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Review - Broadoak Bristol Port Cider
Broadoak Bristol Port Cider at the Far From the Madding Crowd, Oxford The Far from The Madding Crowd on a Sunday. Noisy, but with a decent wifi connection. Me and nor (she of the vegan chocolate reviews) had decided to do some working from home internet c …
- 2012-05-06T14:49:54Z
- Published: 2012-05-06 14:45:46
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Bash Tip: Remove a line from middle of file
This is a thing that I've wanted to do for ages, and it came up for me during this week'd episode of Hak5, which I am getting to be a big fan of by the way. The material under discussion was what to do when one of your known hosts changes. Darren was saying he was a bit slack and just did an rm …
- 2012-05-03T20:57:16Z
- Published: 2012-05-03 20:15:45
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May 2012 Reading
Anarchism and Political Modernity, by Nathan Jun Its worth reading Anarchism and Political Modernity simply for Jun’s wonderfully lucid explanations of the bases of Western political phi …
- 2012-05-12T11:06:22Z
- Published: 2012-05-02 22:22:08
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Collusion: How UK protest websites help business and the police
Online privacy and anonymity should be important for all of us. Doubly so for activists who are likely to get up the noses of capitalist business and the police. Ideally, then, the websites of protest groups ought to steer clear of technology that shares the identities of visitors with advertisi …
- 2012-05-12T14:21:01Z
- Published: 2012-04-29 12:49:25
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April 2012 Reading
Everyman, by Phillip Roth Everyman is bleak and coldly detached short novel about mortality and the inevitable decline of old age. 2012-04-27 by Char …
- 2012-04-28T10:41:52Z
- Published: 2012-04-15 17:07:34
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Review - Barkaiztegi Sagardo Naturala
Barkaiztegi Cosecha 2010 Sagardo Natarala A bit of a rare treat this one! I’ve been wanting to try some of the cider from the Basque country for ages now. And whilst I was in Amsterdam going to the Unlike Us conference and visiting pals, I got given a …
- 2012-03-18T19:37:17Z
- Published: 2012-03-18 19:28:33
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Seven Languages in Seven Weeks: Notes towards an epilogue
I’ve finally finished my seven languages in seven weeks adventure. It took, as I’d oringinally expected, significantly more than seven weeks, though the actual amount of time which I dedicated was only a couple of days more that the amount allocated in the book. It was just that t …
- 2012-03-18T13:05:06Z
- Published: 2012-03-18 13:02:08
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March 2012 Reading
The Telekommunist Manifesto, by Dmytri Kleiner I picked this up at the Unlike Us conference in Amsterdam. It is a solid critique of the political economy of capitalist tech of the wired type. Hi …
- 2012-03-17T16:26:02Z
- Published: 2012-03-17 16:14:07
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Tip: Get rid of the firefox/iceweasel inspect element menu option
Here is a small annoyance with an easy solution. The newer versions of Firefox and Iceweasel have added an "inspect element" tool to the right click context menu. It certainly look very pretty and will be of use for some folks. But its confusing for people like me who use Firebug. You see Firebu …
- 2012-03-15T16:30:48Z
- Published: 2012-03-15 16:29:36
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Haskell - Day Three
The last day of my seven languages odyssey has been without doubt the most brain frying of all. I needed to spend about four days of fairly intense study to get close to a viable maze solver. Even now I doubt very much that its anything more than a naïve and buggy implementation. Still, the good …
- 2012-03-13T14:31:16Z
- Published: 2012-03-12 21:37:07
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Haskell - Day Two (Part Two)
Well, I thought that I’d have the time to do all the extra credit excercises for Haskell Day Two. But as it turned out I got stuck on the justify some text question. I guess this sort of question gets easier, but I couldn’t get the structure I wanted — a list of two tuples of …
- 2012-03-04T13:03:38Z
- Published: 2012-03-04 12:42:18
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Haskell - Day Two
Day two of the Haskell section has been once again very challenging for me. I’m sure that some of the conceptual territory would be easier to navigate were I a proper mathematician. But, after some head/keyboard bashing and rather more than my usual couple of hours allotted to Seven Langua …
- 2012-02-27T23:29:02Z
- Published: 2012-02-27 22:16:24
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Haskell - Day One
The final of the seven languages is Haskell and so far it feels nice. Gone are Clojure's brackets and back to front syntax. Haskell is much more Erlang-esque, which may just be the module declarations and the list comprehensions. It even feels a little perlish with ::s and $s here and there. Tat …
- 2012-02-26T15:11:18Z
- Published: 2012-02-24 19:30:19
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Clojure - Day Three
I suppose it was inevitable after my cockiness on day two that day three should be a challenging one. I felt very stretched; mostly I was getting stuck on syntax, though. The actual coding was great fun. I’ve come rather to like Clojure; I definitely think it’ll be one of the languages I …
- 2012-02-23T00:12:45Z
- Published: 2012-02-22 23:09:48
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Vim Tip: Edit GPG files transparently
A super quick Vim tip today courtesy of Patrick R. McDonald. I was looking for a nice way to have Vim open up files that I had GPGed. That is how I store passwords and its a faff and potentially insecure to decrypt, edit and resave. Nicer to have Vim open your GPG file directly. Patrick’s …
- 2012-02-21T09:06:36Z
- Published: 2012-02-21 09:05:27
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Clojure - Day Two
Today’s excercises seemed a little more straightforward than in previous languages. I may be simply getting brainier, of course. I doubt that. It is something of a lightning tour that we take through Clojure; a lot of stuff gets covered in a little time. The chapter covers recursion, …
- 2012-02-20T22:05:49Z
- Published: 2012-02-20 13:04:46
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Musings
This section contains assorted ramblings, meditations, musings, rants and op-ed type pieces that I’ve written — kinda like most people’s personal blogs. …
- 2012-02-10T17:42:53Z
- Published: 2012-02-10 17:42:53
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A Short(ish) Guide to Searching the Web Securely
One of the things that most of us do every day is searching for stuff on the web. Modern search engines are great for finding random wikipedia entries or videos of snowboarding crows. But search engine companies aren’t entirely respectful of our right to privacy. In fact they make a living by …
- 2012-02-10T18:03:10Z
- Published: 2012-02-09 20:09:40
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February 2012 Reading
