Archive for the ‘Uncategorized’ Category

Scanning old negatives

Sunday, March 14th, 2010

I have been going through some old negatives and scanning them. I have posted some photos from school on facebook, but I found this one and thought I would share. This highlights the village I grew up in Scotland.

You will notice the tractor with a manure spreader on the back parked on the main street outside the news agents.

Playing with a slave

Thursday, November 5th, 2009

That would be the flash kind not the wife kind

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Biking in Hungary

Friday, September 4th, 2009

This picture perfectly describes my bike trip in Hungary.

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This was the first stop on the first day of biking, it has since been complimented by wine at every meal, a visit to a vineyard for lunch and wine tasting, then some more biking and dinner and wine tasting.

Yes we are biking, but not very fast. (day 1) (day 2)

Beer Tap

Monday, April 6th, 2009

I picked up a beer keg starter kit from someone on craigslist over the weekend for $100 (orginal cost about $184)
I got a regulator, a CO2 tank, Keg Tap, and Beer tap

So now I need to build a bar and find a keg of good beer.

Good prospects include

Norms in Vienna

Arlington Market
Total Wine in Mclean

New phone

Tuesday, February 24th, 2009

So in my ongoing quest for the prefect replacement for my temperamental 700p, I saw that Bestbuy is offering $100 of an iphone to silver level rewards members, which I happen to be.

Now apple never does anything out of the goodness of their heart, so either Best Buy has a huge stock of iphones they need to clear from their books from Christmas or Apple is coming out with a new model and this is a way to clear some stock.

Either way I think I will skip for the moment. I need to be able to tether my phone to be able to do call duties.

Finaly got sick of the space.live.com spam

Sunday, December 14th, 2008

I have been getting a lot of spam recently and I spent last weekend cleaning my mail relays so I have complete control over my primary and secondary for all my domains. That didn’t solve my problems so today I added the following to my spamassassin rule sets in /etc/spamassassin/local.cf


header LOCAL_MEDIACOMM_MUA X-Mailer =~ /Mediacomm Communicator/
score LOCAL_MEDIACOMM_MUA 0.1
describe LOCAL_MEDIACOMM_MUA Sent from Mediacomm Communicator MUA


header LOCAL_BAT_MUA X-Mailer =~ /The Bat!/
score LOCAL_BAT_MUA 0.1
describe LOCAL_BAT_MUA Sent from The Bat!


uri LOCAL_URI_SPACES_LIVE /spaces\.live\.com/
score LOCAL_URI_SPACES_LIVE 0.1
describe LOCAL_URI_SPACES_LIVE contains link to spaces.live.com


meta LOCAL_SPACES_MEDIACOMM (LOCAL_URI_SPACES_LIVE && LOCAL_MEDIACOMM_MUA)
score LOCAL_SPACES_MEDIACOMM 20
describe LOCAL_SPACES_MEDIACOMM contains link to spaces.live.com and Mediacomm MUA


meta LOCAL_SPACES_BAT (LOCAL_URI_SPACES_LIVE && LOCAL_BAT_MUA)
score LOCAL_SPACES_BAT 20
describe LOCAL_SPACES_BAT contains link to spaces.live.com and BAT

Hopefully that will catch the spam for the moment.

So I came back from lunch to find this……

Monday, November 3rd, 2008

So I came back from lunch to find this……

Then went round back to find this…..

I am a little scared of what I am going to find when they start on the main roof.

Bad generic_ata with ubuntu on another computer

Friday, October 10th, 2008

So I noticed another of my ubuntu boxes was running slow so I did a

Host:~$ sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 8 MB in 3.72 seconds = 2.15 MB/sec

so it looks like it has the same issue as my other machine

so I did
Host:~$ sudo lspci |grep -i ide
00:0f.1 IDE interface: VIA Technologies, Inc. VT82C586A/B/VT82C686/A/B/VT823x/A/C PIPC Bus Master IDE (rev 06)
Host:~$ lsmod |grep -i ^libata
libata 159344 4 pata_acpi,pata_via,ata_generic,sata_via

and added the following to /etc/modprobe.d/blacklist

blacklist ata_generic

and the following to /etc/initramfs-tools/modules

pata_via
blacklist ata_generic

then rebuild initramfs


sudo update-initramfs -u -v

After a reboot I now get

sudo hdparm -t /dev/sda

/dev/sda:
Timing buffered disk reads: 164 MB in 3.02 seconds = 54.38 MB/sec

Amazing what this little tweak will do for performance.

Louis’ latest YouTube movie

Sunday, September 28th, 2008

I have watched this twice and my response is awww cute, then huh, Je ne comprends pas 🙂

I have met Louis in real life….

Tiananmen Square

Saturday, September 27th, 2008