larryni.me.uk

I was about 11 when I started to realise that religion was nothing but a load of hogwash and fairytales. And the 10 commandments never made sense either. George Carlin explains it best:

I was watching The Gadget Show on Five earlier when I heard Jason Bradbury mention a site called VideoJug. I had to go and check it out and it’s not just another video site a la Youtube. This one is different:

VideoJug is every aspect of life explained and illustrated through an ever-growing number of common sense, informative, helpful and entertaining videos. It’s like having an army of top-class experts at your fingertips 24/7 to “show you how” and to help you out. And you can contribute your own knowledge, experience, wisdom and tips too, as we’re aiming to create a place that people come to share – as well as find – knowledge.

You’ll find anything on there: how to prepare various meals, mixing drinks, massages, magic tricks, buying cars, balloon modelling, testicular self-exam… There really is something for everyone.
Rate and discuss the videos, download them for your favourite portable player, add them to your website or send them to your friends. And if you want the instructions for offline reading then you can print them off.

Great stuff. I’ve added it to my bookmarks and definitely will visit more often. I might even try and make the morning buns.

Looks like Borat, aka Sacha Baron Cohen, picked the wrong guy to play a prank:

He approached the man and said: “I like your clothings. Are nice! Please may I buying? I want have sex with it.”

But the bystander didn’t see the joke. He took one look at Cohen and punched him in the face.

Luckily Dr House was on hand to rescue him.

I’ve been using a Bluetooth dongle for some time to transfer pictures from my Nokia 6270 to my PC, but was never able to transfer files the other way round without booting into Windows and using the software provided with my phone. Receiving a file is pretty straightforward – in Ubuntu launch Applications > Accessories > Bluetooth File Sharing, set up Bluetooth on your phone, and you’re ready to go. You might want to pair the phone with your PC so you’re not asked for a password each time you send a file. If you don’t have the entry in your menu then just install gnome-obex-server.
When I was browsing the Ubuntu How-to forum I came across this thread. It tells you how to create a few simple scripts which you can use from Nautilus to send/receive a file. But it’s using obexserver instead of gnome-obex-server. What I don’t like about that method is that obexserver saves received files in /tmp. gnome-obex-server saves the files in ~/Desktop instead and makes them quicker to locate. Also, the Bluetooth Setup and Bluetooth Receive File scripts in the How-to become pretty much redundant when you can simply run gnome-obex-server from the menu, or simply add it to System > Preferences > Sessions > Startup Programs if you use it regularly.
If anybody knows of a way to sync my phone’s contacts with Evolution or Thunderbird then please let me know. And also get in touch if you know of a way to change the default folder where the received files are saved.

It’s only been a few weeks since I upgraded from Dapper Drake to Edgy Eft and I have to say that I’m a very happy camper. I haven’t had any of the problems that people report on the forums and in the blogosphere. Sure, there were a few glitches as would be expected with any new release. But I actually had far fewer with Edgy than I had with Dapper. I even got my ATI graphics card (Radeon 9250) working at the first attempt.

And now we have the release dates for Feisty Fawn. The final release is scheduled for 19th April 2007:

Shuttleworth said “the main themes for development in this release will be improvements to hardware support in the laptop, desktop and high-end server market, and an aggressive adoption of emerging desktop technologies.”Ubuntu’s Feisty release will put the spotlight on multimedia enablement and desktop effects. We expect this to be a very gratifying release for both users and developers”.

I’m just after reading Om Malik’s excellent article Microsoft, Zune & The Music Mafia. In case you haven’t heard about it yet, it’s about MS making a deal with Universal Music Group which will give them a percentage of the sales of Microsoft’s new digital music player Zune. The device will sell for $250 and UMG gets $1 per unit sold. Why? According to UMG people aren’t buying enough digital downloads and are ripping their CDs to put onto their music players instead. How dare they! And the poor music industry is suffering because of it and need to cover their losses. Not to mention the ‘damage’ done to their finances due to file sharing.

Bullshit.

I have been buying and sharing music my whole life. At the beginning my cousin, who worked as a part-time DJ, passed on her old records to me after she finished with them. When I was about 10 or 11 I started buying vinyl from money I got for birthdays, christmas, etc… I swapped LPs with friends to make copies on tape when I couldn’t afford to buy them myself. I remember going to school with records in my school bag to lend to friends. On Saturday afternoons we all headed into town and spent most of our time in our favourite record store flicking through and listening to albums, spending money whenever we could afford to. I always felt it worth spending money on good music. I still do today.

During the 80’s CDs came on the market and I ended up paying for the same music again. At the same time the big labels started producing what I call disposable music. Crap bands that were all about looks and little about quality. And over the past 20+ years this has only become worse. I refuse to pay for music I know I won’t be listening to again in a few months’ time.

Yes, my buying habits have changed. So has my taste in music. I guess in a way I have to thank Apple for that About 4 years ago I bought an iPod and that’s when I started ripping most of my music to mp3 format. Shortly after I got broadband and filesharing suddenly became very attractive. It opened up a whole new world to me and introduced me to lots of music I never heard of before. Along with the popularity of broadband came good and legal social music services like Epitonic, last.fm, and GarageBand which easily let you discover new music. And let’s not forget great independent Internet radio stations like Soma FM, Whole Wheat Radio, and great net labels like Magnatune who care about their artists as well as their customers. Somewhere along the way I stopped listening to most terrestrial radio, it just wasn’t worth listening to any more. It was like cheap bubble gum that you chew a few times, spit it out and it leaves you with a bad aftertaste. Bubble gum music. Yuck.

I still buy music. The difference now is that I order directly from labels like Sazanami, Motor Sounds Records, Magnatune, or online shops like CD Baby. I buy music directly from artists’ websites who I find whilst browsing the net and MySpace. I know where my money goes and that the artists are benefiting from it. I participate at sites like Musicbrainz and Discogs by adding meta data. I contact artists/bands/labels to get them to sign up with last.fm so other people can discover the same music as myself, enjoy it, and hopefully buy it.

The big labels have only themselves to blame. Fuck them. They are old and greedy bastards who are completely out of touch with what’s happening. They simply can’t, and don’t want to see that DRM’ed music hurts not just the customers but also their artists. They force artists to conform and destroy them and originality in the process. They are lying to us by pulling stats out of their asses about the damage apparently caused by filesharing, and their frivolous lawsuits are ruining low-income families. What for? A few dollars? Scumbags. Let them die a slow and agonising death, they deserve it. And their $1 levy won’t rescue them.

One of the things I really like about using a Linux distro is the fact that you don’t have to reboot each time after installing updates or new software. There is an easy to understand blog entry on ITtoolbox which explains why.

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Getting this blog started hasn’t been without its problems. I screwed up the files/folders permissions a few times and messed around with WordPress stuff that I maybe shouldn’t have. But the main headache is my FTP access. It sucks. It sucks big time! And the network support staff at my ISP don’t seem to be able to find anything wrong. I can establish about 1 connection out of 10. I can use ssh and telnet to get into my account without any problems though. And when I finally get a connection then the transfer rates are practically zero. I hope they get it sorted soon.

The good news is that my domain has finally been re-directed to my blog’s webspace. About time that I set it to some use.

I also replaced the header image courtesy of Plastic Jesus and Creative Commons license. Talking about CC, I decided to make the contents of this blog available under a by-nc-sa license. Not that there’s much to license yet

Well, my blog’s up and running. It was actually surprisingly easy to set up once I got the file permissions right. Now off to do some tweaking and customising.