Kerry and I were invited to a combined Halloween and Flat Warming last night at Anna & Jen’s new place. Kerry was unforuntely working and so I went alone, without a costume. I did bring snacks, liquer and wine so they still let me in. Lots of people had cancelled and Anna wasn’t very well so the back-up plan of heading to the Auld Hoose swung into action. We somehow got stuck watching Bound (the Wachowski bros. film before The Matrix) and ended up at the Hoose just after midnight. It was packed out with lots of kerazy dressed-up folk, so I had a quick drink and then escaped to annoy Kerry at work.

I’ve just realised that I haven’t blogged about the free blueyonder speed increases. I was originally on a pretty standard 1Mb cable line, but now have a mighty 4Mb! This is mainly the cable companies playing catch-up with ADSL and completely out-doing them so they don’t get left too far behind. This new connection means I can download at 500kb/s (that’s kilo-bytes!) and upload at 48kb/s. Awesome 🙂

So now that I have my shiny new wireless access point I’ve managed to get my media player thing working over wirelss. Which is just beyond cool and keeps Kerry happy, as there aren’t huge lengths of CAT-5 trailed eveywhere. Its a nice little box and fits in with the rest of the D-Link range. I’ve had no problems so far with reception but then it’s only going about five metres. The firmware is pretty neat and has stuff like syslogd support so that the access point log gets piped across to my linux box’s logs aswell. Now I just need a laptop or something to waft around the flat, marvelling at the magical wireless technology.

Woo-hoo, an extra hour in bed!

We’re often joking at work about how cold it is. Maybe this is the answer: The Heated Mouse.

Now that we’ve got a TV and everything in an actual living room the problem arose of how to watch all of our downloaded media on it. Kerry would have probably killed me if I’d set-up a noisy media PC in there, plus it would be a bit too expensive. A chipped xbox was another option, or some kind of dedicated divx player. I was browsing ebuyer and came across the Lite-On LVD-2010 which is a DVD player than can also play mpg4, divx etc and can stream stuff via ethernet. Seems pretty sweet! I faffed around too long though and ebuyer sold out, I eventually got one from dvdplayers.co.uk, who have now sold out aswell.

It’s a neat bit of kit. It looks just like a normal DVD player but can play content from a ‘Media Server’ on the local network. This clever ‘Media Server’ is actually just a web server that offers a file browsing interface and streams the files to the box. The server software that comes in the box is pants, and uses Java (eww). SwissCenter is a much nicer, open source project that just uses a mini version of apache and PHP. The only problems so far have been that it can’t play q-pixel encoded divx files (whatever the heck they are) and it doesn’t support movie subtitles in external files.

In the retail box you also get a wireless bridge adaptor so that you don’t need to run CAT-5 to the box. I haven’t yet got this working, mainly because I don’t have a wireless access point for it to work with. This presented an excellent opporunity to get one though, and I shelled out for a D-Link DWL-2000AP+ which should arrive tomorrow. More toys! 🙂

Awesome pictures of underground Britain

Update: Uh-oh, they’ve exceeded their bandwidth 🙁

I got this from the library a couple of weeks ago and have been engrossed by it since. Now that we have an actual bedroom without tv and computer I have much more time to read before bed, which is nice.

Blimey! Dabs have gone all CSS, and have valid XHTML! They’re even displaying the W3C buttons in their footer. I can’t think of another sizeable e-commerce operation that does that. Good on ’em!

This is just beyond awesome: Boing Boing: Meth dealers use model rocket to hide drugs

I know I’m becoming a total mac-geek when I like t-shirts with mac GUI widgets on them. At work I use a mac while at home I’m in PC/Windows land. I have to say, there are more elements of OS X that I’d like in Windows rather than vice-versa.

The shopping cart system over on panic.com is also awesomely cool and the UI is instantly useable to mac users.

There’s a great article over on rollingstone.com about Justin Frankel, the guy behing winamp, the AOL buy-out of his company and the ensuing fallout. I remember the very first time I ran winamp on a PC, it was and still is a very nice piece of software.

So I’m adding to the general blogosphere buzz by blogging about a blogging tool. A while ago I put my email address into some box on wordpress.com and a few days ago I got an invite to start a blog. WordPress.com offers a free pre-installed wordpress hosting solution much like blogger. So I setup a completely pointless blog just to try it out.

It’s a very neat setup, you can do almost everything you can on a normal wordpress setup except edit the actual page templates. It comes with a choice of eight different themes which is more than adequate for this type of service. I think I’ll stick to my own hosted wordpress install though. The geek in me requires much more customisation than wordpress.com allows.

Google playing catch-up with RSS have release Google Reader, a web based feed reader.

Serenity has been officially released now and I went to see it for a second time last night with The Gang. It was fantastic even on the repeat viewing and has been getting some great reviews in the press. Even Orson Scott Card likes it!

Websites that don’t work without the www at the beginning of the domain name. A typical culrpit is Argos (omg doesn’t work).

Wahey, I’m back on the ‘net. Last Saturday we got cable installed in our new flat complete with 1MB internet (soon to be four!) 😀