Yes, you may

I Can Haz Cheezburger is a site for what seem to be called "cat macros". Funny pics & stuff, for the rest. I get bored of things quickly, but it's consistently very good - the pictures are great, the captions are funny. The spelling is atrocious deliberately, especially in the comment section which it becomes exhibishioistic.. Here's my favourite today:

Layout fucked up by blogger.com

They said I could get my old layout back if I tried a new one. They lied. Now I have a stupid ugly navbar and I can't get the old one back, and now I miss it. Stupid ugly narrow design. Stupid ugly Trebuchet (oh, no, please, name >all< my fonts after the medieval siege engines their ugliness resembles). Stupid ugly header. Stupid ugly spacing. Double stupid doubleplus ugly "interface" for editing the stupid ugly layout. Stupid ugly stupid blogger.com

Edit: OK, I have vented and am tinkering. Stupid me for letting them do it, stupid me for trusting them and not saving a copy of my template, stupid me for not being able to figure out how to fix it. (The navbar is now an iframe, which save having to hide the individual bits, but they've used variables in the template which makes it hard to edit the file externally, and browsers are shit for that kind of thing work with the auto-resizable textatreas which are fashionable now (and generally nearly work). I was very close to deleting this blog out of anger, both of your personalities will be relieved to find I didn't :)

Catastrophic security idiocy

So, a CD with 25 million sets of personal details of child benefit recipients has been "lost". We will be on this. How tragic! I have never known such fear: anyone who knows my name and address will be able to look me up in the phonebook or the electoral roll! If they know my bank account details they will be able to deposit money in my account! If they know I have children they might paedophile them!

The end of Safari and other browsers

The new version of Safari on OS X Leopard still doesn't have a "New Tab" button in it's toolbar options and the hacks that used to let you do it don't work anymore and aren't being re-developed. This is no good for me as I always customize browser toolbars to stick a new tab button just to the left to the location bar where the web address is, always have, always will (where possible of course, Mr IE.). I'm a big user of separators as well, back/forward, separator, refresh/stop (I don't really approve of integrating the two, especially as Ajax style apps often make them redundant but not consistently enough to do without the functionality of both), separator, print on it's own, and new tab. I can live without everything else customizable, but not without new tab: you can't double click the tab bar to get a new tab in Safari like you can in Firefox (Edit: you can now do this in Safari 3.1) and you can't drag a bookmark to the tab bar to open it like you can in Firefox (as Safari deletes it, and there's no Undo available!). I use Camino myself but the rest of the family use Firefox, it was my baby daughter's word for "Computer": having more than one browsers installed is always handy (especially as none of them are any good at identity management).

The sky is not falling in, and it is not onerous to cmd-T and click/type or command-click a link in your Safari bookmark bar to open it in a new tab. Using modifier-key commands don't really scale though: I can substitute cmd-c for ctrl-c easily enough using Stuart Logic (i.e. "always get it wrong the first time") as ctrl-c was 'break' for me long before it was 'copy', but remembering what variant to use for UI operations is annoying cross=platform. What's command-click going to be in Safari for Windows (control-click, but I don't want to have to think about it, that's the point of usability, plus I have to remember which browser I'm using and make it a special case)? What if I'm using Parallels Desktop to run Windows within OS X, which is it? If I am running programs via remote desktop, which isn't good at all at recognizing the differences in keyboard layouts? Not exactly Jane User maybe but not rocket science.

The other annoyance is that switching from mouse to keyboard or keyboard to mouse is what you might call a "high cost user activity" - it takes time, and attention - you have to look for the device, orient to it, use it, and then return to the task. When I watch people using programs I often feel myself wanting to say "You could just press enter" as they switch from text entry or selection to using their mouse to click the OK button in a dialog. I don't, though, as the first 500 times I did it made no difference.

Usability means offering as many ways to achieve your user goals as possible, in the hope you find the right one for a given value of 'user'. Why can't Safari have a new tab button I don't know (Dave Hyatt adamantly doesn't want one, is my guess, but why?)

