Rain rain rain

Ho hum, its raining quite heavy round here at the moment and there is a nice huge thunderstorm that has been going on for ages!

Anyway, enough about the weather, its time for "Programs and/or websites that Dave thinks are great"

Website one: So just how good is Dave at Counter Strike Source?? Well its good for a laugh anyway.

Program one: Like Risk? Love taking over the world? Got a thing for killing everyone else? me neither! However, Lux is a very good little port of Risk to the computer without taking over your whole PC. Available from Sillysoft here.

Website two: http://www.flickr.com Quality photo/image hosting with upload limits rather than storage limits

Program two: Do you have a long blog roll? Read hundreds of online comics every day? Like to get the breaking news as it happens? Then a news feeder/feed burner/RSS reader/whatever you want to call them, is what you need. Sharpreader is just fantastic and I use it to keep taps on over 30 sites all day every day. Get it. (As a small note, I have been working on some batch files which allow you to run Sharpreader off a memory stick, which is useful if you use more than one pc but want to take your feeds with you simpily. More on those when they are finished I think.)

Program three!!! Whoah this list is getting long. This one goes out to all those who are too poor to own a Mac with Tiger installed. Konfabulator. Its effectivly a Dashboard for Windows (and OS X actually) Again, check out the website and you will see what its all about. But its so cool and very handy. All that needs to be done is to create a Blogger widget and I will be a jolly happy bunny.

Well I think thats all for now.

See you guys later
Dave

431

431 searches in Google in the last 2 months. Thanks to the new(ish) Google accounts, you can get Google to remeber all you searches and count them. While I currently can't think of a use for this feature, its still funny so there you go.

As an aside, this figure should actually be higher but I have only just got round to setting my work PC to be logged into my account.

Well I hope you enjoyed that little foray into silly facts.

Back to sitting on the helpdesk hoping that the phone doesn't ring for another hour and 20 mins

Dave

Hmm

Ok, so I didn't manage to get Whoppix to work properly on my laptop yet, though I possibly need to pass some commands at boot for it to work. Will have to look into that.

Its been a bit of a quiet day so far in the office, so I am currently fiddling around with the styles and tags for this site. At the same time, I am happily listening to the Oasis album (which, as I have mentioned before, is very good) and am about to start an install of Windows XP within Virtual PC 2004.
This may seem like a crazy idea, as I am running Windows XP normally anyway, but what I am going to do is create a clean install of XP with all updates and small useful apps like Winar. Once I have done that, I will back that up to CD (or possibly a DVD) and then procede to use it as a test intstall, because if I break it, get it full of viruses or install spyware or something, I can just delete the virtual machine file and copy a fresh one off my CD/DVD. I already have a Windows 98 machine which I sometimes use to play old games on.

Anyway, I'm gonna have to go and actually do some work now.
More later

An experiment...

Kind of a geeky post here, so none computery types, you can stop reading here if you want.

Linux: (live on CD)
Last summer I was introduced to Knoppix. A distro of linux which you could boot and run off CD. It was fun to play with, but was a but sketchy running on my desktop.
Recently I was having a peak as some of the newer variants which deal with network security such as the Auditor
However, this flavour and most others don't support the Intel Centrino wireless card in my Dell :( Not discouraged I continued my quest. Then this article appeared. "Cracking WEP in 10 minutes"
Its quite worrying really, watching it done. I decided to have a look at Whoppix (the distro used in the video)
Recently they released 2.7.1 minor release which as it states on their home page
"fixes several issues, such as support for Centrino wifi 2100 and 2200 drivers..."

That includes me!! So guess who is using the college 10Mb connection to suck down the ISO and is going to be having a play tonight!!

Thats all for now
Dave

Honest Music

I don't seem to have blogged about this yet so here goes.
About a year and a half ago I decided that I should make my music collection legal, ie having paid for it, was given it or legally downloaded it for free, and I deleted near 10 Gb of an accumulated collection.
Sad times, I missed a lot of the music that I had amassed because obviously some if it was awesome. Anyway skip forward to last week, digging around in my piles of old computer bits for some spare hard drives and what do I find? My old hard drive, one which I was using before I deleted most of my music but then upgraded to a newer drive, copied all my music across and neglected to delete. Woo! Talk about a trip down memory lane. Approx 3,000 songs, over 250 hours of music, some epic tunes, some silly clips from the Simpsons, Budweiser adverts and some stuff that I can't even remember where or why I have it.
Now, while before I would have just deleted it all again, I had a better idea. Buy it all!



Okay, you can breath again now, I'm not actually going to buy it all, as some if it is either not available on CD (live bootlegs) or was free anyway (film clips) or I have since bought it anyway, but I am going to go though it all (a lot of it will be fairly easy as I was quite organised) and decide on if I if I enjoyed my (slightly over) "30 day trial" of the tracks I have, then search iTunes (and others) and start to purchase the songs. I am also going though making a list of just artists to "explore" and albums to check out. Hopefully this way, my music collection will again grow and become a fuller, and better collection and have my old cool music too.

Anyway, I'm not sure if this post makes complete sense because I have been going though the music even as I type, so every 3 mins or so I have to stop and edit my lists.

Right well I need to stop here so that I can get ready for bed as I need to start getting to bed earlier (ie like 11pm not 1am)

Dave out

PS Coldplay “X&Y” and Oasis “Don’t believe the truth” are two must buy albums

Crazy code

Hey guys, just a quick message to prove that I do update here every so often.
Very quickly before I have to dash off to fix some printer or other, check out the related link and some of the links surrounding it. Some very interesting material about web code. Now anyone who has looked at the source for this site will see that I went div mad. Oh well, I plan to go though and clear up a bit eventually, I'm just a bit busy at the moment.
Ohh and I am probably going to be buying some hosting soon in prep for next year, so expect weird and wonderful things.

Dave out