I’ve been using the rather spiffy Lusty Explorer for some time for my buffer and file finding. However it (I thought) had a rather annoying bug where I could never tab directly into some of the repositories I was hacking on. Eventually I figured out that the problem was down to the way I name [...]
Archive of posts filed under the geek category.
NoSTalgia
In the middle of ripping box-sets to our media server I had a little bout of nostalgia for the ‘ole days. After a little messing about I got the latest version of Hatari running which still seems to be making releases. It does a very creditable job in handling Atari ST emulation including some of [...]
Availability is hard it seems
It’s a mark of how reliable some websites are that the first thing you do when you can’t access it you assume it’s something up at your end. As it turns out the BBC has suffered a major DNS outage knocking all four of their DNS servers off the ‘net. At a stroke anything with [...]
Star Stuff
Fliss is fairly convinced I have a man crush on Brian Cox. If I have it’s because it is nice to have a telegenic scientist on our TV screens who is obviously so excited by the science he wants to share it with his audience. Last week’s Wonders left me a little cold as it [...]
Doom posts
Let me start by saying that I in no way want to minimise the horror the Japanese have been going through. By any standard the recent earthquake has a big one. Despite their advanced technology and modern 21st century infrastructure there isn’t a lot more they could have done to mitigate the effects of nature [...]
Edit with Emacs v1.9
It’s been a while so I thought I’d push out a new version of Edit with Emacsto the interwebs. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to wrangle the edit-server.el to reliably handle keeping the current frame open for iterative editing. For now this feature is only available via the python server. Patches are of course welcome! v1.9 [...]
Book Review: Free as in Freedom
I’ve just finished reading Free as in Freedom a biography of Richard Stallman the founder of the free software movement. The title takes it’s name from the oft repeated statement used to highlight that software freedom is not about the price rather what you can do with it. The book itself is relatively short and [...]
Baseline Codecs for web video
A lot of ‘net comment has been generated in the last few days following Google’s announcement that they will be dropping support for H.264 in future versions of their Chromium browser. They expound on their decision here. In making this move they join the ranks of Mozilla in supporting Open Video in web-pages. The trouble [...]
Chromium Privacy Plugin
Did you know every time you see a Facebook/Twitter/Social Media-de-jour button on a web-page it’s reporting your visiting patterns to home base? If you thought Ad tracking was a worrying invasion of your privacy then just consider how much info Facebook has on you along with your browsing history? While things like incognito mode have [...]
Noddy data recovery script for text files
Yesterday I turned my hand to recovering some data from our old wiki server. I spent a little time poking around looking for open source tools to help and found scalpel and foremost. They look quite powerful but do work by looking for file signatures in headers. Pretty much every file has these signatures apart [...]
