Tag archives for themself - Page 10

Study

A215 – Life Writing – Initiative at Night

Here's the second of the pieces I wrote for the A215 Creative Writing online tutorial on life writing. Saturday 13th December 1991 It’s 3am on a Saturday before Christmas 1991, I’ve only been awake for 21 hours. After a day of lectures I went with the UOTC to Redford Barracks in Edinburgh for a training camp. Since 1830 I have been on the Pentland Hills doing orienteering and solving problems with a team of third year cadets. We’ve not been good at following the approved DS solutions. To change the tire on a land rover without a jack we ignored the planks and mik crates and instead rolled the vehicle onto its side before righting it after we’d changed the tire. Our time was the fastest, but the officer wasn’t pleased. To take a casualty across a minefield (laid with…
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250 Posts

Well 251 now as it happens, since this one is the 251st post on themself. I've always been a bit vague about blog dates, largely because it doesn't really matter all that much. I've been writing for decades, before it was even possible to publish it easily. There are still a couple of ring binders with stories in them and also dozens of notebooks and a couple of boxes of index cards from before the internet. I doubt many of those will ever be published, although they may well be mined for ideas eventually. This is not my first blog, and as much as I can I've imported the articles written for the previous blogs into wordpress. I've also gone back and gathered up things that I wrote for publication and added them into the archives where I can. There…
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linux

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…
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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…
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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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