It's a shame, as Safari has fantastic CSS support for exciting new capabilities, and is the browser du jour as regard iPhone development. Ho hum.

Another thing that annoyed me about Safari was that I couldn't configure it to search with what I typed from the location or address bar. Firefox by default does a semi-optimized "I'm feeling lucky" ("I'm feeling useless" more like) search, but I always set the keyword.URL preference to http://www.google.co.uk/search?hl=en&q= in about:config (keyword.enabled needs to be true, but that's the default anyway) to always search google.co.uk as searching from the location or address bar is just so obvious to me, it's a textbox, you can type in it, let's search. I have nothing against the location box (which ironically I have started enabling after all these years of address bar searching and I had even trained myself to type cmd-c cmd-t tab cmd-v enter instead of old faithful cmd-c cmd-t cmd-v then enter when I wanted to search for selected text from a webpage. Most browsers now have a context menu option to search for a selection using the default search settings.

Oh, when you type text in the location bar in Firefox 3, it searches the full text of your history URLs as well as the title of he web page, so when you type foo it matches "http://bar.com - my foo web page" as well as http://bar.com.snafu.foo/zomg - it's much easier to find what you're looking for.

Got to be quick..

My employer has introduced new rules: you are allowed three 10 minute sessions on "social networking" sites like Facebook or blogger, and I've already used one slot playing the movie quiz on FB (access is completely blocked from 10-12AM and 2-4PM)



Anyway, I've found a whole new way the BBC is deceiving and manipulating viewers: you know on the weather forecasts they seem to be standing in front of the UK - it isn't real, it's a fake! People should be told.

Amazoooh!

Tog On Interfaces for £6 delivered. Thank you Amazon! You can get very good prices on popular books secondhand.

Shooting fish

Core Image Fun House is a lot of fun, installed with Xcode from the Leopard CD. The Edit menu's a bit obscure though..

Not on the Radar

Radar is Apple's bug tracking system, but you have to be a paid member of ADC to access it, and I haven't made that plunge.. yet. If I did, I could report this error which is consistently reproducible, updating Camino from a disk image as a non-admin user: first the update fails to request my credentials to authenticate the update (the copy fails) then as a bonus the existing version fails to run until the copy failure sheet is dismissed.

Edit: seems to be fixed in 10.5.1

Time Machine

In order to make Time Machine complete a backup on my G4 before the heat-death of the universe I had to disable Spotlight indexing on both of my drives as well as the drive I am backing up to. Now it's running nicely (albeit still slowly). This will be the first system backup I have ever made in more than 10 years of personal computing, which says something about Time Machine (as well as me).

I need to get it to run at a reasonable speed (ie one that will complete in my lifespan) as I can't just leave the disk connected, as I could only get it to work with no actual enclosure, so currently it's just the naked hard disk and external IDE connector, and I don't want Monsieur Garcon getting hold of either. Serves me right for buying cheap shit enclosures, I am finally learning the lesson that the 3.84 unit is no good and I should always buy the 20.84 unit - when I finally bought a proper USB2.0 card to support my iPod touch it worked out of the box, but the 3 other cheap ones I bought never worked properly.

Incidentally, is there a nerd in your life??

(Edit: it worked eventually, but it took 3 days. Then it took Spotlight another day or so to reindex the volumes..)

Looking for a Wii online?

My Wii was stolen along with my MacBook, dead iBook and iPod in a recent burglary. It's been tricky to replace: my local Blockbusters had them in stock straight after I got my insurance settlement, but I really hate them so I didn't buy one. Then I regretted that particular decision, and couldn't find one anywhere: step up to the plate the realtime 'Wii In Stock webpage', which I kept open in a browser tab yesterday lunchtime. After only an hour or so it popped up with Amazon having stock, and although it seemed to be being drip-fed onto the site - I kept trying to buy one but it was out of stock by the time I reached the checkout - I got one eventually, and I just got the email to say it's been shipped so it's non-virtual and will arrive next week. I paid £1.69 for delivery, which I frankly couldn't care less about: there were websites selling the basic Wii package for £279, a premium of £100 over the usual selling price. I bet they sold them, as well.

