Was given a link to an interesting piece on Sky and Mad Men today, which points out that Sky have a viewship of under 50,000 for Mad Men.

Like that blog writer, I have an abiding love for that piece of televisual entertainment, put simply, it is one of ...

Political Proposal from the Mayor of Killarney.

"The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which"

Well, not entirely lost for words, lest there be nothing actually to say.

Another lie to add on the stack. Another betrayal of the party membership. Another party principle wrapped in a blue rag and flung under a bus. Another kick in the face for anyone who thought this party ...

Yesterday, I logged onto my desktop to find errors spewing everywhere. A bit of digging brought the unpleasant news that my rootfs was 100% full. On an emedded device, this might be unpleasant but likely, on a desktop where rootfs is 38GB, this was unpossible, surely.

Booting onto live media ...

Further update to the two previous posts about the Vaio Laptop: Thread on recycling old computers prompted me to write the following today:

On 11/03/12 13:28, Nigel Stapley wrote: (There don't seem to be as many of them here as there once were, but anyway...)

I ...

Sick to death of people who couldn't locate the conflict zone on an atlas sending this kony crap on. Here's some general tips on dealing with such emotive topic:

1. Check who has made the video. In this case it's a dodgy "charity" in cahoots with the Ugandan ...

A few things from the world around which bear mentioning:

The Tyranny of Tolerance

The head honcho of Catholicism in Scotland, Keith O'Brien wrote a despicable article in which he, among other things, compared gay marriage to slavery, called civil partnerships "grotesque madness" and frankly showed a complete lack ...

Whilst grumbling about the non-availability of printing from my Android phone today, a kind googler pointed me in the direction of Cloudprint on GitHub

More details on this can be gotten from this LinuxQuestions thread. Essentially, this is a python script which hooks into cups (via pycups, or, in debian ...

So, after the phony war the Government has decided to refer the fiscal compact to the people of Ireland by way of a referendum. No wording of the referendum has been released as yet, but the tenor of Enda's speech to the Dáil strongly suggests that this is going ...

Two nice little articles in the Irish Times and the Irish Examiner this morning, both warning about the heinous evil of Pizzas! Apparently they contain your entire daily fat, sugar and calorie allowance. All of them.

Look a little closer at the Articles, and you'll notice that they are ...

Amidst all the (right and proper) general outpuring of sympathy, grief and indeed outrage over the killing of journalist Marie Colvin, its easy to overlook that Remi Ochlik was also murdered by the Assad Regime in the same attack.

Ochlik's website http://www.ochlik.com/ is still operative at ...

Update on the vaio referred to in an older post. The kids continue to enjoy the computer, but they were complaining a wee bit about the screen.

Essentially, it was barely 800*600, and the font display was just terrible. Found that puppy uses an interface somewhat akin to dpkg-reconfigure ...

Well, the Oracle case where they wanted $6bn from Google for patent violation, that's just become the case where Oracle want $300m from Google for, well, its hard to tell, but they definitely think Google owe them something

Full details and analysis on the always excellent groklaw, which continues ...

The Sunday Telegraph, from which I might have expected something better, has a really rather disgusting hack-job on Richard Dawkins in today's edition.

Dawkins himself has written a rather wonderful response to this piece of pure gutter journalism in which he attempts to descry the logic which must have ...

Yet more evidence, as if more was needed, that the current economic travails being suffered by millions of ordinary Europeans are just that - For Ordinary People Only. The super-rich, the ones whose reckless gambling and untramelled naked greed got us all into this hell hole in the first place, they ...

A little while back, I wrote about my troubles with G+ and GMail both having a sudden tendency to cripple my computer, thereby destroying my ability to work. Well, that post was noted by someone who works in Google, who mentioned it to someone, who mentioned it to someone else ...

The European Court of Justice has decided the case of SABAM -v- Netlog and it's a big one.

In this important ruling, the EU Court of Justice follows a similar reasoning to that of the SABAM vs. Scarlet decision, and concludes that forcing a hosting service to screen all ...

Was pinged on twitter with a link to a slashdot story about Gnome 3.

The main article is a link to a gnome-developers blog which discusses the thinking behind the new gnome-shell UI. To say that it is staggering in its delusion is mild. Core to their thinking is the ...

In using the Pelican blog system, I've wanted to add a GooglePlus button for my own usage. The program already featured a twitter button, so I guessed this was achievable.

I went onto the Pelican IRC group, and made my modest enquiry. Two minutes later a user had patched ...

Today's Irish Times brings yet more joyous news to those who supported Labour as a progressive modern party in the last election.

During last year’s election campaign, Labour promised to extend adoption rights to all parties in civil partnerships. This was in a section of the party’s ...

I acquired a nice old vaio laptop via freecycle some time ago, and have only now got around to makig it usabe for the kids.

I've managed (despite Sony's best efforts) to get a Linux distro installed and working - Puppy Linux but I'm somewhat concerned about its ...

In the persistent pursuit of a decent computing experience in the new wave of Linux distibutions, I have surrendered myself to the people who wear anoraks and complain about Blurred Fonts.

Yes, I finally got a decent WM experience with Debian Wheezy, thanks to the tiling wm awesome. Its taken ...

Been playing about with ifttt. If that then this appears to be the lastest darling of the always on api-obsessed internet generation, so I reckoned to give it a go.

This post should be retweeted as a link to my blog, i'm just learning, so ...

Here's an interesting snippet from a gnome3 oriented IRC channel from last night:

[03:17] <twb> Or switch to intel GPUs :P
[03:18] <DammitJim> LOL @ twb
[03:18] <twb> I'm serious
[03:18] <twb> Half the kids that come here want help babysitting their stupid nvidia GPUs ...

Google+ and GMail both had some changes done to them in the last day or so. THey appear to be rendering their own scrollbars now, the inertial crap they featured in the Reader redesign.

Result: I can now no longer access G+ or GMail in a sensible manner on my ...

Apropos of a conversation in alt.fan.pratchett, I went looking for a reasoned defence of Paul Verhoeven's Starship Troopers

I found an article on tor.com by SF author John Scalzi. I highly read more

Well, stick a fork in me, I'm done. Or an idiot.

After I submitted a ticket to the Hosting Provider, I reread the lftp man pages.

Missing switch was: set ftp:ssl-allow 0

Idiot.

Been playing with the blog software Pelican

It, finally, seems to have everything I've been looking for in blogging. It uses Markdown as its underlying structure, python code to render it into readable form, and is decidedly low overhead.

The one issue I continue to have is uploading the ...

if there was any evidence that Labour were mitigating the Thatcherite tendency in FG, then that would be one thing. As it stands, however, there's no sign of it. It isn't a FG minister attacking the poorest and weakest in society, Joan Burton is. It isn't FG ...

I am desperately trying to find some way of continuing to use Gnome2 on Debian Wheezy.

Squeeze is getting on in years, I shall soon have to upgrade for various reasons, but the idea of using this piece of dung is disquieting.

I had been looking at Maté but it ...

On 2012-02-07, GaryN webmaster@oxtoyrun.org.uk wrote:

Just looking at my bookshelves and thinking 'Why did I buy x, y, z?'

Okay, I'll bite.

Pratchett, clearly, been reading since forever. I've never really come to any other author via him, save and excepting:

Carl Hiassen. Who is ...

Brian Lenihan, T.D., has died of pancreatic cancer. While feeling sympathy for his wife and children, I can't help feeling growing outrage at this.

Essentially, it is now clear that the lackwit Fianna Fáil/Green administration sent a terminally ill man from his death bed to represent the ...