Suffering from another spell of insomnia, I thought it might be a good idea to write a quick post. Even though I have data to suggest that you freaks now stay on this site for several minutes on average no one has shown any interest in coming up with a logo outside of immediate circle of friends. i will therefore enable the theme later today, unlless I have another last minute job interview, and use the logo provided by a friend.
However should anyone feel the need to come up with one, I’ll display them on the site.
Which reminds me; as I didn’t specify a size feel free to use what ever I like for your first “draft”.

I love Buffy it’s one of my favourite shows ever and Joss Whedon’s has a history of brilliant shows, which I enjoy enormously so it shouldn’t come as a surprise that I also quite like Buffy.

I mean what isn’t to like? Especially in the first season with all of the cheer leading practice and dancing and… You get the idea.

I’m sure it’s fairly obvious that I’ve been watching Buffy again (I’m currently on a bit of a marathon which could account for the lack of motivation to do other things like updating my blog’s theme), I will probably dig out all my other Vampire films and watch those too, including the Blade trilogy.

I quite like the Vampire genre as a whole because it ranges from the extremely serious to the plain comical with several variations in between, where else would you get James Woods dressed from head to toe in chain maille trying to speer vampires while cracking rather dry jokes? Or George Clooney and Quentin Tarantino stuck in a Mexican tavern with even funnier vampires?

And don’t get me started on how funny the Scream movies were…

While everyone else is probably writing about what a giant cock-up the iPhone is, I’m going to focus on hydroponics because I’m not everyone else.
Now for those of you not familiar with hydroponics, it’s a wonderful thing in which plants are grown in a soil less medium through the use of nutrient solutions. This means that you can grow plants indoors, but through the use of lights and the ability to accurately controlling pH levels, CO2 concentration and nutrient levels you can also end up with much bigger plants or anything you want really. One problem of hydroponics in my mind is that it’s prohibitively expensive with small kits which only support 3-4 plants running well into several hundred pounds, which is why I tend to check ebay for any bargains.

As always the case with eBay, hydroponics on there is one of my pet hates because the majority of ebay sellers are a bunch of complete retards. Why are they complete retards? Reading the descriptions of several hydroponics related items, one is left with the view that only people who grow illegal drugs in the form of cannabis use hydroponics, slandering the whole concept!
Sure, indoor cannabis growers might use hydroponics but a lot of people who don’t grow cannabis also use hydroponics, so rather than leading people to believe that only people with some kind of nefarious plan might be interested in hydroponics, why not generalise it?

Writing “You can get 3kg of bud with this system” might attract some idiots to your product but it reflects badly on legitimate gardeners and those who’d like to try hydroponics, after all it is gardening of the future anyone who is into science fiction knows that…

If you’ll excuse me I’ll go back to my bunker deep underground where I’m safe from idiots.

I recently decided to buy a powerball and after a lot of delay it was delivered on Wednesday and as you might imagine these little hand gyroscopes are tremendous fun.

Sadly mine was damaged in transit and was rather noisy but I was able to return it to the reseller and I should get my replacement as soon as possible.

I did however use the dodgy one I received for a while and my arms are still aching I can also hardly type

As it turns out they really do what it says on the tin and if you overdo it will make you pay for it.

I can’t wait for my new one to arrive so I can use it once my exams are over, I obviously need to beat my laughable record of 9337rpm! (Without leaving me unable to write at a crucial time)

By the way: The ball I link to above is the one I own!

I’ve noticed that I had a lot of outgoing clicks going to ‘Weed’s blog, which is obviously a good thing for her because she’s getting some traffic from me.

Either people are interested in what I link to, and want to read her blog which is cool and something I encourage, or they see the link, read “‘Weed” and think Marijuana, which is probably the case.

‘Weed in her context comes from Milkweed and I really don’t know how she feels about people trying to look up drug information on her blog, probably bemused.

Anyway going from that, I have now added a link to the Nirvana Seed Company for people who are looking for Marijuana related products, or just general information about it.

So if you are looking at her blog for those reasons, why not add to your seed collection by following the following link?
Nirvana in/outdoor

Enjoy in any case.

I’m sure some of you wanted a more in depth explanation of what this hex string is, and why it’s currently so important, as I previously stated it’s the key which enables most AACS secured discs to be decrypted.

Funnily enough it was leaked by accident by the people behind the system, and as is so often the case is now being leaked across the internet in an attempt to keep this information public.

The “injured party” as far as I’m aware is currently busy filling out DMCA notices against every offending site, something which is going to cost them a lot of time and money, and I’ll probably fall victim of it at some point myself but we’ll just have to cross that bridge when we get there.

What really intrigues me is how you can legally copyright a string of hex, sadly with the server my domain is hosted on being in the US I’m bound to US copyright law, and everyone knows that the Americans are a strange bunch of people. We also have to remember that we live in a world where people can patent enzymes anyone has in their body, and can as a result make a lot of money if other people want to use said enzymes in a laboratory environment, so even though it is morally objectionable it wouldn’t surprise me if it is in fact copyrightable.

So much for personal freedoms, personally I’m wondering how long it’ll take for someone to knock up a bunch of t-shirts with the string on it and parade it in public.

Sweet. looks like Hack Day is coming to London!

Their site is pretty neat, and I’d quite like to emulate it, it features text which is rot13 encoded, but as soon as you move your mouse over it, the text automagically changes to something which is easily readable, but you expect geeks to read rot13 without a problem, right?

I highly doubt I’ll be chosen to get one of the 500 spots, seeing as I’m around the 5k mark of applicants, but it would be pretty sweet if I did. I’d relish the idea of being able to learn as much as the event would offer, I’ve had an interest in web APIs for quite a while now which sadly hasn’t been allowed to be fully expressed due to me being too busy with my studies…

It would probably also give me an opportunity to increase my autograph collection a tiny bit because AlanCox’s signature is starting to feel a little bit lonely and I was unable to get any at the most recent LWE.

Maybe I’d even learn things I’d like to implement on one of my domains, while giving me an excuse to do something productive over the holidays…Not to mention a chance to get together with some of Britain’s most nerdiest people!

Obviously I’d take an array of pictures for you viewing pleasure.

Bye for now.

This is one of the few cool things you can do with bluetooth which I actually got working in Arch Linux, you might ask yourself why I haven’t managed to get my bluetooth headset working, and there’s a very simple answer for that, I’m lazy.

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I’m a fan of gumstix computers, for those of you who don’t know what they are they’re extremely small linux based embedded computers about the size of a stick of gum (80mm x 20mm). I’ve been meaning to buy one for quite some time now and with me having bought the weather balloon I really should start looking into getting one to use as its operational platform!

In fact I’ll probably be buying a gumstix as well as a few xkcd t-shirts the next time I get some PPP money to indulge my fantasies with.

So while looking at the gumstix site today I noticed that they’ve introduced a new line of gumstix computer the verdex, which is quite an impressive little beast! They feature up to a 600MHz processor as well as 128MB of RAM and 32MB of flash memory (figures are for the gumstix verdex XL6P) which is a significant improvement from previous models.

I don’t know about you but I’m pretty excited about the fact that I can buy something for $170 which is small enough to fit into my jeans pocket, does what I want and has the same computing power as high end desktops not too long ago.

If anyone is feeling generous, I accept gifts :p