Dropsafe

…are now considered safe financial risks. This is the only excuse I can think of for The Thomas Crown Affair (which started the rot) followed by The Italian Job and The Ladykillers and The Stepford Wives and The Manchurian Candidate now being joined by a remake of Alfie [trailer]. There’s Around The World In 80…

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Linked from Jim at [found.pale.org] ; bizzzare thing is that it was only a few days ago, I was theorising loudly and boozily on a London streetcorner in whether there might be something like this possible with Windows, because there have been such in the OSS space for a long time… Notice especially the dig…

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I had an interesting evening last night, experimenting with using Skype as a zero-cost voice-conferencing and instant-messaging tool. It was an interesting attempt – overall I give the experience 6 out of 10. Normally at this time of year I’d be spending a week in California at a conference, but this year I can’t fit…

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Having been introduced to Tequila and Margaritas by a number of my colleagues I felt it was time to learn something about it. Best cheap way, as ever, is read-and-blog: [www.baguiocityonline.com] Brief History of Tequila and the Worm from Mexico Originally, the Aztecs took the heart of the blue agave plant, cooked it, and pressed…

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[www.britishseapower.co.uk] PARAGRAPH OF THE MONTH Recently, the author Anthony Buckeridge passed away. Buckeridge was the man behind the Jennings series of novels, with their funny fun at boarding school. His death inspired Christoper Hawtree to compose the following paragraph in the Buckeridge obituary in The Independent: “No clodpoll, he produced supersonic, lobsterous work which, if…

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I’ve mused upon the theory of tipping quite a lot, of late; I think I can see some of the logic in it: underpay your service staff this motivates them to work harder to justify tips motivated staff make for happy customers happy customers generate even more customers more customers make more revenue …but in…

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In conversation with a colleague on IRC the other evening, I nipped upstairs to the machine room, scanned and uploaded this photo of myself and my colleagues at University of Aberystwyth Computer Unit, circa 1990, in the era when I was first fighting to make sense of DES S-boxes and trying to make E-expansions go…

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With the exception of a small number of DRM-faffed CDs: Queens of the Stone Age: Songs for the Deaf David Grey: White Ladder …which will doubtless succumb to LAME on Linux; aside from these plus one DVD-Single with which I have yet to work-out what to do, my iPod now contains every music and spoken-word…

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Now I do not always quite agree with everything that our ponytailed leader says in public, but in this one Jonathan is, as we Brits say, bang on the money. Solaris and its nifty new features is not a threat to any of Linux, linux, or GNU/[Ll]inux; it is a competitor to those firms which…

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Spotted by Bart: [news.bbc.co.uk] A bold amphibious escape bid by a bear at Berlin zoo has been foiled in a dramatic shoot-out. Juan the Andean spectacled bear first paddled across a moat using a log for a raft, then scaled a wall. Finally he appeared to commandeer a bicycle, before zookeepers with brooms cornered him…

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Nearly-Live Planetary Desktop Backgrounds! Cool! [taint.org]

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So i pointed a colleague at the new iMac – which I don’t like for some reason, looking rather boxy – and he cited several other PC-In-A-Monitor solutions from Computer Trade Shopper. He then cited this one – Computer-In-A-Keyboard – and I said: It’s a Sinclair QL, innit? Or maybe an Oric? Dragon32? VIC-20? Just…

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