Just in time for the release of Super Mario Galaxy! While I can't believe it can be as anything like as good as Super Mario 64 it will be fun finding out, though Becky has persuaded me to wait for my birthday: fair enough, it's only one more month and I've waited a long time.. I need to build up my Wii Sports tennis rating to something respectable first, I think I peaked at 2200 or so on my old one. I thought about buying Tiger Woods golf because I am an old fu- sorry, because I enjoyed the Wii golf game, but I'm not sure - have you tried it? Is it good?

iPhone/iPod Touch SDK

My iPod Touch runs some variant of OSX Leopard, that seems pretty obvious. So why am I not surprised Apple haven't released a SDK for it given that the whole of Leopard is still under a strict non-disclosure agreement which is still being enforced?

Arse-backwards

I was reading this advice about running as a non-Admin user on your Mac, when I realised it's totally backwards.

It advises setting up and using a new account, to which administrative privileges are not granted. It advises

If you want to transfer any data (such as preferences files or e-mail messages) from your current account to the new one, drag the items from their current location in your Home folder to the corresponding location in the new account’s Home folder.

Oh, just like that? All my preferences, bookmarks, settings, documents, music and photos? This is bad advice. Setting up a new user account for a little change like this is quite unnecessary and practically destructive of your data as you can never migrate everything (1). If I'm not mistaken, it's perfectly possible to remove the admin privileges from any user account created in OSX, including those created with Setup Assistant (2). Another reason it's bad advice is that if you can't stand running as non-admin because of some behaviour of other, you can't just Go Back. Which you should always be able to do with changes spouted in an online column.

Far better to set up a new account called Admin, with admin rights, then remove those admin rights from your current account. If you ever do anything in Terminal using sudo then add your current account to the sudoers file using visudo before you do this as it's a pain to do it afterwards (believe me, if you don't understand that or have never heard of sudo you don't need it). (3)

I did it to see what it was like, having experienced nightmarish scenarios in Windows trying to run as a non-admin user (this is much mitigated in Vista, more on which later) and it's just fine - I love OSX's admin escalation paradigm anyway, being able to set/unset with the little padlock is much nicer than Windows Vista's UAC, but the only extra time I've noticed having to authenticate is adding an appliction to the Applications folder, and I don't do this very often. (well, every day if you count getting the nightly trunk build of Camino, but I don't mind that). In fact, I have a Camino image waiting now.. I have to enter the admin user name and password, which is mildly annoying compared to just password, but I can also disable auto-login on my current account knowing Beck can enter the password, and keep the viciously complex password for my admin account. Yes, I know that all of these passwords can be bypassed with OSX install disks, but I am thinking of mitigating that by using Filevault to encrypt my home directory. I just need a backup strategy first!

Ordinary User stuartd

(1) Creating a new user profile is a good way of losing cruft but it has to be deliberate and consensual.

(2) As a software consumer I think "Assistant" sounds a lot more promising than "Wizard", but is that just because I have read Terry Pratchett / JK Rowling? Shop Assistant, Library Assistant, Teaching Assistant, Rincewind, Harry Potter. Which one do you want helping you?

(3) I missed the old sudo warning when I got my new MacBook.

New speed cameras on the A27

I went to Eastbourne today, and noticed there are two speed cameras between Falmer (Sussex/Brighton University) and Lewes where I work, one just after the University bridge and another a mile or so further on. They're both currently pointing East, ie Brighton -> Lewes. It was hard not to notice, as the cars in front slowed down to 30 mph (which is not in fact the national speed limit, no matter how much people who drive on Sundays wish it was)

Not really a problem for me in my old car. They look a bit temporary, I wonder if they're the harbinger of catastrophic roadworks?

