technology, internet oddities & other random stuff
Personal
The shame…..
Sep 17th
I’ve tried to make sure the rugrats have a head-start when it comes to computers. #1 son has been playing with my PCs since he was 4 and has had his own PC since he was 8. Herself is inheriting a PC this year also. Pierce likes websites like howstuffworks.com and wikipedia.org but games are his thing, obviously. This isn’t such a bad thing because I’ve been known to indulge in virtual mindless violence from time to time myself.
One of our favourites is Warhammer 40,000: Dawn of War. It’s a strategy game set in the distant future. You build and control an More >
Aaaaggghhhh!
Jun 11th
A friend of mine has a successful small company. He’s realised that he needs “backup” because he knows he’ll go out of business if he loses his data. He claims that he doesn’t have the budget for online backup, and his staff aren’t computer literate enough to be trusted to swap a backup tape and store it off site.
I decided to use him as a guinea pig for Restore, and open source client-server disk backup platform. He has a reasonably powerful server in the office (I bought it for him) and a web hosting account with 10GB of space (also More >
IvanAnywhere is soooo cool!
Sep 5th
Imagine you’re a telecommuter in a company where everyone else works out of the office. Your only interaction is via conference calls, email and IM. You miss out on all the work and non-work related chatter that happens in the corridors, other people’s cubicles and in the lunch room. Ivan Bowman in a Sybase subsidiary in Canada was one of those people, but he wanted to change that.
Phase one was to install a webcam in the office, so he could see and hear what was going on, but he couldn’t answer back, and it wasn’t what you would call mobile. They ended More >
Hands up who knows what a Theremin is?
Jun 24th
The Doctor Who theme music is the only exposure most people have ever had to the sound of a Theremin, and most don’t even realise it. There’s a bunch of guys called The Ether and Aether Experiment who’ve covered Gnarls Barkley’s Crazy and it sounds strangely cool:
via the Laughing Squid
New car
Feb 19th
My old Ford Focus, that has carried my fat ass up and down to Dublin for the last 3 years is being put out to pasture. It’ll be spending the rest of it’s days doing school runs and trips to the shops with the missus. I need something with a bit of comfort, so I’ve found a Volvo S80 for myself. It’s bigger (a lot bigger!) and more comfortable, and it doesn’t start to wheeze going up steep hills.
It looks like a bit of an old man’s car, but it’s 2 litre turbo’ed engine will leave a lot of the boy racers More >
