I deleted one of my two old accounts on jaiku a today. In the process, it redirected me to its 404 page.
Really a better caption would be “Maybe a bird was eating it so google stepped in and ruthlessly ‘euthanized’ it with a large rock”.
Experimenting with Lock Picking
May 23rd, 2009 § 0
I’ve been trying my hand at lock picking for a little while recently. I did some research around the subject and joined a forum called Lock Picking 101. At their advice I bought a set of 14 picks from LockPickShop.com. I also downloaded and read the LSI guide to lock picking, a resource similar to the better known MIT guide but more visual. The picks seem well made and (in all my untrained glory) I’d recommend them to anyone interested. I also found a guide to making lock picks online which I guess would be useful to anyone with a workshop at easy access.
A little while after having my picks delivered, I mentioned my very undeveloped interest to a friend who was then generous enough to lend me a loose door lock she had used to practice lock picking in high school. It is a simple 5 pin ‘Kwickset’ lock with normal pins which I can now consistently pick. I’m considering buying some pins designed to make picking more difficult, or maybe a totally new lock. I’ll probably go to a locksmith in my neighbourhood in the UK (I wonder what their policies are on selling to someone learning to pick) but I’m also considering buying a ‘training lock’ such as the one sold at learnlockpicking.com. » Read the rest of this entry «
The Song of Time played on the iPhone Ocarina App
May 21st, 2009 § 0
As far as cheap thrills go, Smule’s Ocarina application for the iPhone ranks pretty highly. To play a note one blows into the phone’s microphone and touches a combination of the screen’s four hotspots.
I read the notes off the screen as I played. Lots of other Zelda songs have also been written up by the application’s community but ‘The Song of Time’ is one of the easiest to play.
A Short Facebook Miscellany
May 21st, 2009 § 1
This is an email from Facebook. After I switched my language settings it started sending me mixed language emails.
And this is a terrific feature that I just noticed. I’m probably way behind the curve. Clicking the button downloads an ICS file which contains all the events invitation and opens with your favourite calendar program.
Star Trek
April 29th, 2009 § 1
I saw Star Trek this last Friday at the Providence IMAX cinema as part of Brown’s Ivy Film Festival (that’s right; free, early and huge) and I can confirm that the lens flare was indeed ridiculous – but only distractingly so once or twice. My only other qualm with the movie centres around some frankly distracting attempts at comic relief. Apart from that the movie was exactly what I’d been hoping for, that is to say a re-imagination that holds true to the original whist modernizing it and being a genuinely good self standing film. It has also, as will become very clear to any trekkie at a certain juncture of the film, thrown the door wide open for sequels and franchise extensions.
The casting was great. Kirk’s character shone through without Shatner and Zachary Quinto succeeded in being more than a Vulcan Sylar mirror. It was also nice to see Simon Pegg play a slightly different character for once. Expect a film with plenty of nods to its origins, within and outside of its characters.
My hopes for Star Trek as a whole have been restored. See this film. I award 8 out of 10 possible nerve pinches.
Privacy
April 29th, 2009 § 0
A few of days ago I rehashed the privacy-security debate with a couple of friends. We were talking at least tangentially about the privacy rights of politicians and those in the public eye. The conversation culminated with one of us asking, with the caveat that he understood that it was desirable, how the idea of a right to privacy evolved in the first place. I think this is a rather interesting question. » Read the rest of this entry «
Logic > Internet
April 26th, 2009 § 0
I'm a helpful soul. Stroke me.
My blind reliance on Google Maps sent me on a 2 hour wild goose chase in the pouring rain this week. I was searching for an engraver in Providence RI to add a name to a hip flask graduation gift for a member of my fencing team. I eventually found an address and a phone number, online but via a friend, and gave the owner of ‘Impressions’ engraving a call. She offered me her address but i turned it down as i was in a rush and believed i already had it.
On the plus side, i found out that it is possible to edit locations in Google Maps, however if you change the address by too large a distance it is not immediately updated. I wonder how Google sorts fraudulent updates from good ones?
So i guess the moral of this story is that nothing is more authoritative about a business than the person who stands to make money from it.
Windows 7 Beta on a MacBook Pro
January 16th, 2009 § 0
Over the course of a few days I have played around with installing the public beta of Windows 7 on my mid-2007 edition MacBook Pro, and making it work in VMware Fusion. I had some issues along the way and had to do a fair amount of research to resolve them.
To begin with, I tried using Apple’s Boot Camp Assistant to split my hard disk into my regular partition for OS X and a 25 gigabyte windows partition. I had done this without issue before when dual booting with Windows XP (I’ve never owned a machine running Vista). However this time it failed. Boot Camp told me sternly that I could not create the partition because there were ‘files which could not be moved’. This basically meant that there was not enough contiguous free space on my drive to create the large partition I requested, and the files were too large to be moved. This occurs because OS X automatically defragments your hard drive unless it encounters files larger than 20 mb. So over the course of one and a half years of use, my computer’s drive became too fragmented to partition. » Read the rest of this entry «
Testing Spotify
January 11th, 2009 § 1
The blogosphere has recently fallen in praise at the feet of a new application currently released in its beta stage, called Spotify. I too am excited about this application, it has some very nice perks.
- Firstly, Spotify is Swedish. And I am half Swedish. And I am in the habit of stressing this fact in a futile attempt to pretend I am more exotic and diverse than I really am.
- Streaming does appear to happen almost instantly.
- The music is apparently streamed at about 160 kbps. Whilst this obviously gives lower quality sound than those FLACs you downloaded from your music tracker of choice, I can not tell the difference when listening on my home speakers, so I’m happy.
- Spotify scrobbles to last.fm, and I love last.fm. In fact, last.fm is now probably mainstream enough that any streaming application that ignored it would probably be sunk. People enjoy showing off their tastes.
- There are very few ads, even in the free version – if you can get an invite to the free version.
But, enough of that. Let’s put this thing to the test.
Because there is no way for me to scientifically test this application in any reasonable amount of time I am simply going to pit Spotify against my 20 most listened to artists in the past 3 months according to my last.fm. This is an interesting test for me because I download most of my music from illegitimate (but brilliant) sources. (In fact I download all of it, but I also buy cds and visit concerts if I enjoy the music.) Perhaps if a service such as Spotify allowed me to properly ‘test’ music, I would be less inclined to download it. I want to see if Spotify would have been a reasonable substitute for illegal downloading by seeing what percentage of the music I have enjoyed most recently could have been streamed on their service. » Read the rest of this entry «