TheWrecker

http://bit.ly/1040raf

http://bit.ly/17zrxNX

http://bit.ly/15PGI69

I often want to go to bed while iTunes is downloading podcasts at snail’s pace. You can Start->Run this to make your Windows PC turn off after an hour:

shutdown /s /t 3600

That’s 3600 seconds, or 60 minutes, a.k.a. an hour

http://bit.ly/13os9iG

http://bit.ly/106KuUr

http://bit.ly/13osbar

http://bit.ly/13os92o

Wringing out Water on the ISS - for Science!

Too much for a tweet.

Yesterday, Owen and I were in the garden and he found a big flowerpot full of water. There’s been half an inch of ice on it for the past month so I’m quite surprised it was clear yesterday.

Owen loves water. He loves being in the bath, he loves swimming and he loves having it poured on his face. Not so long ago he was lying out of sight against the sofa chuckling with absolute glee and when I checked to see what he was up to he was shaking water out of his sippy cup onto his face. In the bath he plays with the water rather than the toys. If the toy can’t hold or contain water, he’s not interested.

So, when he found the big flowerpot of ice cold water he toddled off to find something to put in it. I was only keeping half an eye on him (from two feet away I hasten to add) and before I knew it he had a smaller flower pot and was dipping it in the water. Then he was sloshing it all over himself. Then he was up to his elbow. In his coat. Then he fell over in the puddle he made.

After that he went inside with Mummy.

Less than a week ago I signed us up for broadband with plusnet. They beat the deal my existing provider was offering by £5. No contest.

The last time I switched broadband provider it was a certified palava so I was quite cynical this time round.

After signing up the first step was to get the MAC code from my current provider BT. I did that via live chat and although I had to ask for it three times, they did finally concede that I was lost to them and said they’d email it to me. It came a bit later. I called plusnet the next day to give them the code.

Then I got an email late last week saying that we would be swapped over on Thursday 21st March and they attempted to deliver the new router Friday. We picked that up from the post office yesterday.

This is rivetting, eh?

Anyway, I wake up this AM and our broadband from old supplier is disconnected. I don’t have time to check it out so I head out to work. Got an email early this evening to say that our new bb was up and running. Two days early. So, I return home this evening with some trepidation at setting up a new router.

We received a TG582n - not sure it matters because they are all made by Thompson anyway - and it’s a great liltte box, very speedy, extremely intuitive. It poops on the BT Homehub already.

Luckily it was already set-up to use the same IP range as we currently used so I basically plugged it in, changed the SSID and the key to be the same as the old router and… that was that.

I’ll have to do some port forwarding at some point but that looks simple enough. We’ll cross that bridge when we get there.

There was one negative in this whole thing: when I opened the router box up I noticed that it has WPS. You may not know but Wireless Protected Setup is a fucking stupid idea that lets anyone connect to your router in a “secure way”. It’s easy to exploit to gain access to someone else’s network without permission and it’s not so much a back door as a gaping window with a “swag here” neon sign above it.

I had a quick Google to see if it could be disabled. That yield this page. I was delighted to find this for two reasons. Firstly, it points straight to a fix and, secondly, it has responses from plusnet staff that don’t just say “we’ll look into this” but show that they are proactively investigating. All good news.

The fix is here and it took about 30 seconds to apply.

So, why is this sad AND epic? Well, this is how it should be. I have been home an hour and my switch to another broadband supplier has been completely stress free. I now have some time to relax. That’s the epic part.

What’s sad is that this experience so greatly exceeded my expectations that I felt compelled to spend 15 minutes writing a blog post about it that no one will ever read.

Skyrim - Unarmed Badass Viking Commentary

Mila Kunis talks to Chris Stark off the Scott Mills show

I have to be careful what I say because I could be done for libel.

However, if I thought a burglar had locked him or herself in my bathroom and I had a gun, I would stand patiently outside the bathroom while yelling for my wife to call the police.

Since the burglar is contained I know that, in fact, my wife and little boy are as safe as possible.

If I had been Oscar’s situation and these circumstances had played out I would have woken our son up rather than shot my wife to death.

So, I installed Chrome frame on a work PC (naughty) in an effort to get some sites to work better. We use IE 7 and 8. Maybe I should say IE7 and 8 are inflicted upon us as some form of bizarre punishment.

Anyway, I immediately ran into problems when I “roamed”.

The plugin itself installs to the “machine”, whether virtual or not, and so doesn’t roam with you. However, it writes to your User registry, which does roam.

Needless to say I started to get errors on certain webpages, mainly regrading aspxpopupcontrol or lack there of.

The simple solution is to look at the location below in your registry and delete any keys that mention Chrome Frame: HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\User Agent\Post Platform

It’s up to you whether you backup before you do this or not.

Changed a serious nappy this AM. Leaked really badly but was lumpy. So had lumps flying everywhere with him kicking his legs. Took him into bath to deal with it. Later found poo in dressing gown pocket. – Read on Path.

My relationship with Facebook ended some time ago and I have not missed it for a day. That might be because I used Path to fill the most important gap; the distance between me and my family. I turned to Twitter to fill the other gap: the urge to share my thoughts with the world.

But my love for Twitter is dying too. I see story after story from people saying that quitting Twitter made life a lot less stressful.

I saw Twitter, rightly or wrongly, as a way to expand my social and professional circles. However, all that’s happened is that I feel as if I have been swept up in some monsterous extention of peer pressure. Reading Twitter constantly makes me feel as if I should be doing bigger and better things. Put another way, if the grass is always greener, I can see over an awful lot of fences. At the same time I feel like my content disappears into a void, which is totally unrewarding. This is bad for your mental health.

To quote Bilbo Baggins: “I feel like butter spread over too much bread.”

I just want to cut down what I am exposed to and I think “Web 3.0” is going to be applications and sites for LIMITING content and focusing on your interests. The internet is full of chaff posing as wheat and it’s all driven by Ad revenue. The future will be paid services that offer quality. The App.net people obviously figured that out a while ago.

I already pay for a number of web services, something I would never have considered 3 years ago. Paying for a service provides some reassurance that you’re not being exploited in some way and that’s a big concern as the Internet has become a pretty cynical place.

If Path is looking for a revenue stream I should probably let them know that I’d be happy to pay for what they provide me because what’ve realised is that when it comes to social networking what I really want is Hobbiton: laid back, sedate, safe and peaceful.

For that there is a price worth paying.

So, are we headed for a triple dip recession?

Well, I certainly can’t spend us out of this Mr. Osbourne and this is why:

• You froze my pay for 3 years, “Unison, Unite and the GMB estimate that the cumulative effect of the local government pay freeze, now in its third year, and high inflation has resulted in a 13% decrease in pay since 2009.” That makes us about £250 a month worse off.
• Childcare is so expensive that it’s not worth my wife returning to work full-time as the additional income would be wiped out by the increased childcare costs, even though she earns significantly more than me.
• After our mortgage our next biggest expenses are train travel, utility bills and petrol - all of which the government has been challenged to deal with but done nothing.
• If I retain my current salary over the next two years I will become a Higher Rate tax payer.
• You put VAT up by 2.5%

What have they actually done for me? * Increased my personal tax allowance by £1000 a year. That makes me £16 a month better off.

In short, we have no disposable income. They only way for us to spend would be borrow, which is exactly what George is, himself, avoiding.

Raw Video: Marshmallow Launch at the White House Science Fair