Edit: the cameras have been covered up ever since, and the sign saying roadworks are scheduled has been taken down.

Touch notes

A couple of things I have noticed about my iPod Touch:

1) If you do a big swaparound of music, several GB or so, the portrait-mode cover art and the thumbnails are wrong but the right picture is displayed in coverflow (landscape mode.) A full restore fixes this.

2) Before restoring the device, iTunes has to download a 150 MB disk image. Not surprising after the fact, but it increases the already long time it takes to restore over USB. I don't suppose it's feasible to have a connector which could connect to either USB or Firewire, which is a pity as USB is noticeably slower than Firewire.

3) Turning off wireless increases battery life hugely.

4) It optimizes photos - I added a thousand or so, expecting to fill up the Touch. iTunes spent all night optimizing them, as there's no point storing 2460x1280 on a little screen like that: it's a pity this can't be done offline, as this means I have to leave the Touch plugged into the computer all night and thus within reach of the children in the morning. But, when they're on the device, they look great and in slideshow mode you can fast-forward at 20 images per second at high quality. And they only took up a gig or so. [Edit: it doesn't take that long, even for lots of photos]

5) It's tough putting a decent sized music collection on 16GB: my old 40GB 4G used to have everything on it that I would ever want to listen to, but you need a different strategy for 16GB . I won't bore you with mine but it uses half a dozen playlists and smart playlists, fortunately you can drop them all in a folder to keep them out the way (of accidental deletion, mostly!)

6) The back scratches whatever you do. My case hasn't come yet because of the postal strike. I'll be having words with Danny (who works for the PO) when I see him about it!

7) It is a beautiful, wonderful device. And it sounds brilliant, I think even better than my old iPod.

Straighten up and fly right

I've moved my dock to the right hand side of my screen on my macbook - when the display resolution is 1280x800 then vertical space is far more premium than horizontal, especially as a decent sized dock could be 100 pixels high, thus being 12% of the vertical viewing space even without the menu bar vs being 100 px wide and 8% of the horizontal aspect. It bugs me hugely, obviously, that the dock is away on the right but I'll get used to that and I do already really appreciate viewing documents and code without it breaking up my reading eyeline. I've left it at the bottom upstairs, it seems OK on 1280x1024 and I don't do much reading on that Mac, more pictures. Gruber made me try it out and I like it.

Incidentlly, I noticed that a car number plate in Heroes tonight was NCC-1701..

Maggie And Boris

Scary future:

Better than us

Check out these Japanese manhole covers. I love the way the page's margins move when you scroll down, and the idea of having public art just to be walked on.

iLife 08: iMoan but iLike it really

I'm a bit disappointed that iPhoto 8's implementation of albums is still still so inferior to iTunes playlists. In an application designed to manage large photo collections with simple rules it's unfortunate that the implementation doesn't allow chaining rules together to query your data with and/or/either.

In order to do this, you need to be able to reference one "smart album" (a photo album based on a rule or rules) when defining another, and you can't: the operation of creating a smart album is not closed.

iTunes allows this. Say you want all music that's been added to the library in the last six months and is either disco or funk. Easy: create a smart playlist that has genre=disco or genre=funk by using "Match any condition", and another smart playlist where the playlist is the one you just created and the date added is in the last six months.

Not a very real query, but the best I could think of. In iPhoto, I specifically wanted to create a query where the (keyword=Daisy or the keyword=James) and it's been added in the last year. This is to create a playlist that I can then send to iDVD to make a slideshow from with some nice music on to send to my mum. But, it can't be done: I can create the first two options easily enough in a smart album using "Any" with the two keywords, but I can't chain that to another album to restrict by the date.

It's easy to hack around this manually by creating static albums, filtering photos by keyword and dragging them to the album, until you get to a state where you can use a smart album to get the final set you want, but this is annoying because it doesn't update as new photos are added and needs to be redone every time.

