james holden

The Lincolnshire Poacher

I caught the tail-end of a facinating programme this morning about number stations, which broadcast encrypted messages on short-wave all around the world. The broadcasts begin with some sort of signature, like a series of notes on a xylophone, and consist of a recorded human voice slowly reading a list of single digit numbers in [...]

Hardware Misery… Again!

The hard disk in my laptop failed again yesterday :-( Fortunately it’s still under warranty, so I’ll have to dig out the receipt and go and swap it.
The good news is that I was mostly able to recover my data. Here’s how:

Boot Knoppix in failsafe mode. Flip back to a text console using Ctrl+Alt+F1.
Get the [...]

Found A House!

After taking the day off yesterday and looking at lots and lots and lots and lots of potential ones, we found a new house!

DVD Authoring Talk

The slides from my DVD authoring talk are up. You can download them in Openoffice.org through this link.

WYLUG DVD Authoring Talk

I’m doing a talk tomorrow night at WYLUG, the West Yorkshire Linux User Group, on DVD authoring under Linux. It’s at 7:00pm at the University of Leeds school of computing. I’ll be covering how DVD menus are structured and what tools exist on Linux to produce them. There will be some notes posted up here [...]

New Google Feature

Google seem to have sneaked in an extra feature to their web search that suggests possible alternative searches. It devises other searches based on synonyms of the search terms, which is pretty clever. There is an extra option added to the page list, like so:

Bad Headline

Reuters seemed to not notice the more obvious meaning in this headline from this morning:
Catholic monks living on an island off the coast of Wales have flown in a satellite dish to watch the Pope’s funeral
Link

A Good ISP Should…

The IFPI and MPA have produced a code of conduct which they hope ISPs will adopt. Some highlights are:

“remove references and links to sites or services that do not respect the copyrights of rights holders”
“require subscribers to consent in advance to the disclosure of their identity in response to a reasonable complaint of intellectual property [...]

Weekend

I didn’t end up getting round to the PVR box this weekend, because we wend to Harewood House instead, which is only a 15 minute drive away from here. I took a few snaps with my camera phone which are on the site now.

I Used To Believe…

iusedtobelieve.com is a fastastically funny site where adults can list the false beliefs they had as children. There’s a rating system so te funniest beliefs are easy to find. Some of the ones in the sex section are particulalry amusing.
Link