For my sins, I've been running the Christmas pub quiz at London-on-Board for several years. (The reason it's named as above have been lost to the mists of time.) As boardgamers, it's not enough to have a straight quiz of course. No, that would be too easy. Thus the quiz …
So, due to work commitments, technical issues with the website, being busy with life, increasing ambivalence toward social media, moving website hosts, etc, etc., it turns out I haven't updated this website in over a year.
Now I have. And this will serve as my update for 2020.
Scene: a suburban back yard. A giant alien ROBOT is crouched hiding behind the house, talking to a teenage BOY.
BOY: Mr Robot, now that you’re on Earth, how will you hide from your evil robot enemies? And the military, who would like to dismantle and study you? While …
I'm learning Spanish at the moment and the example sentences seem to be trying to tell a story:
Dateline, New York: In a surprise press conference today, Marvel Comics has revealed its TV lineup for new season, consisting of over 500 new shows and comic book tie-ins. Said a spokesperson for the company, "We were wondering how to work in Tigra, whether she should join 'Inhumans' or make …
Of course, everyone wants to have a phenomena or syndrome or disease named after them. So that's why I'm staking my claim on Agapow's Paradox:
Anyone who boasts of their people skills, actually has terrible people skills.
(Thanks to Graham Thompson for the name.)
For better or worse, a lot of HR systems, admin forms and clinical software have web front ends that are generated or driven by Oracle Forms or other Oracle tech. And, for reasons that are completely opaque, these web forms will frequently misbehave or refuse to run in …
Since it's the season for unqualified blowhards running for office, I've decided to throw my hat into the ring and nominate myself for Australian Prime Minister.
My platform is simple:
I'm fortunate enough to be a member of a couple of fine Meetup groups (including the exponentially growing London-on-Board). It does a simple thing well: enable like-minded people to run a club or group.
When joined, Meetup gets a list of your interests and later mails you if relevant groups …
Uh, who are these beardy dudes standing on a beach? I have a feeling I'm going to be asking this sort of question a lot ...
The GRRM writing flowchart:
Is there incest?
No: MOAR INCEST
Yes: (narrows eyes) Hurrrr ...
The quintessential GoT moment: a sex scene cuts to another sex …
In a sentence: I want all my project data accessible (readable and writeable) on every computer.
I'm plagued constantly by wanting that dataset that's on that computer over there, being unable to tell if I've got the latest version of a manuscript in front of me, having to …
Give me an RSS reader made for speed.
With the ongoing demise of Google Reader (July 1), like a lot of other people I've been looking for a replacement. And - like a lot of other people - I haven't been finding what I wanted and so the search for a replacement …
Like many scientists, I make lots of notes: cribsheets, reading summaries, analysis details, ideas ... and I end up with a huge volume of paper, boxes of old journals and notebooks. Not only does this take up a large amount of room, but it's also difficult to search and related …
As my old (6 years) MacBook was struggling to do much of anything, it was time to move to a new machine. One of the great aspects of Apple's Time Machine backup software is how easy it makes it to do this - start the new machine up, plugin the backup …
A simple problem, solved in a simple way.
Sometimes, you need to extract and save an image that is part of a Microsoft Word document, that you can't get any other way. For example, you might need a copy of an institutional logo that is only present as …
Application installation craps out, a mystery is created and then solved.
Following the purchase of a new computer and a new hard-drive for an old computer, the installer for a much-loved game (Ticket to Ride) would choke half-way through with a repeated series of "could not write" error messages …
Typing Russian characters on a plain old keyboard is hard. You could install another keyboard mapping, but this means you have to labouriously change change keyboard layout everytime you swap languages, and have to remember where how the Cyrillic characters are arranged. You could install some sort of virtual keyboard …
How can you take seriously a movie featuring a character called "Pash Cracken"? It sounds like something produced by an Australian slang generator. These are all genuine names from the Star Wars movies, harvested from the IMDB or the Star Wars Name Databank:
All the Microsoft Office programs - Word, Outlook, Excel etc - lose their soothing, sleek modern look for a weird, lo-fi, monochrome appearance, as if the graphics have been reduced to 16bit or reverted to Word 97. Most noticeable is the way that the window buttons (shrink / maximize / close) revert …
If placed into debt, a player must pay a debt as fully as possible on the spot. However, the player can trade to raise money to pay this debt if need be. But this trading can only take place if it raises enough money to pay …
This is an odd bug I encountered in MacOSX. It's tough to google for, but it seems to be common and so far without a solution. This page is for other people to find, and maybe to elicit a solution.
Dragging a file fails in the Mac Finder. Files …
As a recent purchaser of a MacBook (60G white), I've been very happy with the machine. The performance is excellent, the physical form-factor good, the price acceptable, the included devices (camera, IR port) handy. There have been reports about the MacBook Pro line concerning battery problems and over-heating [4] , and …
Upset about the Lord of the Rings? Angry about Hitchhikers? Sassy about about Sahara or exercised by X-men? To save time in future, please fill out this form first:
I've just come back from seeing the long-awaited adaptation of the classic _____. It was terrible …
In theory, the IRISPen is a handheld scanner in chunky pen form, that will allow you to scan sections of books and save them as images or recognised text. As someone who sifts through a lot of information everyday, I was interested in an easy quick way of getting data …
It has been argued that Real Networks and their media player are deceptive, annoying and inconvenient. If you use an iPod, the last is certainly true. How do you get RealAudio track playing on your iPod? Despite some moves by Real towards compatibility, meanwhiles you have to convert to some …
I had the dubious pleasure of growing up in Queensland, a sun-soaked and slightly backwards part of Australia., second only to South Australia for its obscurity [1]. However, over the years I've come to remember Queensland speech with some affection, a dialect in which it is possible to have an …
(Way back when, I used to do a lot of SF/F reviews as part of the Postviews site. Eventually Postviews will be incorporated into this site, but until then this star of the series can find a home here.)
I couldn't wait for that smarmy little brunette to die …