I knew it, I knew he was faking
OK-bleedin-Computer? How stupid is the average Channel 4 viewer?
Fat-bloated-prog-rock-whinge-fest pap voted the greatest album of all time? Maybe it isn’t so shocking when you learn that they also voted The Verve (the Verve!) higher than Jimi Hendrix, The Smiths, The Stone Roses and The Doors. What can be the cause of the destruction of the brain stems of the average British TV viewer? Cocaine? E? Fluoride? Tony Blair? PS2? I despair.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Monday, April 18, 2005
And wuv, tru wuv, will fowow you foweva...
We are nearly a week into our Sky+ Box ownership. It’s not often something far exceeds your expectation but this bloody thing does so with ease. The wee beauty can record two channels at the same time. There is some very impressive buffer management going on in there. We have set a bunch of recordings of weekly shows plus any movies that catch my eye no matter what time they start.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Sunday, April 17, 2005
There is something you don't know. I am not left-handed
Finally got around to collecting together the list of other bits of software I use (mainly at home). But first off, I should be given a thorough thrashing for not including XEmacs in the first list.
I first encountered XEmacs on HP-UX in Philips Eindhoven in 1995. Up until then I had used the VAX editor and a few crappy freeware PC ones. This thing was a revelation - syntax highlighting, tons of extensions, call-out to make, gcc, whatever.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Friday, April 15, 2005
You rush a miracle man, you get rotten miracles
Nostalgia time, 80’s fans. Due to unprecedented public demand (currently at zero requests), I am making available my classic ZX Spectrum games at no cost. Each of these 4K masterpieces, which took months of pubescent angst to complete, requires either an actual ZX Spectrum or an emulator to play. My two favourite emulators are EmuZWin and ZXSpin. The current version of ZXSpin seems to have some problem finding ROMs so maybe stick with EmuZWin for the moment.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Thursday, April 14, 2005
Never get involved in a land war in Asia
I keep a “link-blog” over at Bloglines. It is just a set of links to other peoples blog postings and sites with stories that caught my eye. I’ll put a permanent link to it on this blog when I get a chance.
Overall I’m happy with Bloglines but I’m tired of old posts constantly re-appearing as new. Is Feedburner any better in this regard I wonder?
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Wednesday, April 13, 2005
Unemployed in Greenland?
I was watching The Princess Bride for the gazillionth time the other night and had forgotten how many great one liners it has. So the next few postings are all going to have completely unrelated titles from that movie.
Last year I bought a Hauppauge WinTV PVR-350 video capture card. The main reason was to transfer an ancient (vintage 1980) family video to DVD and also to transfer all our Sony HandyCam Video-8 to DVD.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Tuesday, April 12, 2005
The Apprentice (UK)
I never got into the US version of The Apprentice. I think mainly because I’ve always thought of Trump as a tacky buffoon. I remember being brought to Trump Towers in 1987 by my American cousin (whirlwind tour of NY in one day including WTC, St Patrick’s Cathederal and The Statue of Liberty) and thinking - how can you spend so much money and end up with a place looking so cheap?
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Monday, April 4, 2005
Favourite Software Tools
Not flu - vicious throat infection and tonsil infection. Still in bits. Still agony to swallow saliva. So up late again. I got a new twin-CPU machine in work on Wednesday. I decided to write a list of all of the tools I definitely needed to install on it in addition to the corporate installs. I assumed it it would be 10 or 15. Bloody hell, more like 40. Some are obvious, others are quite nichey.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Dungarvan Follow-up
I was home sick all day today - vicious flu. Slept most of the day so now it’s midnight and I’m wide awake. But my day was brightened by a letter we got in the post from the secretary of a small Kilkenny GAA club. When we had stayed in Clonea Strand Hotel, there had been a lot of shouting and banging in the middle of the night for about 20 minutes.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Wednesday, March 23, 2005
Bloglines vs FeedonFeeds
So I’ve been using an RSS Aggregator called FeedonFeeds for a long time now. The reason I’ve always liked it is that it is server based and caches the data in a MySQL DB. I have it installed on the Fedora box at home and can connect to it via the DSL connection from anywhere. So I have one centralised location for all my feeds. The caching is also handy as I found a lot of the older aggregators would only cache the titles and not any of the content, and for sites that turnover their RSS links quickly, a lot of the items used to be gone by the time I’d try to read them.
Posted by Conor O'Neill on Thursday, March 17, 2005