Snow Crash, by Neal Stephenson It isn’t exactly news that I am a big fan of Stephenson. Snow Crash is an older book, written very much in the cyberpunk style. Lots of virtual reality and f …
- 2012-03-04T12:56:04Z
- Published: 2012-02-09 18:52:39
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Clojure - Day One
There's been a brief hiatus in my Clojure week. Mostly due to me being knackered after some hardcore work days. In the last instalment I got my basic VimClojure environment set up. After that particular mission Day One’s excercises seemed almost trivial. I expect things to become more diff …
- 2012-01-29T13:38:21Z
- Published: 2012-01-29 13:25:16
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Review - Tutts Clump Special Reserve Cider
Tutts Clump Special Reserve Dry Cider A while back I reviewed cidermaker Tim Wale’s rather nice Tutts Clump Cider. You’ll recall that Tim is based in West Berks and his mission is To establish Real Cider and Perry at the forefron …
- 2012-01-29T12:37:58Z
- Published: 2012-01-27 19:43:50
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Review - Malvern Oak Dry Reserve Cider
Malvern Oak Dry Reserve Cider Nor and I rented a little cottage up in the Malverns for a few days for my birthday a couple of weeks back. Yes that does sound thoroughly bourgeois!. One of the reasons for heading out West was to get nearer to tr …
- 2012-01-29T12:37:33Z
- Published: 2012-01-25 19:18:47
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2012 Bradford Hacktionlab Gathering Drupal Session
This year’s winter hacktionlab happened at Bradford’s lovely 1 in 12 Club. Here is my notes/writeup of the Saturday morning Drupal session. Saturday Morning Drupal Clinic Our heads were a little muzzy pre-meeting. Fortunately a bit of raveoke livened us up a bit. Mick Fuz …
- 2012-01-21T15:45:50Z
- Published: 2012-01-21 13:42:24
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Clojure - Day Zero: VimClojure on Debian Squeeze
I spent quite a while trying to save time on getting a nice Clojure development setup working on my Debian Squeeze box. As it turned out I should have spent some extra moments doing the right thing rather than hoping a quick hack would work. Here's my notes on how to get VimClojure working on Sque …
- 2012-01-15T20:48:13Z
- Published: 2012-01-15 19:28:39
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January 2012 Reading
Thinking with Type, by Ellen Lupton I’m not a typography nerd. Got it? Well, OK, perhaps I am. A bit. Nerds and non-nerds alike will enjoy Lupton’s wonderful book. It manages to b …
- 2012-01-29T12:42:23Z
- Published: 2012-01-14 21:24:43
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2012 Reading
Here's all the books that I read in 2012, by month. On the each month's page there's quick review or synopsis of each book. …
- 2012-01-14T21:24:40Z
- Published: 2012-01-14 21:10:38
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Erlang - Day Three
Its the last day of 2011, the yuletide festivities are over and I am on a mission to get Erlang wrapped. Today's installment focussed on concurrency, message processing, some of the Erlang's process monitoring, and IPC. It was all a bit boggling for me. But sort of cool. The excercises introduced …
- 2011-12-31T16:15:09Z
- Published: 2011-12-31 16:15:09
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Review - Thistly Cross Ginger
Thistly Cross Ginger Cider Let me begin with an apology. This week I couldn't be arsed with a picture. "Quel unprofessionalisme!" as they would no doubt exclaim in France. And why the slackness? Christmas cards, that's why. T …
- 2011-12-19T20:51:39Z
- Published: 2011-12-19 20:45:41
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Erlang - Day Two
Erlang day two wasn't quite as swearing free as Erlang day one. You see I tend to swear when I'm stuck or baffled by syntax. And I git stuck a bit on the bonus problem. Turns out that putting []s round my variable made everything turn out nice. Who knew? Day two looks at branching, anonym …
- 2011-12-18T20:21:03Z
- Published: 2011-12-18 20:21:03
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Erlang - Day One
Bruce Tate introduces Erlang as making "hard things easy and easy things hard". Which isn't entirely fair I guess, given that the things it makes hard are hard for good reason. Mutability is hard, but something to be avoided in concurrent systems, which is the area where Erlang's sweet spot is loc …
- 2011-12-15T14:31:29Z
- Published: 2011-12-15 14:31:29
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Tip: Latest Chromium Browser on Debian Squeeze
The version of Chromium browser in the Squeeze repositories is pretty outdated and lacking in some functionality that nor needed for a project she was working on (its a plugin that fades the page based on the number of hops on a traceroute). I wasn't keen to compile it myself. So first I spent a …
- 2011-12-13T21:37:35Z
- Published: 2011-12-13 21:34:00
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Scala - Day Three
Day three and I'm now sort of getting the hang of Scala. Either that or the excercise is easier! I think that in learning about the neat text processing tricks that Scala allows, it helped me to click with it a bit more than in previous days. I've also started to get more used to the type system. …
- 2011-12-11T17:05:23Z
- Published: 2011-12-11 17:05:23
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Scala - Day Two
It all seemed so straightforward at first. And it was. Until I needed to split an array into key value pairs for the second excercise. I spent about two hours trying to find a nice way f doing that. I'm not entirely happy with the way I came up with, but it works at least. The scala syntax an …
- 2011-12-10T17:29:49Z
- Published: 2011-12-10 17:29:49
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Scala - Day One
Tate compares Scala to Edward Scissorhands in his metaphorical introduction to the chapter. What I've seen of the language so far certainly made me feel it was a little on the odd side. Its just near enough to Java that it feels wrong when it works more Rubyishly or more Lispishly. The first day v …
- 2011-12-08T22:08:58Z
- Published: 2011-12-08 22:08:58
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Prolog - Day Three
My fears of a mega hardcore third day of prolog were not realised, and I actually had some proper fun this time round. Mr. Tate is absolutely right that making a sudoku solver the prolog way is "almost magical". I've written sudoke solvers in perl before. And believe me it ain't pretty. With prolo …
- 2011-12-04T16:25:53Z
- Published: 2011-12-04 16:25:53
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Review - Gwatkin Yarlington Mill Medium Farmhouse Cider
Gwatkin Yarlington Mill Cider With today's cider I'm heading back west to the traditional heartlands of ciderism in Herefordshire. For it is in those heartlands that Gwatkin cider is made. On Moorhampton Park Farm in fact. Of Yarlington Mill …
- 2011-12-03T20:06:48Z
- Published: 2011-12-03 20:06:48
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December 2011 Reading
Never Let Me Go, by Katsuo Ishiguro Another Christmas gift from me old man, this is a 2005 novel which was made into a film last year. I've not seen the film. But the book is wonderful, …
- 2011-12-31T10:16:45Z
- Published: 2011-12-03 13:32:43
