Andy Cunningham

Overheard at a US airport:

“Excuse me, sir,” said the TSA officer, pointing to the young female, “She does not need to have her ID out, she’s a minor.”

Dad: “How do you know she’s a minor if you don’t look at her ID?”

Meanwhile, Adam Laurie (of hotel safe cracking fame) has proven the new UK ID cards to be a waste of time and tax payers money…

I love working in security.  Being good is so easy when there’s this much crap around.

After being tired of pages of rubbish when trying to double check my IP address, I wrote this little site.

www.IPfor.me.uk

Just the answer you want, and a single line of ads.  I hope it’s useful for others.

Between my activities with RAYNET and off-roading, and my love of food, I wanted to find a way to do some decent portable cooking. Better than warming stuff up on a camping stove, anyways.

The two contenders – that several people seem to debate, are the Cobb barbecue and the Cadac grill. They are different animals – and ultimately I want both for different reasons.

The Cadac is a gas bbq, with space, from the reviews, to cook burgers and sausages for eight people. You can stick a pan on it, and it comes with flat (bacon and egg) and ribbed (steaks) cooking surfaces. It’s a portable gas barbie, basically.

The Cobb is a portable oven. Charcoal fired, and popularised by the “Hairy Bikers”, it’s a good way of cooking a proper roast or similar out in the field. But it’s not something that can be used for quick grilling of steak, or really for a quick breakfast. If you want to do a roast in the field, it’s the equipment of choice.

So which did I go for?

Ultimately, the Cadac.

It’s a bit cheaper, but the selling point is that it’s really for quick cooking. Grilling a steak, cooking breakfasts, perhaps roasting some veggies. It’s the weapon of choice for the next two events.

I’d like to add a Cobb as well, but funds aren’t unlimited. So I’ll stick with the extra grill space for now.

After Wired.com’s 100 essential skills for geeks, I think I need to make a list of the ones I’ve got to learn.

31. Know at least 10 software easter eggs off the top of your head.

I can think of about five, but this is the first one in the list that I didn’t know.

45. Build amazing structures with LEGO and invent a compelling back story for the creation.

1. Be able to pick a lock.

I’m just not very good.

63. Whistle, hum, or play on an iPhone, the Cantina song.

64. Learning to play the theme songs to the kids favorite TV shows.

I claim a pass on these because I’m tone deaf.

69. Recite pi to 10 places or more.

3.141592654 (what we all remembered from our calaculators) is only 9 decimal places.

Or, from google for future reference, 3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510

75. Solder a circuit while bottle feeding an infant. (lead free solder please).

I can do the soldering.  Which end does the bottle go?

82. Know all the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit.
88. Be able to recite at least one Geek Movie word for word.
89. Know what the 8th Chevron does on a Stargate and how much power is required to get a lock.
93. The ability to name actors, characters and plotlines from the majority of sci-fi movies produced since 1968.

Oh come on, this isn’t geekdom, this is literature.

96. Have a documented plan on what to do during a zombie or robot uprising.

We don’t need no stinkin’ documentation.

After a week long trip to Prague, the Aspire One has proven to be a vastly more usable machine than the EEE.  I have nothing against the Asus – I just wish I’d waited and bought the 901 instead of the 701.  But with the offer on the Acer, the decision was made.

The keyboard suffers from the same problem as the larger Dell I have from work – it’s very easy for me to accidentally hit the trackpad and move the insert point while typing.  But the 82% keyboard is perfectly usable even with my big paws!  The display is clear and crisp, and displays enough text to be useful for previewing photos.   I’m not going to get into any photo editing here though – that’s what the pair of wide screens at home are for!

A bit more battery life for longer plane journeys would be good – but at least it’s compact enough to use in an economy class seat!

Pretty much on a whim, I decided to get an Acer Aspire One to play with.  Equally much on a whim, I decided to put Windows 7 RC1 on there.  And I have to say I’m impressed.  This tiny little machine has a usable keyboard, runs W7RC1 with no problems, and has been pretty stable so far (in a day or so of testing).

Compared with the original Asus eee701 it’s a vast improvement – a more usable screen, a better keyboard, and a decent sized hard drive.  I’ve been using it extensively and find it far more usable.

So what to do with the eee?

How to disable the Autorun functionality in Windows

When the founder of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners-Lee, gets scammed online.

Well, it’s more ironic than anything in that Alanis Morrissette song.

That bastion of balanced and fair reporting, the Inquirer has this tale of woe from a mac user.

PowerBook explodes in London office

Yeah, because mac’s just work without any effort, right?

Well after about 18 months running Linux as my primary desktop at home, I finally admitted defeat and swapped back to Windows.

The reinstall wasn’t too painful – the hardware in my PC hadn’t changed significantly so the re-activation was painless.  The new graphics card caused some problems – it took about 6 tries to find an Nvidia 6200 driver that worked.  But otherwise it’s been fairly smooth, though I still have some bits of re-installation to do – and check all my backups and so on.

So why did I switch back?  A couple of reasons.

Firstly there was just far too much hacking around to get basic things working – every kernel upgrade meant an hour messing to get vmware working again, for example.

But most importantly the applications I want to use now has changed significantly since I made the decision to switch.  There are a couple of Ham Radio applications – most notably Ham Radio Deluxe and UI-View32 that just don’t work on Linux, and don’t play well under VMware.

I haven’t completely switched back though – I still run a Linux VM for the few things that work better there, and will continue to do so.   It works well as a test server environment too – only the VM is exposed to the Internet.

A few more tweaks needed, but the bulk of the work is done at this point.

Sorry, Linus.