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Quick guide to disabling GNOME on Ubuntu.
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“That’s a pretty serious distinction – people who play games in order to excel at them, and those who play games as a conduit to fantasy – and its only one axis of the diagram.” An excellent, and very relevant Penny Arcade editorial today.
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I. Want. This. T-shirt.
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“…some of the most interesting photography in the world right now is taking place among people who would not traditionally have been called ‘photographers.'” Andrew Crissman is a tail-end charlie on a US Marine helicopter.
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“For a year from September 2005, under the nose of the Panthéon’s unsuspecting security officials, a group of intrepid “illegal restorers”… pieced apart and repaired the antique clock that had been left to rust in the building since the 1960s.” Awesome
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“Swotter reads books to Twitter, and via Twitter to the world.” It just finished reading Ulysses aloud. It is awesome.
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“It’s one of the most awesome consumer products ever. It might even be a landmark moment in technology. … and Amazon is promoting it as a $399 waffle maker.” Andy Ihnatko on the Kindle
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Potentially good UK online glasses store – having read mathowie’s reports on buying glasses online in the US, this could be a good idea.
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“Yes, that’s right, Siemens forks Perl to remove features that their engineers don’t like.” More on the craziness that is the BBC web infrastructure. It’s shocking, really.
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“The problem is that you need the MySQL development headers in order to get the ruby gem to compile…sooo, you need to install this first.”
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“Like most organisations the BBC has its own technical ecosystem; the BBC’s is pretty much restricted to Perl and static files.” How depressing.
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LoadingReadyRun are playing non-stop Desert Bus for charity. Their high score is 6 so far. They have been playing for 4 days. They are insane. And have raised $20,000+. They rule!
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UK-based games swapping site. Looks really rather good – might well be worth investigating.
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Just ran into this myself this afternoon. Very annoying! Hope it’s fixed soon.
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“Max is an application for creating high-quality audio files in various formats, from compact discs or files.” Apparently now does FLAC transcoding, too, which is useful.
A pet peeve of mine is the lack of a documented shortcut in Ruby’s #strftime to function to return the hour of the day, in twelve-hour clock, without a leading zero. To wit:
puts Time.now.strftime("%I:%M") # >> 03:29That’s not particularly attractive. I could strip the leading zero with some string manipulation, but this is getting sledgehammer-ish to crack a nut. Fortunately, this works:
puts Time.now.strftime("%l:%M") # >> 3:29That’s a lowercase L in the formatting string, which returns the number of hours in a twelve-hour clock sans leading zero. Result! And yes, that’s undocumented everywhere I’ve looked. Thanks to my colleague Colin for pointing that trick out.
Now, if only I could get it to return am/pm without having to call #downcase
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“Chinaderas is the nomenclature assigned [in Mexican Spanish] to imported goods from China, usually those that are knock-offs or replicas of other branded commodities…” Delightful etymology behind it, too.
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A remarkable story of commando training under Fairbairn and Sykes.
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“The web is not suffering from a lack of canonical design. It’s just that canonical design on the web isn’t as glamorous as some want it to be.” I have wrestled with so many people about what “design” on the web means. This helps me understand myself
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ies4osx rns lots of versions of IE under Wine on OSX. Looks nifty.
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Mark Pilgrim looks at Kindle through what’s been said about it so far, and what’s been said about the act of reading in the past. His comparisons prove depressing, and worthy of at least some consideration.
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“If you’re a parent, I would be [concerned] about the conflation between consumption and consumerism and citizenship (in virtual worlds)… our kids are being taught that to be a good citizen of this world you got to buy the right stuff.” Sadly, yes.
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“Are we absolutely sure that this is the very best we can offer young people?” [Lord Puttnam] asked. “Do we really want them to think of themselves as not much more than consumers?”
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Yes. A healthy tonic to all the mind-numbingly irritating rants going around the place about making the web “prettier” and “more distinctive” and “more art directed” and whatever. It’s a medium in its own right. Now work out what that means.