I was recently talking with a friend about commandline prompt gadgetry, and our tangent conversations drifted to 256colour support in X terminal emulators. xterm. gnome-terminal, and presumably kterm and others also, though only the first two have I looked at.
256 colour support is there. It’s in the code. It works. It’s nice. And it’s… not only not enabled by default, there is no clear and simple way of enabling it even if you WANTED TO.
I was going to blog more about this, but the following IRC fragment I think says it all. Any questions?
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So those that know me should be very well aware that I am a huge Douglas Adams fan, and alongside da Vinci and JDR, consider him a hero. The weekend that he died was one that I count as one of the most horrible in my life (for that and other reasons which coincided)
So I’m wary about extensions to his work.
The movie I enjoyed. I thought it could be better, and some parts truly bothered me, but other parts gave me smiles. I accept it as a HHG movie, but somehow it lacked a vibe.
So this week saw the release of the long-awaited 6th Hitch Hiker’s book, written by Eoin Colfer. I bought it, I have read it. This is my review.
So the first thing I’m going to do is write the positive, but then I’m editing it out to the end of the review, because ultimately, it’s not a book that should be leaving a sour taste in your mouth in reviews.
Mostly spoilerfree review follows
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Dear readers: sometimes this wordpress delivers the RSS feed when requesting a page.
I don’t know why. I’ve upgraded, removed plugins, still the same.
However, if it does that, force-refresh a few times usually brings it good.
If problems persist, well, it’s not that important I’m sure. Or contact me 
October 9th, 2009 in
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As anyone who knows me should know, I’m not one to really make my views on causes or politics widely known. I have my opinions, and by and large feel no great need to proselyte them to the world. But if I could be said to have a Cause, then this is why I’m writing.
Many years ago, and for many years in a row, there was a variety comedy show in Australia called Hey Hey it’s Saturday. Initially spontaneous and subversive, it grew over the (28) years into a prime time monster, lost it’s edge, gained an army of followers, and then crumbled in it’s own weight and habits. Having become a shadow of it’s former self and thus, a relic of the past.
Fast forward another 10 years and we have just had a reunion special or two. I had to admit I didn’t watch them. I was not huge fan of what the show had descended into at the end of last century, and if I watched TV enough to even know there was going to be a special, I’d not have bothered watching anyway.
But then something special happened. Controversy!
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A movie in which the protagonist is a crumpy cynical bastard throughout? That’ll never work! Yet it does. Whatever Works a charming delightful feel-good movie!
It’s the kind of movie where you can see alot of the plot unfold ahead of time, but it doesn’t matter, because it’s not a story which gets it’s power from surprising the audience. Rather, it’s a story which gets it’s power through involving the audience in it. Alot happens, but it never felt rushed
I wont give more away about the movie than that, except to suggest that you go see it when it comes out.
Well, I will say one more thing: it breaks the fourth wall, and I always like that.
October 1st, 2009 in
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I have recently been working on an updated version of a small scrabble sheet I made a few weeks ago for some friends.
version1 (as I have since backnamed it) was simply all the 3 letter words in the scrabble dictionary, handily laid out alphabetically on both sides of an A4 page.
In the weeks since I’ve started using it, I’ve found it to be a useful reference, and heard feedback along the same lines.
For version2, I have added in all the 2letter words as well, plus a limited selection of 4 letter words. (those able to score 12 or more points with natural (non blank) tiles and no specials. Read the rest of this entry »
September 14th, 2009 in
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So I recently moved to a more tropical climate, and was wondering the effect it might have on my computers. So I made sure that my trusty thermometer was topped up with batteries, and recording maximum and minimum temperatures. Here are winter results
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September 2nd, 2009 in
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For some time I have been… let’s say, mildly annoyed, at what I see as a cultural paranoia regarding magnets. This has come about, imho, due to the prevalence of ATM cards for finances, harddrives for data storage, and an unawareness of what it takes to magnetically corrupt these media. I even had a friend (who works in IT!) make strong worrying noises once about data corruption on my hard drives simply because I had a fridge magnet applied to the outside of my case.
Now whilst I was certain that was not a problem, I confess to general ignorance on the subject, and so I intended to do something to correct it. Something a little fun. Read the rest of this entry »
I note that as of writing this post, firefox3.5 is out, but I have yet to switch to it. I do not know if it will alter behaviour, but I’m on firefox 3.0.11 under ubuntu.
So my system crashed. It’s done that a little bit recently (thrice in the last 6 months, but that is not what this post is about). On return, firefox is a bit fail. Some files are corrupted…
If this has happened to you, this is some information which might help you cope… Read the rest of this entry »
Once upon a time whilst sorting my mp3 collection, I ran across a little problem. The tags which I had found and saved to the id3 tags using quod libet (being my favourite tag editor – better than the related Ex-Falso incidentally) were not showing up in Rhythmbox (being my favourite actual audio player). Instead, Rhythmbox was seeing the OLD tags.
This is curious, thinks I. And I go off in search for answers…
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