nemof.org blog

Hi, my name is Nemo and Karma is trying to kill me.

Well that is perhaps a bit dramatic, but it seems like I have definitely pissed off some minor God of goodwill.

Whatever, lately I’ve had some fetid spectral dog chomping at my heels as I stumble through life. Lesse…. I was given a weeks notice to vacate my old house because the landlord needed it for a friend. As he was an old family friend I didn’t have a formal contract and he just turned around one day and said ‘I need your room, can you move out. I need it by next friday’. It was phrased as a question, but only had one answer as he was quick to tell me that his friend had been made homeless with the intention of making me feel guilty….

… so now I live in a shed at the bottom of my mums garden. It’s fucking dreadful - at least tonight is. Wind cutting through every crack, curling round my limbs. It’s temporary while I find a new place with a friend… which might not happen till February as they are very poor and can’t afford to move till then.

I split up with my girlfriend this week. It was my choice to be clear, but I feel bloody dreadful now. I miss her terribly.

I woke up yesterday morning and wrapped my dressing gown about my person, intent on making my way through the garden to the house. Unfortunately it had been raining and was incredibly muddy. I slipped on a hillock and ended up covered from head to toe in mud. After that I found I had left my bike out in the rain, the seat was drenched. Then when I went to put my cycle helmet on water poured mercilessly down the front of my dry work clothes. Further to that I cycled into work to find that my bike lock had decided to give up the ghost - I spent a few minutes hitting it on stuff to make it work. Later on that day I spilled scalding tea and hot water on my hands.

Today I’m a miserable fucking bastard.

Tomorrow I’m a superhero. Semper fi motherfucker.

Heya all. I realize that the last time I blogged it was probably a different year/century/color but I am back.

Everything has been a little crazy, least of all the fact that I am now living at the bottom of my mum’s garden in a shed pagoda. This is a temporary measure while I find a new place to live. My previous Landlord (and old family friend) asked me if he could have my room to put up his recently made homeless colleague who was sleeping in the basement of their shop. Problematically as my Landlord was family friend I had entered into an informal tenancy with him with no contract - he gave me 7 days notice.

So here I am, the angry hermit at the bottom of the garden. I have sedentary Koi Carp for company, and thankfully through the wonders of wifi I have internet access.

I’m pretty bored these days - my jobs lost its interest and I desperately needs something new and inspiring to do. I am going to pull all the old files off my hard drives that are sitting around after I rebuilt my computer. Heh, I should mention that I built a new PC. I could go in to specs, but it’s enough to say it’s pretty nice to have some new gear to play around with. Anyhow, I need to pull my wiki database from the old hard drives, perhaps everything I’ve jotted down there will inspire me - to what, I don’t know.

Interestingly, I have been running Ubuntu exclusively now on my PC since building it. I guess I have been using it for about 2 months. It’s hardly a shock to the system as I have been using Ubuntu on my laptop for over a year. I am thinking about writing some articles about Ubuntu, Gnome & usability as there are elements that are bugging the hell out of me that I feel the urge to get down on e-paper.

Plus, I keep on getting sodding distracted!!!! argh. I swear I have e-add.

I know I haven’t updated my blog in a while, life has been hectic. I thought I would share a nice tip for using google+firefox keywords.

I often use ask.metafilter.com however I really dislike yahoo, whom they happen to use as their search engine. Now, it’s not very hard to go to google and type:

<some interesting question> site:ask.metafilter.com

However, this isn’t half as quick as using Firefox Keywords. Perhaps then is it possible to use Keywords and google together, using googles ability to restrict searches   to a given domain?

It’s extremely easy. The best way I could recommend to do this is to go to google, right click in the search area and click ‘add a Keyword for this search…’, name it and decide on the Keyword command. I tend to use abbreviations or acronyms, in this case (a)sk (m)etafilter, "am".

One useful thing to know about Keywords is ‘%s’ substitution. This is what allows us to restrict our ask.mefi query to just their domain. To illustrate:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=%s+site%3Aask.metafilter.com&btnG=Search

Is the search that is performed if I type "am <some search string here>" into the address bar. However, what would be passed to google would be

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=<some search string here>+site%3Aask.metafilter.com&btnG=Search

The search string being substituted for %s.

Of course the possibilities are endless, and as google is often better than some websites own internal search engines this might well come in useful.

OK, I fixed the htaccess rules for my wiki so it should be accessible. Now I gotta add more content, sigh. Well at least people like the Best Software round-up I published a while ago. I will get around to updating it, adding a few new diamonds and updating some previous entries.

If you are ever having problems with setting up a wiki on a subdomain so it has nice URLs and doesn’t freak out then check out this post which I unfortunately cannot take credit for. For someone who doesn’t have the time or patience to read up on .htaccess rules it’s useful.

