tom k&e's Journal

11:30pm: It's time to leave the country

10:08pm: So my mum's away on holiday in Venice at the moment, and her parting words as we dropped her off at the airport were "don't buy a sports car". So when my dad picks her up from Gatwick in this, I think he'll be in serious trouble.



A 25 year old Mercedes 500 SL. It's frighteningly fast for a 4500lb car, and still felt like an armchair even with the top down, going at an easily achieved ton. It does only do 13mpg though...

4:04pm: Decided to stay in and take some photos of the eclipse last night. The results were... marginal. Probably should have gone somewhere interesting, to make them stand out from the thousands of other shots on the web this morning. Mine are at best of technical interest. Still, this one at least has been linked to from about half a dozen forums for about 1k hits per hour, so obviously someone thinks it's worthwhile;



( Moar )

All shot at the long end of my 70-200, with crappy tripod. I tried a number of different approaches - too long an exposure resulted in motion blur from the Moon's apparent movement, too short didn't capture the colour properly, and high ISO of course means noise.

2:31pm: Ever wondered what the bastard child of emo & chiptunes would sound like....

4:26pm: I like having a car. It means when I get up in the morning and think "I know, let's drive around taking photos", I can. It means when it starts to hail, I don't get mortally wounded. Cars can also handle foot deep floods on country lanes, and can go through drive-throughs to purchase fried chicken. But most importantly, they mean that when it finally clears up, you can drive to the waterfront and take pictures like this

12:18am:

10:10am:

7:11pm:

10:24pm: When pink_betty pointed out this story to me earlier today, I had a sense of deja-vu. There's a story about a similar hack in the (dated, juvenile, and dangerously inaccurate) Anarchists Cookbook, which dates back to the early nineties, and still reports it as being some time in the past. It's stunning that banks would be so naive as to not encrypt this sort of data, or so inept as to not do it properly.

8:01am:

2:01am:

BBQ. Tonight. 5pm.

As you can see, I have plenty of meat (25 x 6oz burgers, and about 40 chicken wings). However, some people would be nice. And some beer. The location is 45 Birchwood Avenue, nearest station Sidcup, on the Dartford Loop from Charing X. I can provide lifts from the station, or it's a ten minute walk. You're welcome to stay over, although there's transport back to town by train until midnight, or by night bus at any time (we're not THAT far out).

2:52pm: Hey look, LJ's got a new feature!



Err, anyway. It's my birthday in a few weeks. BBQ at mine, Saturday 12th, from 5. I'll supply food, you bring beer.

10:17am: You wait ten years for Prey, and then another game comes along and steals its main feature.

EDIT: Here's a much higher quality HD version of that vid.

1:15pm: Whoops

1:15pm: Apparently, I'm legally allowed to drive now, which came as something of a surprise. It would surprise you too, if you'd seen my left reverse. But then I suppose no-one's ever been killed doing that, so it's not too critical. I'm not sure if anyone other than a learner driver has actuall ever done a left reverse at all. Teaching people how to do starts properly (revs at 4000, dump clutch) and shift like a real man (at the redline) would be much more useful.

However, mercifully for other drivers, I'm still unemployed & hence there's little risk of me actually driving any time soon. I'll deliver fair warning if/when I actually get a car, and you can all start driving old volvos or something. With spikes.

8:27pm: Well I've tinkered with the userpics script, and it now outputs the results in a nice lj friendly text box at the bottom of the results page. I had to add an escape to the final loop to stop it generating a post bigger than lj's 64kB limit. I'd like to thank james again for providing such easy to work on code.

( Lots of userpics behind cut )

1:04pm: So, a while back I mentioned to surrealist_comb that I thought a program which extracted all of ones friends list, and then grabbed all their userpics, would be a good idea. A while later he came back with few hundred lines of perl, but we didn't have anywhere to host it. Now however, I have a proper host, so we uploaded it & its libraries last night, and I debugged it this morning to account for somechanges LJ have made since.

Username:

Be warned that if you enter a user who has lots of (>100) friends, it will take up to a minute to load the page, and several minutes to load the images. Also, I've just noticed it seems not to like underscores. I'll work on this... Fixored. Ph34r my mad perl skillz.

8:50pm: It's stunning just how much damage a few bytes of bad RAM can cause.

Also, going back to 1280 x 1024, after using 1024 x 768 for a few days is bizzare.

12:32pm: Okay, so I've been beaten by a few months, but last night I decided to install osx for x86. Eventually resorted to putting it on a spare HDD after running it through VMWare totally failed to work. It's a bit crap TBH (no keyboard or network, slow) but rather cool nevertheless.

3:02am: Note to self - Lots of tea late at night = insomnia.

All you pirates should read my enlightning post about Protocol encryption for bittorrent

10:40pm: This weekend I've mostly been playing Battlefield 2

3:45pm: So that civ 4 game we talked about... who's up for it, when, and what settings?

10:44pm: So I finally got a new computer. Athlon X2 3800+, 6800GS, 1GB RAM, 1/2 TB HDD, a pimping case, etc. For £800. And people wonder why I'm no longer using macs.

I'm probably going to add some fan contollers to try and quiten it down enough to leave on whilst I sleep, some cold cathode lights to take full advantage of the windowed case (ricer lol), and a set of grado sr60s to replace my rather uncomfortable seinheisser earbuds. The temptation to add another 3*300GB drives and make a RAID 5 array, or another 6800 GS and SLI it, is substantial, but probably ought to wait until I've got a proper job.

So now I'm busilly filling it with all the latest games, movies (mmm, dvd iso), mp3s, roms, and all the other warez I can find. Civ 4 is pretty sweet. We really should have an epic game sometime.

I've got some entertaining videos from Kath's excellent new years party, taken before I collapsed unconcious. My apologies to anyone I offended - one day I'll learn that 8 bottles of strong beer + whisky chasers is actually a totaly retarded idea.

Power metal torrent to follow shortly. Honest. I'll even add in the aforementioned videos.

2:51pm:

2:59pm: I have 666 first class stamps.