larryni.me.uk

From today’s Derry News:

A Derry pub landlord has placed a bounty on the head of a mysterious graffiti artist who daubed the inside of his bar.

Les Doherty of the Bound for Boston says he will pay £100 to anyone who provides him with information to unmask the secret scribe who calls himself ‘Da Moda’.

Da Moda’s signature eyes motif has been appearing on walls and shutters across the city for around a year.

However, Mr Doherty said he was incensed when Da Moda took a marker to a wall in the men’s toilets of the Bound for Boston.

“He crossed a line when he crossed the line onto my premises,” he said.

“That’s why I’ve decided to put a bounty on his head. I don’t want to see him prosecuted, but I would like to see him cautioned by the police. Maybe they would encourage him to clean up some of his so called art.”

Mr Doherty has already begun to build a profile of the publicity shy painter.

“Since the graffiti is in the Bound for Boston’s male toilet this excludes females from the suspect list straight away.

“As he drinks in the Bound for Boston he is most likely aged 18 to 26, and from the standard of his work he may be a failed art student.”

If Mr Doherty’s plea for information falls onto deaf ears he is prepared to trawl the Bound for Boston’s CCTV footage to unmask the reclusive vandal.

“Da Moda has also vandalised my window, but maybe he should be renamed Da Eejit, after all only an airhead would air brush under CCTV cameras.”

If you have information that could lead to the capture of ‘Da Moda’ contact Les Doherty at the Bound for Boston on 02871 271315.

A lot of people would be glad to see him clean up his art. As you can see from the picture above it really looks shit. And it’s everywhere around town. Considering the guy’s been doing the same scribble for about a year you’d think he would at least improve a bit.

If you, like myself, get frequent phone calls from not so computer literate friends and family to sort out their PC problems then you’ll love WizHelp. It’s a remote screen sharing tool, and best of all, it’s cross-platform as it runs on Java. Well, at least for some platforms The supported/tested OS list is as follows: Windows 2000/NT/XP/Vista, MacOS X, and Ubuntu/Mythbuntu (i386). And more Linux distros are to be supported soon.

Using the site is easy. First sign up for a free account. Then send the link of your personal Help Center to your friends, or just give them your username so they can search for you from the WizHelp front page. Once they access your page you’ll see them pop up in a list:

As you can see in the screenshot you have several options now – initiate a chat session, take control of the remote computer, give control to the remote computer, view the remote screen or share your own. Either yourself, or the person you are helping can initiate a session:

Once the session has been accepted by the other party a Java applet is loaded, the remote desktop is displayed in its own window and you can get to work:

The above screen shot was taken whilst on remote assistance on another Ubuntu box. I also tried it with Windows XP as a client, and it worked just as well.

Considering that most computer problems are often easily solved with just a few clicks (for my friends and family anyway), this will save you a lot of time. No more traveling to people’s homes or waiting for them to drop off their machine for you to fix it. Go on, take WizHelp for a spin.

I usually have a small bottle of proper vanilla extract in my cupboard that I use to add to coffe, baking, etc… I love the stuff! But it’s so damn expensive. At the end of December I came across a post on how to make your own vanilla extract, and it’s extremely simple:

Here’s what you need:
6 vanilla pods/beans
500 ml/2 cups vodka

Split the pods length-wise, put them in the bottle, top back on and leave it in a dark cupboard for at least 8 weeks. That’s it.

I got a half bottle of Tesco’s cheapest finest. I used 4 pods as a half bottle contains only 350ml.

I couldn’t help myself and stick the finger in today to taste. And damn, it tastes very nice! I might have to go and get another (bigger and better quality) bottle to get ready just for drinking. Yumm.

Free Derry Corner has had another makeover to show solidarity with the people of Gaza.

And it’s forty years this January that the original slogan was first painted on the world-famous gable wall by John Casey. From the Free Derry entry on Wikipedia:

Free Derry (Irish: Saor Doire) was a self-declared autonomous nationalist area of Derry, Northern Ireland, between 1969 and 1972. Its name was taken from a sign painted on a gable wall in the Bogside in January 1969 which read, “You are now entering Free Derry”. The area, which included the Bogside and Creggan neighbourhoods, was secured by community activists for the first time on 5 January 1969 following an incursion into the Bogside by members of the police force, the Royal Ulster Constabulary (RUC). Residents built barricades and carried clubs and similar arms to prevent the RUC from entering. After six days the residents took down the barricades and police patrols resumed, but tensions remained high over the following months.

Make sure you keep Friday the 6th February free, folks.

Motor Sounds Records and The Beatnik Soul Club got together to bring you Scott H. Biram! He’ll be playing in Masons Bar in Derry, doors open 10pm and admission is £8. Support is by Northern Ireland’s own kings of punk blues The Bonnevilles.

They also play Belfast’s The Menagerie on the 5th, I haven’t seen any other dates for Ireland.

For the uninitiated, here’s Scott playing at last year’s Deep Blues Festival:

And The Bonnevilles at Belfast’s Open House Festival 08:

I found a great program to stitch digital photos together into panoramas – Hugin. It’s really easy to use, pretty much self explanatory. Just load some pictures into Hugin, create control points where the pictures are overlapping to match them up, optimise and stitch them together. Well, that’s the basics. Hugin has got a lot of settings to play around with to adjust the final result. Check out the Hugin home page for tutorials. If you’re a Ubuntu user then you can just install from the repos.

Here’s some I made earlier after walking around Derry’s walls. I pretty much only used the defaults settings and then loaded the panoramas into the GIMP to crop. Click the pictures to view the full sizes on Flickr.

Overlooking the Bogside

St Columb’s Cathedral

Overlooking Fahan Street

Up/Down Magazine Street

Guildhall

Verbal Arts Centre

Overlooking the Bogside. Again.

Oh yeah, Hugin is also available for Mac and Windows.