2010
You are browsing the archive for 2010.
By Tom on July 11, 2010
There’s a fantastic new UK government website called yourfreedom.hmg.gov.uk which gives us the chance to tell the government which laws and regulations we think they should get rid of. Please take a minute to vote 5 stars on repealing the digital economy act. Why? What’s so bad about the Digital Economy Act? My objection to [...]
Posted in Journal | Tagged Freedom, Politics, UKGovernment |
By Tom on June 10, 2010
History, 9/10 – Mar/10-Jun/10 A great computer game history book about how the two Johns started a company and developed some of the epics games of my childhood, in particular: Commander Keen, Wolfenstein 3D, Doom and Quake. Loved John Carmacks programming dedication and legacy – what a hero!
Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged history, Programming |
By Tom on March 27, 2010
PeoplePerHour (my primary employers) have a new trailer. It’s fun watching webpages I have helped build woosh past a’la star wars. It’s bold and upbeat, I love not doing things by halves:
Posted in Journal | Tagged PeoplePerHour |
By Tom on March 23, 2010
My brother is doing a 72 hour sponsored fast with some friends to raise money for MS: Three whole days without even a single scrap of food entering our bodies, only having water to keep us going. I’m joining in – it started at 11am: I ate the following a few minutes before 11am: Massive [...]
Posted in Journal | Tagged Charity, Food |
By Tom on March 19, 2010
Sci-fi, 7/10 – Jul/08-Mar/09 This story is set in a Shakespearean-like era with kings and princes and swords and battles – minus the romance. Actually, it’s more like medieval Merlin and the knights of the round table because the civilization is shrouded with myths and has the equivalence of dragons because it is semi-integrated with [...]
Posted in Book Reviews | Tagged Ian M Banks, Sci-fi |
By Tom on February 19, 2010
Ubuntu will be switching their default search engine from Google to Yahoo in the next release (v10.04) because they have struck a deal where they will get a cut of the money made whenever a user clicks on a advert after doing a search. The only reason that this is interesting is that Yahoo search [...]
Posted in Tech Journal | Tagged Google, Microsoft, Open-source, shameless-self-promotion, Ubuntu |
By Tom on February 19, 2010
I love my nerd pop – here’s some links: The jQuery theme song by Jonathan Neal – http://jquery.thewikies.com/jquery.mp3 – It’s catchy. The free software song: By Phoenix Imago – http://www.gnu.org/music/freesoft.ogg By Fenster – http://audio-video.gnu.org/audio/Fenster-Free-Software-Song.ogg By RMS (the orginal) – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9sJUDx7iEJw Coder girl by dalechase – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B-m6JDYRFvk Search Engine Rap Battle: GOOGLE vs YAHOO and MSN [...]
Posted in Tech Journal | Tagged FreeSoftware, List, Music |
By Tom on February 1, 2010
I didn’t play much single player but we found this game really fun in multiplayer mode, especially 4 player – you have to work together otherwise it’s chaos. I liked the “bubble mode”, it’s like a get out of jail free but without making it feel like cheating.
Posted in Game Reviews | Tagged Wii |
By Tom on January 26, 2010
If you can spot what I find annoying about the following screenshot of an advert I keep seeing whilst browsing around, then you are fabulously geeky (like me): Google is trying to teach me to suck eggs. They obviously know what Operating system I’m using so I thought they would be clever enough to detect [...]
Posted in Journal | Tagged Annoying, Google, Linux |
By Tom on January 10, 2010
A friend of mine is planning to write 52 songs in a year. It sounds extremely challenging but I love the first three. He’s releasing them under a copyleft license. Go for it Rob!
Posted in Journal |
By Tom on January 9, 2010
Yes – I went outside bare foot in the snow. I saw the cat catch a Robin in the garden and rushed to the rescue. The nice thing about working from home is that you don’t need to wear any shoes.
Posted in Journal | Tagged Random |
By Tom on January 6, 2010
For £30, in my opinion this is MUCH better than a iPod because it can play ogg vorbis files. I use it to listen to podcasts at the gym and it’s ideal – it remembers where you got to so you can easily listen to hour long files and the fast-forward is perfect. The clip [...]
Posted in Toys | Tagged Exercise, Gadget, Music |
By Tom on January 5, 2010
I need to remind myself that there’s no point whining about a shortfalling in a piece of software unless I can be sure the author is aware of it. To that effect, I filed a bug with the Chrome team: #31833. I also submitted a tiny patch for the Jodometer JQuery plugin.
Posted in Tech Journal | Tagged Bugs, Open-source, Software |
By Tom on January 1, 2010
I recommend the new Ubuntu 9.10 release (Karmic Koala), it works well on a Sony VGN-AR51E. Karmic Goods: It includes a new piece of software called “Ubuntu One”: Ubuntu One currently gives you 2GB of free cloud storage via a folder called “Ubuntu One” in your home directory or via a URL (https://one.ubuntu.com/). Ubuntu One [...]
Posted in Tech Journal | Tagged Ubuntu |