Total Conversion

It's childish and immature, I know.  Whenever you play a game on Steam, people on your friends list get a popup saying what game I am playing.  Example, "Ian is playing Borderlands 2".  I recently added a non-steam game to the launcher and the name chosen by Steam was "PES14".  I went into the properties to change the game name to "with his balls..." Gets a giggle every time. #steam

Awesome. Another bargain with hours of entertainment and distraction. Might even make a Windows tablet useful. http://humblebundle.us7.list-manage1.com/track/click?u=a42731fd3353ff4c76f7f11bb&id=cd13a1186b&e=eda508f684

Galaxy s4 i9500 update to 4.3 available in South Africa on my Cell C phone. 693mb downloading over wifi as we speak. OTA.

Every know and then,  I need a little Bjork in my playlist. #Bjork  Play Dead, Venus as a Boy, Joga , Hyperballad... Now, I just want to walk around extra slowly and try and find a facial expression that says "mysteriously moody" oh, and I wonder if any artists are as unsuitable for Karaoke...

Shouldn't the movie #Gravity  be called inertia or something else?  Gravity wasn't the overriding thing I thought about while watching it.  Felt like a spiritual sequel to #Apollo13.    Overall a good movie, but I think the hype machine went crazy on this one.

Inspired by a post from Franco Rizzello , I'm making this weekend an Alan Wilder tribute.  Gonna make a lovely long Old DM playlist.  Stripped, Black Celebration, Nothing, Monument, etc.  Any other suggestions?  Been watching YouTube's of Alan Wilder's various interviews.  Genius.

Just watched the latest episode of the adventures of the gang in SAMCRO.   It just blows me away how a simple gesture or look between these characters can generate more emotion and power than big speeches by lawyers and doctors in typical TV dramas.  For those of you who are watching, the scene with Jax & Chibbs with the gavel in the latest episode is such an epic moment that just blew me away.  The rest of the episode was awesome too.   This show has always had these moments from day 1 and I don't know how they have maintained the quality.  Good job guys.  #samcro   #sonsofanarchy06e06  

IOS7.  Nuff said.

For no apparent reason, my Windows 8 installation just stopped working.  No amount of automated recovery was working, so I just reinstalled. Decided to make a list of the must have apps that I install to make the bloody thing useful again. First thing was Total Commander 8.  Can't live without it. Also, Classicshell to make the Start Button behave. 7Zip to handle archives Nero for burning (wanted to use CDBurnerXP freeware instead, but needed some extra's). Chrome (restores sanity after the 15 minutes I had to use IE) I have Office 2013, but holding off on installing it for now.  Putty (I've missed you!)  My 3 servers are all headless, so I need putty just to log in and run some updates, etc.  Being Linux boxes, they're all fine.  They've been ticking over just fine as Windows decides to crap itself... FooBar2000 VLC. Steam (can't live without it) Now it's reboot, update, reboot, install, reboot, etc, until everything is happy.

Yawn apple. More spin and nothing I'm interested in. Even my wife is not going to bite this time. Sad. Really. Stock seems to have dropped but hype will save it again I guess. Come on September 25. Daddy needs a note 3.

Mmmm. On what channel should I put my mifi....

Why is it that the song you love about an album is the one that's never remixed, never extended and never seen again? "Try all you want" by "Electronic" from their excellent debut album "Electronic" in 1991.  Dammit.  From 1991 til now, no remixes.  What a cruel world.  The instrumental break from 3 minutes to just over 4 minutes is soooooo good and the final bit as it transitions to the verse can not be played too loud.  My hand reaches for the volume button every time. Damn.  it just stopped.  have to play it again. #electronic

Just listened to the wonderful https://soundcloud.com/fastidiousandroid/personal-jesus-fastidious by Franco Rizzello  Also recommend his Nocturne track. Soundcloud is an excellent resource for rediscovering songs that you've loved. Huge fan of: https://soundcloud.com/reaps https://soundcloud.com/dominatrix-1 https://soundcloud.com/kaisersoze-1 Highly recommended! https://soundcloud.com/reaps

So!  My electric blanket caught fire 10 minutes ago.  I had been out for a couple of hours and my daughter switched it on because it's cold out and she knew I'd be home soon. Near miss.  She could have been hurt or while I was sleeping I could have been burnt. We're laughing about it now, but that's the end of electric blankets and this family...

So, it's like not an actual stairway, like, it's a metaphor... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JK_DOJa99oo&feature=share

Search for Tom Thum on YouTube.  Insane beat-boxing...

Just upgraded to S4. Loving it so far.

