Author Archives: tony

Google Insights

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I posted recently about why search means something, and about Google tracking the Flu.  Here’s another site from Google that’ll waste three weeks if you’re not careful, Google Insights.  It lets you see who’s searching for what and how it’s changed over the years.  There was one fascinating search that amazed me.

And that was “apple in the Food and Drink category in the US“, over time you can see people are more interested in Apples during the end of Summer and the start of Autumn, and that it’s the same every year.

In case the link doesn’t work or the info goes away, here’s a screenshot (click to bigginate it).

Star Wars and Goose Pimples and All Things Nice

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I used one of my Star Wars THX DVD’s to check out what Rab had said about tuning your TV with THX, and he was right!  In the language settings section there’s a THX logo and it runs you through some picture setting stuff, mainly around contrast and brightness, along with some diagnostics.  Lo and behold, my TV was already spot on!  I’m really picky about contrast and brightness, because I’m really sensitive to bright lights.  I always have my computer monitor set very dark, and I try and have the TV set so that it’s not too bright, and I’d got it spot on in terms of being able to pick out the different white and black contrasts on the THX thingy.

Very pleased.

Of course, as soon as I stuck the DVD in, the surround sound popped into life and I was able to enjoy the intro Star Wars music blaring out.  Man it’s fantastic, and it evokes such an amazing set of memories.

I still can’t watch the 20th Century Fox logo/intro on movies without expecting it to fade into Star Wars.

And Sunday arrived in that usual Sunday arriving style

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In which every paragraph is a segway.

Lovely fresh November morning.  No rain yet although it looks like we might be in for some later.  I’m not sure how it works but during October it’s always too cold to have the patio doors open, where-as in November there’s nothing better than sitting in the computer room with the door open enough for the crisp clean air to sneak in.

Because spending 7 hours at a craft exhibition wasn’t enough, the girls are all going to Hobbycraft in a bit, maybe it’s considered a suitable ‘warm down’ after the full on exhibition.

A friend of mine found a screen callibration bit on a THX DVD and mentioned it to me, so I may spend the time they’re out seeing if I can tune our screen any more.  I’m quite happy with how it looks but there’s always that vague concern that you’ve picked some weird settings and pink skin is looking orange but you never noticed.  Sunday’s just the kind of day for doing lazy LCD screen tuning I think.

John Scalzi wrote up a Quantum of Solace review, which I totally agree with.  Despite the fact that I still don’t really know who John is (I just stalk his blog) I feel at least now I could share a pint of beer with him and have one topic to chat about that we agreed on 🙂  That’s the internet, bringing together people who don’t know each other and fooling them into thinking they do.

Mark wrote a blog update, which I really enjoyed, despite his implication that he shouldn’t write them too often.  How am I supposed to live vicariously through other people if they don’t tell me what they’re doing?

We watched a comedy show on ITV last night, in honour of Prince Charles’ 60th birthday and some of the acts were really funny.  One guy stood out, I’ve seen him before and really enjoyed his stuff.  He’s Omid Djalili and you can check out his web site over here.  He manages to poke fun at a lot of racial issues and particularly racial accents and still stay on the right side of the line (in my view) and is pretty funny.  There’s some videos of him on the site, check them out.

Moussaka success I think

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The moussaka seemed to go down pretty well.  The cinnamon is a bit of an odd item in the list but it complements the lamb really well.  Overall I was really pleased with it although I’ve stopped believing anything the book says about how much liquid to add.  All of the recipes I’ve made now from the one-pot book have totally over estimated how much liquid they need.  I just didn’t add any of the 3-400ml of water it suggested and it was fine, in fact it was still a little over-runny just from the canned tomatoes.

Anyway, hopefully the guests enjoyed it, that’s the most people I’ve cooked for (6) in quite some time.

Snoozing

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Grete and our guests are out, in Birmingham at a craft exhibition, at which they’re meeting up with Grete’s mum and aunt.

Meanwhile I’m home alone with two snoozing cats, emitting strong snooze pheromones.

zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Guests are here

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Guests are here.  Made roast chicken (rosemary sprigs) on a bed of roast vegetables (courgette, aubergine, sweet potato, onion and red peppers) with some boiled new potatoes for tea.  The non-diabetic amongst us then had low-fat high-sugar ice cream, while those of us with diabetes had cheese and crackers (nice and smelly brie).  The roast chicken was nice I have to admit, and it’s the first time I’ve tried to cook aubergine so I was pleased it turned out at least edible.

I don’t care if they enjoyed it, I’m just pleased we didn’t get takeaway.

Tomorrow (when there’s 6 of us) it’s moussaka, and they better eat it because the recipe serves 8.

Virtual Geekery – Sun xVM VirtualBox

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Been playing with Sun’s xVM VirtualBox software again for a couple of days.  I find virtual machines fascinating.  Clearly emulators have been around since the dawn of computing, and in fact, the whole concept of writing software is in some ways emulation.  But the complexity of emulating an entire PC, within a PC, just makes me giggle.

In the daylight hours that I’m obliged to work I spend a lot of time dealing with virtualisation as it’s an increasingly popular technology, and I’ve messed around with virtual machines at home, but VirtualBox really is pretty smooth.

And I’m using it to satisfy my other geekery interest – Linux.  Anyone unlucky enough to have read this blog for a few years will know that I used to have much more Linux in the house, handling web, mail and a bunch of other things.  Over time it became clear that I was just doing it for the sake of it and that open source and free Windows software really was enough to get me by.  This was even more true when we bought new PC’s with XP licenses (I’ll leave that statement hanging, so you get the implication).

I’d messed with Linux desktops for quite a while, originally with SUSE and a little Red Hat, but I’d never gotten on very well with the X Windows environment, it was always too painful to me.  So for a long time I stuck to a server implementation of Debian (never got X working on the graphics card that I used in that machine) and stuck to the server side.  Lately however the desktop distributions have come on in leaps and bounds and coupled with Linux versions of Firefox and Open Office, they really do provide a significant amount of functionality that I use day to day at home.

So I stuck Ubuntu on a virtual machine and it runs really well, very impressed.  Despite the fact that it’s a VM it runs pretty quickly, more than useable.  I suspect other than games I could quite easily live with Ubuntu as my main OS and these days WINE is pretty good at supporting most games (if I understand it correctly).  The reason I won’t move fully is that I have a legit version of XP on this machine, it works fine, does everything I need it to do and plays games.  Which is exactly why Linux is still the underdog in the desktop wars and why you find people so upset about the bundling of OS’s with hardware.

The reason I started looking at VirtualBox again was actually nothing to do with Linux, I wanted to see if I could build a little sandbox running XP, in which I could install and run software that I’d downloaded to make sure it worked as expected and didn’t cause any issues, before installing it on the real image.  VirtualBox provides really nice snapshotting which can ‘roll back’ any malicious installs.  I’m really not sure how the XP licensing works though.  Can I run the same licensed version of XP on my machine, and inside a VM on the same machine legitimately?