Archives for themself - Page 14
3 Step Guide on How to stream Demand 5 on linux (and windows and Mac too)
I like to watch the Mentalist, and my PVR is a bit flaky, which means that I need to fall back on Demand 5 to watch it when I miss it. If you have tried this you'll know that it is a much maligned video on demand service offered by Channel 5 in the UK. There's a reason for this, there's too much going on with their page because it is badly developed. They've certainly not designed with the user need in mind like GDS are getting the UK government to do. So inspired by this post and after reading lots of other posts telling me I needed to install hal and stuff I came up with the following three steps to get Demand 5 working: Install Firefox Flash Block Ad Killer 1. Install Firefox I tried it with both Mozilla Firefox…
Review – The Lego Movie
I went to see the Lego Movie this morning with my eight year old son. We both laughed out loud at it. A lot! It was seriously funny for most of the movie, some of it was slapstick and some of it was pretty geeky side jokes. Either way we had a whole lot of fun watching it. As the theme song goes, 'Everything is Totally Awesome!' The premise of the movie is a pastiche on the ancient prophecy tale where a hapless youth discovers he is the chosen one a little earlier than he's ready to deal with it. A mentor sees him through it and good triumphs over evil in the end. In the case of the Lego movie this sees a standard construction worker (Emmett) become the master builder who will save the Lego universe from the…
Chaos Monkeys
I spent a chunk of Friday in an alpha training session on clouds. Much of it wasn't new, but there were some insights into designing stuff for clouds as opposed to fixed infrastructure. The netflix chaos monkeys came up, and it made me think. It isn't the first time I've come across the chaos monkeys, but it put an image in my mind of a chimp in an old fashioned data centre pulling cables out of a patch room and the unplugging servers from the network. Add in a bit of the cliche cleaner who pulls the plug out of the critical system to power the vacuum cleaner and you're away with the mental image. In the cloud no-one has to hear you scream. If you spaghetti cable all the boxes together and make them all redundant by synchronising data…
Book Review – First Light by Geoffrey Wellum
First Light by Geoffrey Wellum My rating: 4 of 5 stars If you want to know what it was like as a spitfire pilot in the Battle of Britain, then this is the book you need to read. The author was a public schoolboy that joined the RAF just before the outbreak of war. He signed up in the spring of 1939 and started training as soon as he finished school in July 1939. The first third of the book is a very detailed account of his entry to the service and the flight training. Through this we get to know the author as a typical public schoolboy, he struggles with the academic side, but has no problems with the discipline and dealing with being in a service institution. Flying is clearly his passion, and is most of the focus…
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Themself – a Word Cloud
Inspired by some of the word clouds posted by friends on facebook I thought that I would do a word cloud of the blog on so here it is. (NB click on the image to see the full size version) Related articles The 100 Most Useful Websites On The Internet