Category: Personal
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Teleportation Goes Long-Distance
The BBC have an article about Australian researchers successfully teleporting photons a distance of 600m, advancing upon their first efforts in the field, over two years ago.
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Where Do They Make Balloons?
So I come home from work on Monday evening to find my flat full of balloons. WTF??? -
One Thousand, Two Thousand, Three Thousand… Check Canopy!
Wow: a most memorable weekend. As you'll remember, I spent the last weekend on a crash-course in parachuting in Lancashire. Having spent plenty of time in light aircraft or coasting around in a paraglider, I thought I had it sized: but it turned out to be even more spectacular (and scary) than I could have …
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1000... 2000... 3000... Check Canopy! (Claire's take)
This repost was published in hindsight, on 11 March 2019.
Claire wrote:
Yesterday I spent about 8 hours watching Dan and his Dad learn how to parachute. They did their first jump at about 6pm. It was a very comprehensive course, and I think that I could probably have jumped out with them, had I the … -
This Weekend : Parachuting For Dummies
The good news is that the weather looks fantastic for my parachuting trip this weekend. I can't think of a better thing to be travelling for on a Friday 13th.
The downside is I haven't spent more than a few consecutive minutes off the phone this morning talking my work colleagues through the code I've left … -
Executable Stenography… With A Difference
Somebody's come up with a program that hides secret messages in executable programs. Well... that's not so impressive - we've all hidden secret messages in JPEG files before by using programs to 'flip' certain pixels (example). This works by changing the image in subtle ways that the human eye won't detect, but that the descrambling …
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If I Were An STD…
If I were an STD, I would be...
Which STD would you be? -
Ferreting Out Piracy
CNet News has a story on the BSA's attempts to educate children that copyright evasion and piracy is wrong, with the help of their new cartoon mascot - a ferret (shown).
And yes, I've used the picture of their new mascot without their permission. <wink>
Is a ferret really the best mascot they could think of...? -
Thrashing
Thrashing is a computer science term referring to an undesirable occurrence in multiprocessing systems.
When a processor is given multiple jobs to do, it services them a little each in a round-robin fashion (assuming that no priority system is in effect), until each is done. This is, of course, actually significantly less efficient than doing each … -
How To Keep Up With The Latest Happings On Scatmania (or What Are All Those Pretty Buttons?)
If you're looking for a way to keep up-do-date with the latest Scatmania happenings, it's now really really easy. I've enhanced my weblog with a heap of useful syndication tools that make keeping track of my latest activities a doddle, even for those of you who are unenlightened and can still be caught using an …
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Weather Situation Unclear For Weekend’s Parachuting
As you may know, I'll be doing a crash course in parachuting - hopefully climaxing in a solo freefall - next weekend, to celebrate my (finally) getting a degree, courtesy of my dad. The weather reports don't look too favourable, though - potentially stormy at the end of this week. Hmmph. We'll see. It'll take …
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Windows Security
Just recieved the following error message from Windows, while trying to connect to a shared directory elsewhere on the network... have never seen one like it before, so I thought I'd share it with you:
Oh, so now I'm a hacker? Thanks, Windows. -
Dan Breaks The Internet… Again
Whoops. You'd have thought I'd have learnt my lesson when I fucked around with BIND last year, and 'broke' a small portion of the internet, but no. I managed to 'break the internet' again while playing with the Domain Name System settings on big. That's why Scatmania was inaccessible for the last day or so …
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Painful Work Patterns
This is actually getting quite painful. I've now been at work for 13 hours straight, and for a total of 40 hours so far this week. Still; next week should be marginally better.
The knackeredness I can deal with. What's nasty is that I'm not seeing as much of Claire as I'd like. -
I’m Surrounded By Idiots
Conversation with a co-worker, who shall remain nameless:
Her: Is anybody any good at Fireworks?
Me: Yeh; you just light the blue touchpaper and run. But seriously, you ought'a be using Corel Photo-Paint.
(I wander over to her desk, and see that she's working with a bitmapped image of our logo - she's trying to remove some of …