In other news I am reading this livejournal post with trepidation. I haven’t got to the pictures yet, but a sense of disquiet is slowly building in my stomach… that might be heartburn though.

I can’t believe I am posting this but here is an in depth preview of Halo 3 from 2old2game. I guess even my interest has be piqued about what will surely be one of the biggest games to hit the shelves this year. My money is on Crysis though. My money will have to be on the counter to play it though, my current machine is ~5 years old and that just doesn’t cut the mustard these days.

Compiz & Feisty Fawn Ubuntu

I updated to Feisty Ubuntu a few days ago. A pretty seamless upgrade from Dapper it went off without a hitch and left me with a spanking new iteration of what is undoubtedly the most shiny and well thought Linux Distro around. Ubuntu has got it where it counts, and as you can test drive it on a Live CD there’s no need to fear a full installation. You just burn it to CD, boot from it and test drive the system without making any alterations to your PC.

What I’m seriously impressed with this version has to be the inclusion of Compiz. Simply put Compiz takes your Desktop and adds eyecandy, extremely gorgeous eye candy. The kind Vista wished it had.

For instance after Compiz is turned on (called ‘Desktop Effects’ in Ubuntu) all windows wobble when you move them. It even wobbles movies while rendering them in real time, it has to be seen to be believed. Further to that some of the effects and functions have a practical aspect. To put it simply the one effect I’ve fallen in love with the most has to be the Zoom function. With a few click you bind zoom in/out to your mouse wheel and you can dynamically zoom in and out of the desktop, enlarging any area. I can think of fantastic potential for helping people who are partially sighted to make more use of their Computers.

Funnily enough Compiz wasn’t the first place I’ve seen this zoom, it’s around on pretty much any modern Mac which is where I first fell in love with it. Since I first saw it I’ve been looking for a program that adds this kind of functionality to Windows and have yet to find it. The closest I’ve found have been magnifying glass type affairs that are always atrociously out of date and only do set multiples of magnification.

Before I go into propaganda mode I just wanted to link to some Compiz videos on youtube so you can see exactly what you’re missing till you stick that Ubuntu CD in!

It seems every day that Windows sees itself losing more of its lead that it used to be able to proudly boast of in terms of First and Third party software as compared to other platforms. Ubuntu is an extremely accomplished Desktop as is Mac OS X, both of which I would whole heartedly recommend. Of the two Mac OS X is the simpler and also in some ways more accomplished, however if you find joy in tinkering and learning then I would suggest Ubuntu. You get your first introduction to Free Open Source Software, you get the joy of learning something new and the end result is a wonderful, flexible operating system that has almost limitless potential.

Why is 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 important? It’s the HD DVD processing key that allows people to watch HD DVD content. With it you can watch HD content and decrypt it from it’s media, even though ‘The Industry’ doesn’t want you to. Oh, and apparently it’s copyrighted so under the DMCA my posting it here is illegal etc etc.

Well tough titties, it’s on Digg and the story has just hit 10k diggs, which is very unusual even for a digg story. This is the article that the digg links to.

Go digg the article, go post that number on your own website.

**edit**

It seems the Digg article got deleted as a comment mentions below, after hitting 15k diggs! I can’t say I applaud Kevin and his team for taking this stance, but I’m pretty sure they would be right behind the rest of us 100% of the way if they could; Big business being what it is, sometimes taking a moral stance is harder than it seems.

Simply put, keep on spreading the number. This little piece of text, this string of characters is a protest, plain and simple. Put it in your signatures, on your emails, in your IM conversations. Maybe I’ll be served with a takedown notice tomorrow, maybe I’ll have to comply. It’s not easy for people running personal sites to stand up to the combined strength of the entertainment industry. Each time this simple string of numbers is copied to a new web server though, each conversation, each time a hard drive platter spins up and caches my page, it’s a big FUCK YOU! to those ass-holes who think they can control us through intimidation.

I deeply believe that Information wants to be Free. It’s up to us.

**edit**

I’m excited to say that the DIgg team has come out kicking this is fantastic news. I think nothing can more plainly show how dedicated the team is at Digg to it’s users, us. Thank you!

Related links
http://digg.com/tech_news/Digg_This_09_f9_11_02_9d_74_e3_5b_d8_41_56_c5_63_56_88_c0_28
http://09-f9-11-02-9d-74-e3-5b-d8-41-56-c5-63.com/
http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/04/30/spread-this-number/
http://www.freedom-to-tinker.com/?p=1152
http://www.boingboing.net/2007/04/30/aacs_drm_body_censor.html
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