feed. I guess today…

Strange coincidence from my Facebook main feed. I guess today was llama day?

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Animoto Test

Check out animoto.com. It’s main premise is putting your photos to music, but it’s not a slideshw. It actually works really well! See for yourself (my first):

You can upload everything yourself but it also pulls in your photos from other photo sharing sites and they have a library of licensed music. Short embedded clips are free, but anything longer than 30 seconds or to be able to download as a file you have to pay.