Oh, there's another thing you can do in iTunes that would be very handy in iPhoto - you can context-click a track in a playlist and choose to open the track in any other playlists it is a member of, or in the default music collection. I was using an "Untagged" smart album and it would have been very handy to be able to jump to the photo within it's event or in the main photo list even.

Still, I like iPhoto's implementation of Events a lot. I got the new version in the middle of tagging 8,000 photos - I was accused of taking more photos of our eldest child than the younger, and there was only one way to find out. So as well as having 4,000 photos to tag I had 8,000 photos to put in events as well.. It took me a little while to adjust my workflow to the new keyword interface, and I usually have the keyword window over the album list which isn't the perfect usability. I have my events as months, so I don't have too many but they don't have too many in, but I like being able to have special events - holidays, birthdays - in their own events. It would be nice to be able to autosplit events monthly: I tend to take a few pictures a few times a week rather than a lot in one day. One thing I found annoying was that I would open an event I wanted to split into separate months, split it, then return to All Events. Usually then I would want to merge the split events into existing months, but iPhoto has automatically selected all the albums you have created already, and if you're not careful to deselect those before clicking on the one you want to merge, you can end out re-merging all the photos you've just split with some others!

Incidentally, when you delete the current photo in a smart album, if you then try and use the arrow key to navigate, at least under some circumstances you get summarily dumped to the top of the list. Annoying, but at least you can delete from within a smart album now. I deleted 1,200 out of focus photos as part of the tagging project, so it happened to me a fair few times.

Pigment map courtesy of MacBook Photo Booth

Every bit of non-vitiligoed skin shows up, even bits I can't see. I will have to find out which effect this is. (Edit: it's 'Glow' of course)

It doesn't get any better than this

First day of the football season in an odd year (*) watching MOTD with no idea of the football results and the newly promoted Black Cats (Sunderland **) beat "Top Four" Tottenham with a goal in the final minute. Joy! Or rather schadenfreude, which all football fans know is just as good.

* Odd years - ie 2007, 2009, 2011 - have neither a World Cup nor European Championships to fill the tedious close season.

** My family on my mother's side, the Oswalds, are (or at least were) Sunderland fans. My Uncle Dick packed in a grocer's stall my Granddad had bought for him so he could go down the pit because he'd get Saturdays off to go to the games. He'd been bought the stall (it might even have been a shop, I will ask my Mum, also about the date which I estimate 1933) to keep him out of the pit of course.. in the '50s, incidentally, Sunderland were called the Bank Of England club because they spent so much money chasing success: in the end they won nothing, and the sums spent seem tiny compared to the modern game.

Hmm

I crutched to Sainsbury's today (in my car - you can't carry shit with a crutch) and a woman said to me (presumably about some geezer) "He's a cheeky bugger - they're all the same, after it every minute. I don't know why they come after me, I haven't had it for twenty-seven years, I can tell you".. then I dived down the butter aisle.

Mac Blindness

I spend so much time staring at my MacBook I worry that spending too much time on a short fixed focal length will damage my eyesight, and I have a bet with Beck that she'll need glasses before me. It's a bit of a worry..

To the rescue!

Breaking a bone in the outside of my foot has caused my walking pattern to change, putting a lot more weight on my heels, and causing the hard skin on them to crack open. Ouch. I've been suffering for a few days, Becky got me some cream to soften them. The instructions said to beware putting the cream in the open cracks, bit of a problem on my left foot with old Grand Canyon Crack. So I had a brainwave - superglue the cracks together before applying the cream! Worked a treat, they are a lot less sore. Wish I'd done it last week.

If you think I'm crazy (Beck did) then google for "superglue cut": there are vague concerns that cyanoacrylates (the chemical in superglues) are toxic, but a) it's on the outside and b) it isn't much and c) I got more on my fingers anyway and d) life is toxic, man.