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Prolog - Day Two
Day Two was challenging. Like really hard. My imperative mindset is finding the declarative approach to coding frankly odd. When things do work it feels almost magical. And in at least one of the solutions I just chanced upon the implementation by fiddling round pretyy randomly rather than having …
- 2011-12-03T10:32:28Z
- Published: 2011-12-03 10:32:28
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Prolog - Day One
Its been a long time since I finished the Io section of my Seven Languages in Seven Weeks Journey. I realize that. Probably six months. That is doubleplus ungood. In my defence I must remind readers that I said at the outset that I might not do these on seven consecutive weeks. I'm just stretching …
- 2011-12-01T22:22:14Z
- Published: 2011-12-01 22:22:14
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Review - Tutts Clump Cider
Tutts Clump Traditional Farmhouse Cider Tim Wale is a cidermaker from West Berks who has a mission “To establish Real Cider and Perry at the forefront of English drinks, even if it takes the rest of my life”. Well, I am certainly down wi …
- 2011-11-30T20:41:51Z
- Published: 2011-11-30 20:28:42
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Vegan Mushroom, Tofu, and Sweetcorn Pie
This is a cheeky little winter dish that's perfect for lying round on the sofa watching crap movies on a foggy day. The main ticks are shoving in a load of tarragon, and also a little bit of tahini to thicken up yer sauce. I served it up with some steamed red and green cabbage. Lush. …
- 2011-11-20T22:16:32Z
- Published: 2011-11-20 22:16:00
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UK Postcode Lookup - My First Drupal7 Module
Update 2012-02-26 I updated this module in a few ways. It now uses the Drupal presave hook rather than the form_alter hook -- meaning that if there is a postcode and no lat/long it will always look up your postcode. That is a much better way to do it in my opinion. I’ve also changed the de …
- 2012-02-26T17:29:16Z
- Published: 2011-11-19 20:45:59
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MySQL tip: Counting total number of rows even when LIMIT is set
Pagination is a pain in the arse, right? That's one of the lovely things about using an ORM or something to do it for you. But that isn't always possible, so at some point you'll need to use a LIMIT on your select. Now, MySQL has a nice little feature called SQL_CALC_FOUND_ROWS which puts the nu …
- 2011-11-19T11:05:51Z
- Published: 2011-11-19 11:02:16
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Perl character encoding and UTF-8 in brief
Character encoding. Its enough to make grown people break down and weep bitter tears of rage. Perl provides rather good UTF-8 support, and there are some excellent tutorials out there. So, my contribution is more of a checklist and cookbook than a technical explanation. UTF-8 In your source …
- 2011-11-14T22:25:19Z
- Published: 2011-11-14 21:18:20
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Review - Ross on Wye Traditional Farmhouse Cider
Ross on Wye Traditional Farmhouse Cider This is another from my recent cache from Cider Club UK order. Ross on Wye is much more traditional cider country than Scotland or Berks. The bottle informs me that Broome Farm, wher …
- 2011-11-14T21:06:37Z
- Published: 2011-11-14 19:41:03
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New Features On Site: Page Archive, Tags In an Atom Feed
I've been doing a bit of hacking on the frontend of the site today, and I've added a couple of new features one of which I've wanted for a while and one of which I needed in order to get stuff aggregated into the Planet Perl Iron Man blogging challenge. Well, for the Pla …
- 2011-11-13T23:40:11Z
- Published: 2011-11-13 23:39:15
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Review - Thistly Cross Gold
Thistly Cross Gold Whisky Cask Matured Cider I'm not going to beat about the bush here. I like whisky. And I like cider. So I was intrigued to hear of a cider that was matured with chipped whisky barrels. That's got to be good, right? Well, …
- 2011-11-11T22:27:37Z
- Published: 2011-11-11 22:25:28
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Making SVG fractals with perl
I've just returned from visiting nor in Rotterdam. It being her birthday, we went to the pub with some of the lovely folks from her course, and the talk turned to SVG and if there was anything interesting you could do with it. I thought that maybe you could do something with fractals. In thi …
- 2011-11-06T15:18:44Z
- Published: 2011-11-05 19:29:38
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November 2011 Reading
Practices of an Agile Developer, by Venkat Subramaniam and Andy Hunt The original Pragmatic Programmer book was pretyy influential on me when it came out and I've really enjoyed a few o …
- 2011-11-30T19:19:05Z
- Published: 2011-11-05 15:22:39
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Having SOAP::Lite or LWP::UserAgent skip SSL certificate verification
Wow. This was a two pipe problem. I just upgraded perl on one of our servers. We use a lot of SOAP::Lite calls here, which used to be fine. But all of a sudden all my lovely scripts say: 500 Can't connect to our.server.com:443 (certificate verify failed) at /usr/bin/myscript.pl line 28 …
- 2011-10-27T17:56:58Z
- Published: 2011-10-27 17:03:00
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Review - Combe Raider
Combe Raider Cider from Kintbury Bonjour ciderists. Long time no wotsit. 5 months in fact. Time flies, eh? This week I've been getting ciders off the internets thanks to Cider Club UK. My ciders arrived at work in a big box a couple of days …
- 2011-10-26T18:41:53Z
- Published: 2011-10-26 18:39:53
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Tip: Make a distressed font with GIMP
The other day I had need to make a sort of distressed/grungy/textured looking font using The GIMP. You know the kind of thing. A little googling bought up Grunge texture text from gimp.pixtuts.com, which got me most of the way towards the effect I wanted. This video is my simplified version of …
- 2011-11-16T13:08:21Z
- Published: 2011-10-02 17:53:24
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October 2011 Reading
Britain's Empire: Resistence, repression and revolt, by Richard Gott This is a difficult read at times, putting the lie to the myth of the British Empire being a benign …
- 2011-10-23T17:48:23Z
- Published: 2011-10-02 13:15:37
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September 2011 Reading
Deep Green Resistence, by Aric McBay, Lierre Keith and Derrick Jensen The anticiv folks are a really good read for anyone who wants to do serious political campaigning …
- 2011-09-11T17:22:14Z
- Published: 2011-09-03 10:53:49
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Tip: Upgrade Magento 1.5 from the commandline
One of the roles that I have at work is maintaining the Magento software that runs our ethical gift shop. I recently upgraded one of our Magento installs from 1.5.0.1 to 1.5.1 using the newly introduced mage commandline tool. As regular readers will know I am a bit of a CLI freak, and was happil …
- 2011-09-01T13:11:18Z
- Published: 2011-08-18 21:46:04
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Chart: Who loots more MPs or rioters?