Waiting to see Eddie Izzard for the first time live in Cape Town, South Africa. Very excited. Covered in bees...

http://qkme.me/3ut7bq Only for the gamers out there. ;) http://qkme.me/3ut7bq

https://www.humblebundle.com/weekly

If you, like me, had an Apple TV3 lying unused in a Box due its limited feature set, rejoice! http://elan.plexapp.com/2013/06/04/introducing-plexconnect-an-appletv-client-which-thinks-different/ The GitHub site where the file is hosted mentions Windows & OSX Instructions.  I got it working on Ubuntu without too much effort.  Just need to spend more time making it work as a service.  Maybe somebody can help me out there.   Rough notes on my blog http://istoff.blogspot.com/ Being able to use the ATV3 to view my Ubuntu hosted Plex Library is just awesome! http://elan.plexapp.com/2013/06/04/introducing-plexconnect-an-appletv-client-which-thinks-different/

Quite easy although still working out the kinks. PlexConnect is a bit of magic python code that allows you to access your Plex Library on an stock Apple TV 3.  For somebody who had an Apple TV 3 unplugged and packed away, this has made the device useful again. I have read back through my command line history and found all the commands I typed in sequentially to get it running.    Optional If you don't have git or nano installed : sudo apt-get install git-core nano I'm pretty sure most Ubuntu boxes have python pre-installed. git clone https://github.com/iBaa/PlexConnect.git cd PlexConnect/ nano Settings.py sudo ./PlexConnect.py LINUX SIDE DONE! What could go wrong?? 1) I got an error that port 53 was in use trying to activate the DNSServer. Fix: In my case, I had started dnsmasq in a previous experiment, so I KILLED it quickly. sudo killall dnsmasq ( I will disable the dnsmasq service later ) 2) Next I got a message that port 8

Dear Skype, I have uninstalled your apps from my phone and pc.  I would now like to delete my account.  Why are you making it so hard?   I do NOT want to join your support community to find out how to leave your user base.  I do not want to just be unlisted.  I want to be deleted. Your friend of almost 10 years, Ian

Nintendo Wii U deluxe 32gb on crazy special today for about 100 dollars. I could not care less. Nintendo is so screwed this generation...

I'm so tired of the Android vs iPhone fanboy talk.  It reminds me of all the Linux vs Windows arguments a few years ago.  If you have an iPhone + Dr Dre Beats/Monster Earphones, you should not even be allowed to post on the subject.  Your choice of product clearly disqualifies your ability to pick a product on the basis of performance, features or even the most basic comparitive reviews.   You have chosen to buy an inferior performing product and the only argument(s) you can honestly make is that a) you prefer it subjectively or b) you enjoy the apple integration with products you already own.   You have chosen to buy a product with a selection of features that are executed very well, but that either prevents you from certain others, or is totally incapable of doing them due to hardware constraints. So, argue away about your iDevice and what it does for you, but please, as soon as you make a technical argument in favour of your device, without taking cognisance of the many things t

Been listening to the new  DepecheMode album for a while now.  Growing on me slowly, but not one of the better ones.  I'll wait for Dominatrix, Reaps & Kaiser Sozey to elevate some of the tracks.  Missing Alan Wilder or Tim Simenon's touch.  Vocals are fine, but some of the tracks seem to lack the depth / complexity.  It might be a new arrangement style/sound, but I miss the layered synth sound.  Still, a new mode album and VCMG album in the same year.  I feel loved!

Another Mother's day since my mom passed on.  Life makes up for it having a wonderful wife, 2 kids & a family who knows how to appreciate it all.  Had a great day.  Wishing everyone the best for the week ahead

I seriously doubt that Google Reader is worth abandoning at this point.  Good service, does what it says on the box really well.  Can it really have limited users?  I can't believe that.

This post is for  Windows 7 users.  Don't follow this for Linux.  Its far easier to do this on Linux. For years, I've had the various pc's in the house accessing shared resources on one of the Linux servers in the place. It's normally mapped by drive letter in Windows or OSX or readily accessible as a \\Server\Share UNC name.  This convenience has come at a price. The free availability of media has been a huge distraction to the kids who should be studying and I just don't have the time to monitor this access. I just stopped the Samba service and as a result, things are broken ;) Even for me... So after much research, I went back to something I'd long stopped using.  NFS. I created some shares in /etc/exports on my servers looking something like this /home/shares/allusers/drive1/ 10.0.0.0/24(rw,insecure,async,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check) /home/shares/allusers/drive2/ 10.0.0.0/24(rw,insecure,async,no_root_squash,no_subtree_check) /home/sha

So now I need two quadro copters?? Quadrocopter Pole Acrobatics http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pp89tTDxXuI

Gives me an excuse to blog for the first time in 2013. Downloads can be found at http://code.google.com/p/winff/downloads/list I swear I am going to try and make some videos this time...

WinFF is a FFMPeg based - Video Conversion Utility written in Lazarus, which is an open source Development Environment inspired by the original Borland Delphi IDE.  Applications are written in FreePascal and are totally cross platform.  WinFF is currently built for Linux & Windows, but I know the same code compiles on OSX as well.  Thanks to FFMpeg, Lazarus and the Free Pascal upstream developers who make projects like WinFF possible.   The source tarball has also been uploaded and should work on recent Linux distros. Absolutely free and open... Enjoy the new version 1.5 released today at  http://code.google.com/p/winff/downloads/list