Yuck 2
Posted: Fri 12 June, 2009 Filed under: Charm School, Domestic, Geeky, Weirdness Leave a comment »In other news, Panasonic have released a very strange (and really quite creepy) prototype for a new remote control unit.
This conceptual gel remote from Panasonic lays limp when not in use, pulsating with a soft light. But when its sensors detect a hand coming, it stiffens, ready for action!
Thankfully, it’s a prototype and not released yet – otherwise I’d have thought twice about buying the new Panasonic DVD-Player/Speakers I’ve just got…
2.8
Posted: Thu 11 June, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky, WordPress Leave a comment »The new version (release 2.8) of WordPress came out today – and it’s already been installed here at D4D™.
I have to say, since I updated D4D with the redesign and brought the WordPress install up to date as well, one of the things that has impressed me the most (despite some of its potential security issues) is the ability to update WordPress or the installed plugins directly from the site. It makes life a hell of a lot easier.
In this case, even updating the core files for WordPress was a matter of a couple of clicks, letting the file download, then a final click when everything was completed.
All told, it’s a pretty impressive way of doing things.
As for the use of 2.8? Well, there’s certainly been some changes, but I still have to explore most of them, so I’ll write more about it sometime in the next few days.
Still Dead
Posted: Tue 9 June, 2009 Filed under: Domestic, Geeky, Technology 1 Comment »Following on from last week’s post about the death of the DVD player and Blue Witch’s comment therein, I decided to get a DVD head-cleaning disk, (disc, whatever) just to see whether it would have any effect.
It wasn’t much of an investment, only £6.50 from Amazon, so it’s no biggie.
Anyway, we tried it out last night, to absolutely no effect whatsoever. In fact, the player won’t even acknowledge there’s a disk in the machine. It spins, but can’t identify a disk at all.
So it looks like the DVD player is now completely kaput fucked, and we’ll need to get a replacement set-up.
Bugger.
Audio-Visual
Posted: Wed 3 June, 2009 Filed under: Customer Services, Domestic, Geeky, Thoughts 2 Comments »Not content with the bed breaking last week, it looks like our DVD player is also on the way out. For some reason the discs aren’t playing at all, and we’re getting told “No Disc” when there patently bloody well is one.
Normally, a replacement DVD player wouldn’t be an issue. Thirty quid (at most) and job done.
However, we’re in a similar situation to when my DVD player died years ago – it’s not just a stand-alone DVD player, it’s a multiple disc thing that also deals with all the surround sound, Dolby® etc., so it’s pretty much DVD plus the full stereo etc. Which means that ideally I’m looking for a DVD player with the Dolby 5.1 outputs, so I can plug the speakers into it and job done.
Only of course, they’re hard to find – if they exist at all. The players are rarely sold on their own, instead coming with all the speakers as a completely new bit of kit.
All told, it all becomes a bit of a pain. I’d rather just get the player, so we don’t have to get new speakers etc. too – but that doesn’t seem to be a possibility.
Blocking Spammers
Posted: Thu 28 May, 2009 Filed under: D4D™, Geeky 1 Comment »Yesterday, D4D came under attack from a spammer using the name “Ebay Sniper”. They hit D4D with about 200 spam comments overnight, and they kept on trickling through during the day.
For whatever reason, Akismet was stopping them from displaying, but not blocking them completely. In addition, despite adding them to the discussion blacklist in the settings, the comments were still getting through.
So anyway, eventually I’d had enough of the crap, and ended up going to the big guns – blocking it by IP at source. So the server now blocks everything from the IP address where all the spam was coming from (and it wasn’t an IP used by any of my normal readers, thankfully) and redirects it to www.fuck-off-spammer.com . I don’t know if that site exists – but if it doesn’t, it should.
Funnily enough, since I put the block in place I’ve had no spam comments at all. Go figure.
The Next 30 Years
Posted: Thu 14 May, 2009 Filed under: Creativity, Geeky, Technology, Thoughts, Writing Leave a comment »Charlie Stross is one of my favourite current sci-fi authors, and this post goes some way to explaining why.
It’s the text of his keynote speech for LOGIN 2009, a conference for online games developers, and the speech is about the changes he sees coming in gaming over the next thirty years. He’s already written a novel based around some of these ideas (“Halting State“) and is currently writing the sequel to it, so I think it’s fair to say he’s done a fair amount of research and thinking about this subject already.
All told, it’s an interesting and entertaining read – and I’m sure it would’ve been even better to see him make the speech in person.
Geeky Tattoos
Posted: Wed 6 May, 2009 Filed under: 1BEM, Cynicism, Geeky, Weirdness 3 Comments »Really, you’ve just got to worry about some of the people shown on the Geeky Tattoos site.
I mean OK, I can understand (kind of) getting a tattoo of your favourite game characters or whatever – but the text of a 90s geeky meme that wasn’t funny at the time? Not the smartest of moves for later life, I’d suggest.
And as for a tattoo of Wolverine riding My Little Pony – let’s just leave it at “Oh. My. God.”, shall we?