In the followup to the riots that hit the UK earlier in the week, MPs have been trying to out-authoritarian one another. However, we should remember that many of the people doing the name calling here are guilty of some "looting" of their own. I thought it would be of interest to compare their "lo …
- 2011-08-12T17:36:22Z
- Published: 2011-08-12 15:35:30
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Video Mix For Nor
Mijn minnaar, noch, is verhuizen naar Rotterdam :-( Dus ik maakte een video mix van Rotterdam verbonden liedjes als een afscheidscadeau. Build your own custom video playlist at embedr.com …
- 2011-08-10T08:21:03Z
- Published: 2011-08-10 08:16:16
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Vegan Fajitas
I was in Prague recently and had some stonking vegan fajitas in a restaurant. Which got me to thinking I should really figure out how to make my own. Turns out to be pretty straightforward. I have to admit I am a bit of a chilli fetishist. I like hot stuff, OK? So I added a few drops o …
- 2011-08-07T20:15:12Z
- Published: 2011-08-07 20:13:58
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Tip: Selective Focus Effect with GIMP
As you can see from the pic above, by Vincent Lafore, selective focus tilt/shift photographs can create an amazing toytown feel to them. I've used a lensbaby composer to similar effect, for example in my photo set Toytown, but the true master of the art in my opinion is Olivio Barbieri, whose …
- 2011-08-06T23:57:48Z
- Published: 2011-08-06 23:50:43
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Photography
This section will be a collection of tips and things that I have discovered about taking photos and about editing them later on. I am by no means some big shot photographist, so do feel free to correct my naivete in the comments. My photo gallery has (what I consider to be) some of my better pic …
- 2011-08-07T00:12:27Z
- Published: 2011-08-06 23:12:00
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Wok Bread Recipe: Its Like Vegan Naan
OK, the title is a bit of a cheat. I invented wok bread when I was on the dole. Signing on was probably one of the most productive times of my life for inventing by the way. It was massively valuable to have the time and space to think and explore ideas. Well anyhow, I was faffing ro …
- 2011-08-06T22:44:02Z
- Published: 2011-08-06 19:02:05
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Vegan Recipes
Below here you'll find a selection of various vegan recipies that I cook regularly. Well, you will when I get round to typing them all up anyhow. I've been Vegan since my early 20s. Its an ethical choice that is both easy to make and doesn't feel like any sort of sacrifice at all. People …
- 2011-11-14T00:47:08Z
- Published: 2011-08-06 18:29:37
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August 2011 Reading
Post Prison Writings And Speeches, by Eldridge Cleaver A really intriguing glimpse of Eldridge Cleaver's political development, focussing on the black panthers and other …
- 2011-09-03T10:42:52Z
- Published: 2011-08-04 21:57:16
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SQL tip: Most Popular Pages This Week with Piwik
Just a quick update today. I want to make myself a little most popular pages this week for the front page of this site. Now, I am using the lovely Piwik Analytics tool to monitor the site. So I first looked at the Piwik API. That should be the way to do it right? Not quite. The Actions plugin ca …
- 2011-11-14T01:43:54Z
- Published: 2011-07-16 19:08:17
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Lessons from Community Webhosting in Oxford: ox4.org
A bit of history Back in 2008 me and my pal Penguin decided that it would be fun to have a webserver to play with. Nowadays, it doesn't cost much to have a virtual server with awesome hosts like Bytemark. But it still costs. Plus we wanted to provide a bit of a community activist resourc …
- 2011-07-15T07:56:18Z
- Published: 2011-07-14 20:05:14
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July 2011 Reading
Parecon, by Michael Albert Parecon is an interesting and thoughtful answer to the "but what do you want" question that anticapitalists are always asked. I got occasionall …
- 2011-09-03T10:33:06Z
- Published: 2011-07-08 20:27:44
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Tip: Email with attachments from the *nix commandline
This is a quick tute for folk who want to send email from the commandline under the various Unices, especially those who also need to include attachments. This has been tested on Debian GNU/Linux with Icedove/Thunderbird. We start by simply sending an email from the commandline. I shall u …
- 2011-07-08T20:04:09Z
- Published: 2011-07-08 20:03:12
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Visualising RSS feeds with Perl and GraphViz::Data::Grapher
The slider requires javascript. Trying to load it now... $('#slider').flickrshow({ autoplay:true, interval:5000, set:'72157626958402918' }); A few weeks back I was browsing round Perlmonks as is my wont, when I came across planetscape …
- 2011-06-14T09:31:18Z
- Published: 2011-06-14 08:57:31
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June 2011 Reading
White Space is Not Your Enemy, by Kim Golombisky and Rebecca Hagen I am not a designer. But I do often end up doing design. That's why I was interested in this title. Now t …
- 2011-06-22T19:45:13Z
- Published: 2011-06-07 22:57:47
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Cidered up techs in a field? Must be BarnCamp 2011!
This post is a slightly edited version of the BarnCamp 2011 blog post, which appeared on New Internationalist's tech blog. I am a big fan of the BarnCamp. I first went along to what was then called the Hacktionlab in 2009, and found a unique combination of stunningly gorgeous …
- 2011-06-03T12:35:21Z
- Published: 2011-06-03 12:34:46
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Tip: is.gd from the commandline
This is a pretty minimal tip. The other day I was looking for a way to shorten URLs from the commandline. Now the bit.ly API expects you to authenticate before doing any shortening (I've not pulled apart the web ui to see if its possible without). The is.gd URL shortener has no such restrictions …
- 2011-06-01T19:35:11Z
- Published: 2011-06-01 19:35:11
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Perlmonks User RSS Maker
Monk This is a tool for making an minimal RSS feed of a user's posts from the Perlmonks website. I made it to incude my perlmonks posts in my Drupal life aggregator with my perlmonks posts. You can construct an url to get ther feed from scripts or the CLI by hand usin …
- 2011-05-31T13:31:19Z
- Published: 2011-05-31 12:40:02
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Io - Day Three
It all looked so easy, especially after the monster list of assignments on Io, day two. Well, appearances can be deceptive it seems. The place where I got stuck was on question three. Try as I might I couldn't override the colon operator as I wanted to do. It worked fine on the commandline. No p …
- 2011-05-30T18:48:43Z
- Published: 2011-05-30 18:48:43
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Iceweasel/Firefox 4 or 5 on Debian Squeeze
I don't know if you heard about it but Fabrice Bellard recently made a Javascript PC emulator that could boot a full linux with emacs and vi and even a c compiler. Which is insane. I wanted to check it out, but the core Iceweasel on Debian Squeeze (3.5) isn't up to the job, Fabrice has coded it …
- 2011-07-08T08:43:21Z
- Published: 2011-05-18 22:24:34
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Backtrack5, on an encrypted USB filesystem and nouveau driver
Backtrack Linux has become increasingly useful to me over the last few months. The latest release Backtrack 5 came out on 10 May, so I, of course wanted to have a play. Just a little background on Backtrack. Its specifically aimed at security professionals and hackers and has everything that you …
- 2011-05-18T21:45:02Z
- Published: 2011-05-18 21:36:18
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Tool: Twitter RSS Feed Getter
User: What's this? Love it or loathe it, it looks like Twitter is likely to remain an important part of the infrastructure of the interwebs for some time. Back in August 2010, Twitter removed RSS feeds from people's profile pages. They haven't droppe …
- 2011-05-19T11:17:06Z
- Published: 2011-05-18 12:56:11
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Io - Day Two