Come to think of it, there must be a statistical split with superglue users, something like:
30% - perform gluing operation perfectly with no residue or spillage
30% - perform gluing operation satisfactorily, but get glue on your fingers resulting in some sticky moments while trying not to touch anything for more than 3 seconds so as not to get stuck to it - while still getting the gluing done.
30% - perform gluing operation, but get glue on fingers and get stuck to the thing being glued.
10% - perform gluing operation, get glue on fingers, then inadvertently squeeze the rest of the tube. With hilarious results..

Stupid Technorati crap

It's that or give them my account details (over unsecured HTTP, why not, eh?)

Technorati Profile

New thing

I find myself watching a program on channel a hundred or so called [adult swim] which is apparently an animated comedy sketch show. Cruel, ruthless and funny: of course, that could be just the episode I'm watching. Let's try another.. seems some are just one scenario, some are many quickfire jokes.

How cool is that?

Lisa and Steve's Lego Wedding cake

See also the bride and groom

Broken foot

I have a spiral fracture of the fifth metatarsal on my right foot - nice clean fracture, no displacement. I got it last Tuesday playing football, it'll be a fair few weeks before I play again - old bones heal slower.

So, if you ever turn up to football and you've forgotten your boots or trainers and someone offers you theirs but they're a size too small - go home, and don't play.

This is what it looks like:

Airport Extreme

There's an airport on Ebay for a million pounds - postage is free, of course.

You know what it's like..

.. when you get something new, and what you had before is suddenly revealed to be instantly obsolescent?

My Mighty Mouse came today! Daisy sellotaped the old Pro mouse up the other day as part of one of her installations, not that it was bothered, and James has given it a lot of stick. Let's see how this new fancy-dan thing stands up to it.. in the mean time: right-click! middle-click! amazing scroll ball! mmmm.. thanks to RTB for persuading me.

Update (August): No problems, mouse truly is mighty. Daisy stopped after Sellotape Untitled IV: James hammers it as you might expect, it just keeps working. He did get loads of jam in the scroll wheel but after a few cleaning scrolls it was OK.

Fantasy celebrity sprog

If Bob Geldof had had a son he would surely have called him Gandalf Geldof..

Formally assimilated

I bought a refurb white macbook from Apple today: spent some of the £100 saving over the new core 2 duos on extra memory [not from Apple!] and I get a superdrive out of it, may come in handy one day. Delivery date is on or before Friday..

When I was checking out the purchase from the the Apple store, I realised I have mislaid my VISA card: I remember them all falling out my wallet "somewhere, the other day". I also remembered the security code on the back which I needed to quote to make the purchase which was just as well, as the refurbs go fast.

Fight! Fight!

Armoured suits for cats and mice. Ippon!

Microthinking

I grudgingly admit the possibility of the existence of Microsoft Desktop Search plugins, and I understand that if I am stupid enough not to realise that uninstalling said Desktop Search would scupper said plugins then I could be mildly inconvienced: and yet, when uninstalling the software (>my< system resources, thankyouverymuch!) I was amazed when presented with this: couldn't they at least have removed the security updates from the list?

Another switcher

> From: robinthebear@robinthebear.com
> Subject: Ordered

> iMac, 24-inch, Intel Core 2 Duo
> NVIDIA GeForce 7600 GT 256MB SDRAM
> 2.33GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
> 750GB Serial ATA drive
> 3GB 667 DDR2 SDRAM
> Wireless keyboard (English) & wireless Mighty Mouse + Mac OS X (English)
> SuperDrive 8x (DVD+R DL/DVD+RW/CD-RW)

Chulo!

Losses

The wonderful French radio station FIP has disappeared from the Brighton airwaves, and Porky Whites are no longer available from Asda.

What I want do do though is say goodbye to Kurt Vonnegut who spoke many words directly into my brain. This image, at the time of writing, is the home page default:



Eidt: FIP is gone for good now it looks like, Porkies are back, and Kurt Vonnegut is still dead..