Wow. Day two messed with my head. I woke up a bit tired this morning to have a crack at it and got really baffled by how to make a fibonacci sequence. Just drew a total blank. So, I dug out some old c code I had and copied that into io. Which is sort of cheating, but got me going and also helped …
- 2011-05-15T14:20:09Z
- Published: 2011-05-15 14:20:09
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Review - Savanna Dry South African Cider
Savanna Dry South African Cider My continuing cider odyssey went in a most peculiar direction with my first crack at a South African cider. I had no idea that such a thing even existed and felt a little bad for incurring all those food miles. …
- 2011-05-15T21:51:06Z
- Published: 2011-05-14 18:43:50
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Collaborative pornography and making Windows 7 rsync
This should be an unusual blog. I'm attempting to combine a belated shoutout for nor's collaborative porn project, OpenSauce with a howto guide to making rsync work on windows. Lets see how it that works out. The OpenSauce Project Nor's radicalx project has previously investigated …
- 2011-05-14T22:51:03Z
- Published: 2011-05-11 20:25:30
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Io - Day One
After getting Io installed, I am feeling a little smug with myself. I don't know if its just because the language is so different, or because I've had a beer or what but the Io introductory material seems more complex than that for Ruby. However, looking back at what was covered I suspect that the …
- 2011-05-08T15:34:58Z
- Published: 2011-05-08 15:34:58
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Io - Day 0, setting it up on Debian
Well, it has been a while since Ruby, so I thought it was time to have a crack at the next of the my Seven Languages In Seven Weeks challenges, its time to play with Io. As it turns out Io was a bit of a faff to install on Debian Squeeze. So I've written up a day 0 tute on how to do just that. I …
- 2011-05-08T13:39:37Z
- Published: 2011-05-08 13:39:37
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Ettercap remote_browser Plugin Fun
I've just spent some serious time getting Ettercap's remote_browser plugin to work as expected on my home network. The plugin allows you to view the pages that another user on your network is browsing. What actually made the difference in the end was changing the argument ordering. For once dogged …
- 2011-05-07T20:32:57Z
- Published: 2011-05-07 20:01:22
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Sack Boris 2012: Ruling class flim-flam-nonsense maker
I was chuffed to learn that the folks at Common People had been able to use the code I wrote for the What will George Osborne Cut Next random cut generator into a Boris Johnson flim-flam answer generator. You ask Boris a question and he talks errant ruling class nonsense. Just like the real th …
- 2011-05-03T21:20:07Z
- Published: 2011-05-03 21:12:05
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May 2011 Reading
Alex's Adventures in Numberland By Alex Bellos My pal penguin recommended that I read this one. Its a lovely "pop maths" (if that is even a genre) investigatio …
- 2011-05-29T15:53:10Z
- Published: 2011-05-03 20:54:04
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Comment Guidelines
I love reading people's thoughts about my meanderings and discussing their ideas, that's why I made a comments system. Unfortunately, some folks on the interwebs insist on wasting all our bandwidth with irrelevent, abusive or spammy comments. So, before you post it's worth me being up front and te …
- 2012-01-14T21:06:32Z
- Published: 2011-04-26 13:35:48
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Review - Newtown Estate Still Cider
Newtown Estate Still Cider from Chipping Norton farmers market Greetz ciderpeeps! This week I've learned that I'm now top of the results for cider reviews on Google (i.e. dot com, not dot co dot uk). Sweet. I've also learned that I say "autu …
- 2011-04-27T15:35:50Z
- Published: 2011-04-20 21:26:50
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Ruby - Day Three
The last day is definitely the most fun. We get to play with metaprogramming with one bigger question, of which more shortly. My reflections on Ruby were it was cool to catch up with the language. I'd sort of forgotten quite how nifty it was to play with. For my money its more Perlish than the oth …
- 2011-04-12T21:59:02Z
- Published: 2011-04-12 21:59:02
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Ruby - Day Two
The second day of Ruby picks up the pace a bit, mostly focussing on the nice bits of sugar that Ruby provides and the excercises give you a chance to play with them a bit. fileio.rb Find out how to access files with and without blocks. #!/usr/bin/ruby -w # witho …
- 2011-04-11T20:10:46Z
- Published: 2011-04-11 20:10:46
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Review - Wilkins Farmhouse Cider
Wilkins Farmhouse Cider accompanied by Chillipepper Pete's vindaloo mix My normal practice when writing these cider reviews is to write up my experiences the next day, or within a couple of days of drinking. This time I am making an except …
- 2011-04-27T15:35:50Z
- Published: 2011-04-12 22:40:49
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Ruby - Day One
As I said, Ruby is a language I know pretty well already, so this is a gentle introduction for me. Tate compares Ruby to Mary Poppins — magical and fun. I hated that film. But I take the point. The excercises are pretty trivial, but here are my answers. helloworld.rb Print the string …
- 2011-04-09T11:54:30Z
- Published: 2011-04-09 11:54:30
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Seven Languages In Seven Weeks
There is an idea, popularized in the Pragmatic Programmer book that its good to learn a new programming language every year. Seven Languages In Seven Weeks takes the concept one stage further, although clearly only for certain values of "learning". One is never going to be proficient at any …
- 2012-03-10T13:10:52Z
- Published: 2011-04-13 19:41:14
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One liner: Find all javascript files used by a website
Just thought I'd document this as its likely to be the sort of thing that others might need. I was doing a bit of a tidyup of our javascript files on the global justice site New Internationalist and I needed to know which javascript files were still in use. Its a recursive grep for .js files rig …
- 2011-04-27T15:35:50Z
- Published: 2011-04-04 11:26:53
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Review - Westons Scrumpy Cloudy Cider
Westons Scrumpy Cloudy Cider At Dinner With Friends Regular readers will know that I am a bg scrumpy fan. Like massive. So when I chanced upon a fuck-off 2 litre flagon of Westons Scrumpy in my local co- …
- 2011-04-27T15:35:50Z
- Published: 2011-04-10 20:23:28
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April 2011 Reading
Seven Languages In Seven Weeks, by Bruce A. Tate I like a challenge, learning seven programming languages in seven weeks seemed like a challenge. I'm blogging about it. I doubt …
- 2011-04-27T15:35:50Z
- Published: 2011-04-13 19:28:40
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Anti-cuts video from the grassroots
The visionOntv are providing these grassroots anti-cuts videos in advance of the 26 March demo. Nice one. All the best anti-cuts videos Loading grassroots uncut video feed … jwplayer("grassroots_ukuncut_player").setup({ flashplayer: "http://visionon.tv/html/jwplayer/play …
- 2011-04-27T15:35:50Z
- Published: 2011-03-18 14:57:39
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Review - Thatchers Katy Cider
Thatchers Katy Cider At The Gardeners Arms, Oxford We headed up to Jericho, via Cuckoo Lane last Sunday. The weather started out springlike but grey and g …
- 2011-04-27T15:35:50Z
- Published: 2011-03-17 00:20:07
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Review - Keane's Premium Cider
Keane's Premium Cider Review Magners. That's a social phenomenon. And not necessarily one which the dedicated ciderist should be keen to embrace. I tend to think that cider that requires ice is, let's say prob …
- 2011-03-14T10:45:53Z
- Published: 2011-03-12 18:37:08
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Video: Richard Stallman - A Free Digital Society
Richard Stallman is something of a legend. He singlehandedly launched the Free Software movement, and the GNU project and has been campaigning for software freedom for almost as long as there have been usable home computers. I jumped at the opportunity to see him talk at the Institution of Engin …
- 2011-03-14T14:31:00Z
- Published: 2011-03-09 17:52:47
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March 2011 Reading
The Politics of Postanarchism, Saul Newman Let me first just mention that prepending the word "post" to any body of thought – post-anthropology, say – doesn't magic …
- 2011-03-24T09:26:44Z
- Published: 2011-03-08 22:48:27
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Review - Thatchers Somerset Vintage Cider
Thatchers Somerset Vintage Cider for M&S on the train to see rms talk I should note as prominently as is possible that buying stuff from M&S is ethically extremely questionable given their well doc …
- 2011-03-08T22:42:54Z
- Published: 2011-03-08 22:42:54
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Tip: Hassle Free Passwordless Remote SSH Login
There is plenty of other documentation of how to set up remote passwordless ssh logins elsewhere on the web. But it often takes some faffing to make it work as you'd like. Now, I often do this, so I thought I'd write up the easiest way that I've found to do so. It only has two steps. However, the ca …
- 2011-03-01T20:25:24Z
- Published: 2011-03-01 20:25:24
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Privacy Statement
Online privacy is extremely important to me and I do my level best to maintain your privacy when you use this site. However, I do collect some data to help me run the site better and to figure out what bits are good and what bits are crap. I never share any information that I collect with anyone, es …
- 2011-12-19T16:04:22Z
- Published: 2011-02-28 23:11:45
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Review - Aspalls Draught Suffolk Cyder
Aspalls Draught Suffolk Cyder at the Jericho Tavern, Oxford Photo by Bill McIntyre used under Creative Commons BY-NC-SA licence. Of course this isn't t …
- 2011-02-27T20:56:07Z
- Published: 2011-02-27 20:56:07
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February 2011 Reading
The Annotated Turing, Charles Petzold Turing's 1936 paper on Computable Numbers, with an Application to the Entscheidungsproblem is something of a geek classic, introducing imp …
- 2011-02-25T22:07:13Z
- Published: 2011-02-25 22:07:13
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January 2011 Reading
The End Of Capitalism (As We Knew It), A Feminist Critique Of Political Economy, by JK Gibson-Graham This is a frankly awesome critique of the (mid-90s) left's 'master' nar …
- 2011-02-25T22:16:20Z
- Published: 2011-01-05 22:16:20
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5 Best Firefox/Iceweasel Privacy Plugins
Activists and other people are frequently targetted for surveillance by power in its various forms - governments, police, media and corporate power. Increasingly this surveillance takes place on line. And so it makes sense to set up your firefox browser to be as resistent as possible to such s …
- 2011-02-25T21:50:04Z
- Published: 2011-02-25 21:50:04
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My Drupal Life Aggregator
I have a slightly unhealthy obsession with RSS. Its just simple enough that you can make something in an evening. But just complex enough that the thing could potentially be a bit interesting. So, I set out to learn a bit more about Drupal, especially about theming it. …
- 2011-02-24T15:53:53Z
- Published: 2011-02-24 15:53:53
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Oxford Sexual Abuse and Rape Crisis Centre Website
OSARCC are a fantastic collective of "women committed to supporting survivors of sexual abuse, rape, domestic abuse, and harassment". I helped them to get their website transitioned away from flat html to a simple CMS, Sky Blue Canvas. Their main requirement was that whatever system they e …
- 2011-02-24T08:29:35Z
- Published: 2011-02-24 08:29:35
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Projects
First thing, I have taken a fairly liberal interpretation of what a project is. So, a project might be a little hack I did one weekend, or something I made, or it might be a bit of work that I've done as a volunteer or even a bit of paid work that I've done. Well, I think you get the i …
- 2011-05-24T09:06:39Z
- Published: 2011-02-23 15:54:20
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Review - Old Rosie Cider
Old Rosie at the Turf Tavern, Oxford I'm a firm believer in contextualising. So, here's the back story. We'd been to watch a Disney film (no, really!) after a couple of beers in the Three Goats Heads and decide …
- 2011-02-22T18:55:11Z
- Published: 2011-02-22 18:55:11
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Drupal 7 web server performance shootout: nginx vs Apache
I was interested to see how nginx would play with Drupal 7 and how much performance boost I'd get as compared to Apache . As it turns out an extra ~50 requests a second and a lower overall system load (as measured by top). This is quite a high res screencast (thanks kazam!), so you might …
- 2011-05-19T11:21:03Z
- Published: 2011-02-17 01:44:36
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HOWTO: Kazam ScreenCast Software on Dual Screen Debian Squeeze
Let's start out by saying that there's nowt wrong with gtkRecordMyDesktop as a screencasting tool. But it is a little old in the tooth, and perhaps suffers from an overly complex UI. So, I was interested to read Introducing a screencaster called Kazam, by andrew@thisblog, an insigh …
- 2011-08-06T23:41:37Z
- Published: 2011-02-16 18:04:26
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Tech Tools For Activists Booklet
Note: This article originally appeared on the New Internationalist Tech Blog and is reused under a Creative Commons Licence Given recent revelations of police spying on activists, the takedown of the fitwatch blog and the increasing use by police of social networkin …
- 2011-02-16T15:56:15Z
- Published: 2011-02-16 15:56:15
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Review - Sheppy's Organic Cider
Sheppy's Organic Cider at the Nosebag, Oxford 2011-01-23 by Charlie Harvey Its been a while since I reviewed a cider, but in a burst of ridiculous new year enthusiasm I decided to revive the practice. A recent wander to the Nosebag Café in the …
- 2011-02-16T15:57:32Z
- Published: 2011-02-16 15:57:32
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Thunderbird/Icedove sort order and delete order on Debian Squeeze
Its true. By default Icedove (that's Thunderbird to non-Debianists) puts the newest emails at the bottom of the message list. This is wrong and evil (I may be exaggerating). It took me a while to find the proper solution and then a bit longer to figure out I needed to delete the .m …
- 2011-01-16T15:55:56Z
- Published: 2011-01-16 15:55:56
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2011 Reading
Here's a list of books I read in 2011, by month. On the monthly page there's quick review or synopsis of each book. Update 2011-02-25 I've realised that this page was going to get ridiculous by the end of the year, so I've split my reading lists up by month. …
- 2011-12-03T11:33:36Z
- Published: 2011-02-12 20:30:07
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Reading
I've noticed a few different people publishing lists of the books that they're reading on their blogs. Always one to follow the crowd, expecially when "managing my online profile", I thought I should do the same. Here goes. 2011 Reading …
- 2011-03-13T10:26:56Z
- Published: 2011-01-01 00:00:00
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Debian Tip: Get Adobe Air working on 64-bit Squeeze
Lots of people seem to want to develop applications on the decidedly unfree Adobe Air platform. They provide a .deb for 32 bit systems but not for 64 bit systems. I wanted to check out some software from the dark side, and took a while to suss out what the provided deb needed to make it ru …
- 2011-06-17T08:15:21Z
- Published: 2010-12-11 13:14:18
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Vimperator Tip: Cut and paste with ctrl-c/ctrl-v
I'm a huge fan of the Vimperator Firefox plugin. It works just like you'd want it to and doesn't break much. Well, it breaks one useful thing, which is the almost universal ctrl-c/ctrl-v cut and paste shortcuts. So, I was well chuffed to find a Vimperator cut and paste tip on superuser. I've exten …
- 2011-02-15T21:51:59Z
- Published: 2011-02-15 21:51:59