Astroturf

I played football tonight for the first time in years: I have never played on astroturf before and I had no idea how abrasive it is.

I can never stay on my feet when I play in defense: I like to go for the ball and get it no matter what, so I end out doing sliding tackles: astroturf is more like glasspaper than grass, so I have no skin on my right knee or elbow. Other than losing miserably I enjoyed it a lot: it reminded me of the last time I played, back when I lived in my old flat.

I was turning out for an Ericcsons team in their sports and social league as a favour for a guy I worked with (who was a Kiwi and had never played 'soccer' in his life before: I also have a medal for being part of a winning ESSC baseball team) and managed to get a decent grassburn one week: I was cleaning it with peroxide (yes, I was a single man) when I dripped much too much on the graze and kicked upwards involuntarily: I must have had shoes on (I don't remember it hurting my toes) so the Stanley knife I used to keep on my coffee table took up, turned over once lazily in the air, and embedded itself into my leg. I didn't know which to say ouch for, I imagine I swore a bit.

(We did play at Glastonbury a few years ago but that wasn't an organised game: we were on tv though according to legend)

Long sleeves and trackie trousers next week! Shinpads are a bit woofy though, without boots.

Google Desktop/Mac

I've never installed a Google desktop search product on Windows, let alone seen the need for one on the Mac - why would you when you have Spotlight? - but seeing as Mr Pinky asked so nicely I will give this new Google Desktop/Mac a go on old failthful G3 iBook.

My main problem with these multi-search programs is that I always know in advance where I am looking. If I'm looking for a document or file, it's on my local disk. If I'm looking for a web page, it's on the internet, and the two don't really coincide: equally, if I'm looking for an email, I search there, whether that's local or internet (ie Gmail). I can imagine that under some circumstances you would want to look for all info about a topic, whether as emails or files or webpages, even though I can't think of one myself. Perhaps the program will offer that opportunity (if it ever finishes indexing!)

Edit: on reflection, I would probably use this type of search at work (where I don't have a desktop search program anyway, mostly because everything is stored on the network somewhere and/or on an Exchange server)

Administrative entry

Imageshack.us trashed my profile picture, which as a free service is of course entitled to do. So I've had to upload it again, which is why this post is..

If the cap fits..

Firefox has a few problems with Microsoft and certificates - Microsoft insist on self-signing rather than participating in the trust network - but this one made me laugh:

Everything Virgin does is shit.

We get broadband and TV from Virgin, who took it over from NTL. In the course of their first weeks of operation they have fucked up their contract with Sky and lost Sky One, which means the missus can't watch Lost. And now, suddenly and very inconveniently, it's very difficult to get through to torrent sites where episodes of Lost can be downloaded - sites like The Pirate Bay are suddenly unavailable (they can be pinged, but no connections can be made through a browser)

This is intensely annoying - not Sky One, which I am quite glad not to have any more, but I like to be able to go to whatever website I like. I linked to The Pirate Bay once before, to something I found on their "legal" page, which is worth a look, if you're not a Vigin customer that is and you are allowed to access it by your internet provider (there's also a Turkish internet provider which blocks TPB according to it's wikipedia entry)

Unfortunately our house has neither a rooftop aerial nor a BT phoneline so it will be inconvenient and expensive to change away from Virgin to Freeview and ADSL, but I think we'll be doing it.

Everything Virgin does is shit. I phoned up for Beck once to topup her mobile and the voice menu was all "Hey you" and "Great! You've topped up your mobile -- cool". Arseholes.

Edit: I'm not the first to notice.
Edit: Still no access in April.

No kidding..

Gutsy

Watching a TV program about Kamikaze and Bushido during WW2 on channel 203: "Japanese soldiers would strap grenades or mines to themselves and attack tanks".

Neat

All software installations must require some kind of user action these days - I think this is the best example of a graphic installer instruction I have seen. Whether you're a Mac user or not you should be able to tell what you need to do.