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Debian Tip: Get a list of all installed packages with dpkg
I like to make sure that I always have a listing of all the files I have on my Debian boxen. Fortunately dpkg has a quick way of doing just that. # dpkg --get-selections > /path/to/mybackup.txt I run that once a day or so as a cron job dumping to a file, that file will be in my usual rsync backup …
- 2011-01-03T15:58:05Z
- Published: 2011-01-03 15:58:05
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Video: FeedMash - A Perl/Catalyst RSS Masher-Upper and Twitter-izer
Update 2011-01-31: Well, life got in the way of getting this out in January, let's see if it will come out in Feb! I'm currently coding a project using the Catalyst Framework. The project is called feedmash and is partly inspired by …
- 2011-05-19T11:23:20Z
- Published: 2010-12-20 14:08:27
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SSH Tip: Proxy your browser with SSH
I was just now trying to see how the New Internationalist website might look from Canada, to test some GeoIP set up that we're working on. So I used a trick that I mainly use when I'm browsing the interwebs from public WiFi networks. Given the emergence of tools like Firesheep, which a …
- 2010-10-27T01:41:02Z
- Published: 2010-10-27 01:41:02
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Flickr API and Grabbing Wedding Photos From A Group
My lovely friends Danny and Jess got married recently. I took some photos and so did lots of other people. So we put them all in a flickr group. But they wanted to get hold of everyone's pics to print or whatever. Problem. For some reason flickr have seen fit to disable the API key for the one t …
- 2010-09-07T21:51:33Z
- Published: 2010-09-07 21:51:33
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Video: Turning MP3s back into ones and zeros
I've wanted to make some code to turn MP3s back into the ones and zeros from which they are made ever since reading Eben Moglen's Anarchism Triumphant. In that Moglen says: A CD player is a good example[of a digital device]. Its primary input is a bitstream read from an opti …
- 2011-05-19T11:20:52Z
- Published: 2010-08-24 10:41:27
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Config::General arrayrefs and HTML::FormFu
I'm in the process of making a nicer backend for charlieharvey.org.uk using Catalyst (which is lovely BTW). One of the things I'm playing with is using HTML::FormFu for making the forms. But this morning I got proper stuck on the simple task of populating a select box with options from my Config …
- 2010-08-15T21:02:07Z
- Published: 2010-08-15 21:02:07
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Tool: Google Creative Commons search for New Internationalist
At New Internationalist, where I work, we often struggle to find Creative Commons images that are large enough to use for print. This is a custom google search form that sets up parameters for a search of commercially reusable and modifiable images suitable for print at sizes of 5.333x4 inches o …
- 2010-11-12T16:01:33Z
- Published: 2010-11-12 16:01:33
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Video: ORGCon Open BBC Session
In case you haven't noticed their "Protect Your Bits" poster in the background of the IT Crowd, let me introduce the Open Rights Group. The work they're doing on digital civil rights is crucial to everyone who values freedom or privacy on the interwebs. Not just activists …
- 2011-05-19T11:22:36Z
- Published: 2010-07-27 16:01:15
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Video: Quick HTML Editing With Vim
This is the minimalistest of minimalist web casts, just to show off the awesomeness of a couple of vim modules for quick html h4x0ring. Specifically Surround and snipMate. w00t! …
- 2011-05-19T11:22:02Z
- Published: 2010-07-17 15:58:49
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BarnCamp 2010
BarnCamp 2010 was two days of workshops on topics ranging from renewable energy to foraging for food to citizen journalism to using free software for activism, three nights of camping, open space sessions, evening entertainment, great food at Highbury Farm, a beautiful farm co-op high in the Wye V …
- 2010-05-01T22:23:18Z
- Published: 2010-05-01 22:23:18
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What Will George Osborne Cut Next?
Here's a cool project. Helping the lovely folks at No Shock Doctrine For Britain to build a random George Osborne "cut generator", called What Will George Cut Today? to highlight the absurdity of the new UK Chancellor's unjust and unnecessary budget cuts. No Shock Doctrine For Britain are fighti …
- 2011-04-27T17:01:06Z
- Published: 2010-06-15 14:22:16
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Getting Chandler Hub to send a daily agenda by email
I think that the OSAF's Chandler project is awesome and I've been using Chandler to organise my life for a while now. But one feature it was lacking was a daily email agenda update. Here's how I hacked one in perl. The code is at: The first thing was to be able to pick up some vaguely pa …
- 2010-08-01T00:00:00Z
- Published: 2010-08-01 00:00:00
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My GPG Key
2010-12-04: Key Revocation I mentioned on 2010-10-10 that I'd revoke my old B1233772 key and transition to 196AA973. I have now revoked it. There's a full writeup of why I did this on the Debian admin blog and a more accessible writeup of the DSA1 rollover at riseup.net. Th …
- 2010-12-04T13:14:15Z
- Published: 2007-04-22 17:14:22
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Dual Head on Debian Squeeze with nouveau and xrandr
I recently got myself a 24-inch monitor. I wanted to keep using my trusty 17 inch as well - to use as a secondary monitor for system monitoring, playing music and other background tasks. There is a closed-source nvidia driver. But I'll be using the open source nouveau driver (after trying with no …
- 2010-02-11T12:19:08Z
- Published: 2010-02-11 00:00:00
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Samba: IP Alias Servers On Debian
pre { background-color: #000; color: #0a3; margin: 0.7em 1.2em; padding: 1em; min-width:50em; } Note: This post was written in 2008. It might or might not still work. I've not had time to test. YMMV! Intro This is a mini-howto which shows one way to get round an a …
- 2011-08-25T12:34:28Z
- Published: 2008-05-29 11:22:14
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Gmail de-ad greasemonkey script
NOTE Google changed the gmail API some time ago. I haven't been able to suss out how and they haven't documented it. So I'm no longer able to support this project. My apologies. This Greasemonkey script hides the right hand side ads on gmail and widens the email bit. You'll need to instal …
- 2011-04-11T20:15:15Z
- Published: 2008-04-16 23:21:16
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3. 6th Sept. Lookin' A Twat
RE: Prime Minister Hey Gordy, I just got your "Look at me, I'm Gordon Brown, wahey!" leaflet from my local MP, Andy "Pandy" Smith. You wanna watch that one by the way - he voted against Trident not long ago. I think he may be one of those free-thinking anarchists like at the climat …
- 2010-08-01T00:00:00Z
- Published: 2007-07-19 09:00:18
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Daily Mail Story Generator
I was at the Climate Camp, reading the Evening Standard's account of how militants intended to hijack the camp to eat babies or something when it occurred to me that Daily Mail, Express and Standard journos could be replaced by a relatively trivial perl script. So, may I present the Daily Ma …
- 2007-09-02T16:24:00Z
- Published: 2007-09-02 16:24:00
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2. 9th August My Cabinet USPs
RE: Its me Gordon, remember? Hi Gordon, Its been ages, when are you going to get back to me? Its almost as if you don't want me in your cabinet! Just to remind you of my unique selling points as the business community would have it. I wash my feet in disinfectant all the time, ho …
- 2007-07-09T09:00:18Z
- Published: 2007-07-09 09:00:18
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1. 30th July - I've smoked weed, am I in?
RE: Cabinet Hi Gordon, I heard that you're trying to create a "cabinet of all the talents". Can I be in it? I can assure you that I've smoked plenty of weed in my time! Love from Charlie XXX …
- 2010-08-01T00:00:00Z
- Published: 2007-07-01 17:03:54
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Dear Prime Sinister ...
I thought that it may be fun to write to the Prime Sinister every now and again. He hasn't yet written back despite my generous offer to join his "cabinet of all the talents". …
- 2007-07-01T16:48:00Z
- Published: 2007-07-01 16:48:00
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Climate Change
Climate change is real. Human beings are contributing to it. It is killing 150,000 people a year. These are poor people in poor countries. They produce far fewer emissions than rich people in rich countries but suffer the worst effects of climate change. This is a class issue, a power issue, a j …
- 2010-08-01T00:00:00Z
- Published: 2010-08-01 00:00:00
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Camp For Climate Action
14 - 21 August 2007 This summer, the Camp for Climate Action will pitch its tents at Heathrow airport for a week of education, sustainable living, and direct action to tackle aviation, the fastest growing source of greenhouse gas emissions in the UK. All our efforts to tackle climate ch …
- 2007-05-01T14:02:01Z
- Published: 2007-05-01 00:00:00
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Review - Chiddingstone Bone Dry
Chiddigstone Bone Dry is brewed by the Castle Cider company in Sevenoaks, Kent. Served at the Spotted Dog in Penshurst and to my knowledge, no other pub in the area, this 7.5%er certainly packs a powerful punch. It has a crisp, light appearance and certainly does not taste like a stron …
- 2008-11-22T17:23:14Z
- Published: 2008-11-22 17:23:14
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Review - Addlestones
I had high hopes for Addlestones, being, as I was, somewhat hungover from a night at the local. The occasion was the opening of my pal Meredy's official birthday season. It was lunchtime and I was on the "other" side of Magdalen bridge. To East Oxfordians the other side of the bridge is a place of …
- 2008-06-21T21:09:16Z
- Published: 2008-06-21 21:09:16
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ALF: Apache log filter
ALF is a filter for people using Apache logging to plain text logs, who still want the flexibility of being able to search their logs like a database. It relies heavily on Jeff Zucker's DBD::AnyData to do the clever stuff, and overlays that with a simple Gtk2 interface. You can run SQL querie …
- 2007-03-31T18:45:21Z
- Published: 2007-03-31 18:45:21
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Vim tip - Preview webpage source
Here's a neat little trick for people who have a *nix setup, vim and lynx browser. I've remapped my F8 Key to use lynx to dump the nicely formatted source of a web page in a new window. Useful for testing if your site is working. In my .vimrc I added the following lines: " split at the bottom …
- 2009-06-14T12:23:45Z
- Published: 2009-06-14 12:23:45
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Geekery
Some useful snippets of technobabble, code and such for the discerning geeks and programmers amongst you. …
- 2011-03-13T10:27:22Z
- Published: 2006-12-01 00:00:00
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Bellamy Doesn't Exist Claim Scientists
Scientists have today claimed that there is no conclusive evidence that David Bellamy, the controversial botanist and TV personality, exists or was caused by human activity. Man or myth? Speaking from a windfarm …
- 2007-11-05T08:21:12Z
- Published: 2007-11-05 08:21:12
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Review - Aspalls Premier Cru
You may be thinking that labelling a cider "Premier Cru" is, well, a bit wanky. And I'd have to agree with you. However, Aspall Premier Cru Suffolk Cyder made me reconsider. A bone dry feast of light appley loveliness in a distinctive cone shaped bottle, it positively leapt down my neck. Honest. T …
- 2009-06-18T09:20:10Z
- Published: 2009-06-18 09:20:10
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Review - Sam Smiths Organic Cider
I think that Sam Smith's, the Tadcaster based independent brewery, are a fantastic organisation. Everything they brew is vegan and a high percentage is organic. They run some of the cheapest and most pleasant pubs about; their pubs feel like proper pubs, rather than soulless McPub beer malls. By …
- 2011-06-13T18:03:45Z
- Published: 2007-10-03 18:22:14
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Review - Westons Organic
My local pub started selling Westons Organic cider a few months ago. I'm feeling pretty lucky about it I can tell you. Though mass produced, it's a real cider, made from fruit rather than concentrate. It has a nice balance between bitttersweet apple and booze. Its fairly heavy; more a cider for a …
- 2007-09-16T18:03:34Z
- Published: 2007-09-16 18:03:34
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Cider Reviews
Cider is an alcoholic drink made by fermenting apples. I'm particularly fond of good proper cider (i.e. not the sacchirine-infused Strongbow type). I often go by the name ciderpunx online (I like punk rock too). I went through a phase a couple of years back of publishing cider reviews and have now …
- 2011-04-20T19:02:32Z
- Published: 2007-09-19 23:56:41
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My Geek Codes
How to tell the world you are a geek, you ask? Use the universal Geek code! Using this special code will allow you to let other un-closeted geeks know who you are in a simple, codified statement... The Universal Geek Code Page So here's mine. Original Geek Code -----BEGIN GEEK CO …
- 2007-03-01T15:33:51Z
- Published: 2007-03-01 15:33:51
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Spinal Text
I wanted to learn how to write a firefox extension. This is it! Spinal Text - an extension to turn your text up to ELEVEN! It won't work on all pages, after all its just a learning project. I'll probably redo it properly one day! WTF? see the Spinal Tap fan site …
- 2007-10-04T16:28:44Z
- Published: 2007-10-04 16:28:44
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Windows Vista - Time to Jump
Windows Vista will profoundly downgrade your ability to use your computer as you see fit, rather than as Microsoft and the corporate media see fit. It will operate inefficiently, forcing users to upgrade to expensive and power hungry new hardware which will be bad for the environment, especially …
- 2006-10-13T10:00:00Z
- Published: 2006-10-13 00:00:00
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Activism
Actions, campaigns and political writings that I support or agree with. …
- 2011-03-13T10:26:01Z
- Published: 2006-08-03 00:00:00
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What the hell do these icons mean?
OpenOffice provides a fantastic replacement for M$ word and excel. I prefer to post in this format, even though OpenOffice can read and write M$ documents, to encourage people to switch to non-proprietary document formats, that the whole world can share freely. See also Richard Stallman …
- 2005-05-01T00:00:00Z
- Published: 2005-05-01 00:00:00
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Pong
Looks like your browser doesn't like Java. Sorry about that. You could try and download the plugin This is a 2 person java version of the all time classic Pong. It's fairly simple, but it does require a >=1.2 java plugin. You c …
- 2006-12-01T00:00:00Z
- Published: 2006-12-01 00:00:00
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Fun and Games
A collection of games, amusements and diversions. …
- 2011-03-13T10:26:20Z
- Published: 2006-08-21 17:03:22
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Space Invaders
You need java here! You can download it at no cost from Sun, who probably have a trademark on java or something. I wrote this for fun and to learn and practice design patterns. You can download (t …
- 2009-08-01T00:00:00Z
- Published: 2007-09-12 00:00:00
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Index
These pages contain bits of html, perl, sysdminning, activism, politics and that for your perusal, enjoyment and edification. Or something. All the background stuff is done with object orientated perl, thanks to the CPAN magic of HTML::Template and DBI. If you're browsing, I have a full ar …
- 2011-03-13T10:25:48Z
- Published: 2005-11-09 15:00:00
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