December 2010
14 posts
3 tags
Pukka Pinboard
Mac users who have made the leap to Pinboard might be interested to know that CodeSorcery’s Pukka will work quite happily with it, thanks to Pinboard’s support of the delicious API, and Pukka’s ability to override the default API endpoint.
What you can’t do is set up one account pointing to delicious and one to Pinboard — it’s all or nothing, unfortunately.
To configure Pukka...
4 tags
Headology
There are lots of people out there who don’t really understand why people buy iPods and iPhones — even less so iPads and Macs. There’s another group of people who do understand it, but choose other things. Best tool for the job, and all that.
All of this is fine, as far as I’m concerned. Apple products are no religion (no moreso than Microsoft, IBM, Sun, Miele, or Blizzard...
4 tags
Streaming DVB across my LAN
You’ll recall that I recently had some woes in streaming Freeview across my local network. This evening I hit upon the solution.
In actual fact, I had bigger problems: the quality of my aerial cables was, at best, shoddy, and I was lucky to get much of a signal at all half of the time. The best signal I got was when the tuner was plugged into the (otherwise unused) TV Out socket on my...
3 tags
Dynamic DNS with public keys
I had an idea recently, on the back of something I came up with a while ago.
In a nutshell, it’s a dynamic DNS service, not a million miles away from DynDNS, but it has a few crucial differences:
you don’t need to register anything to use it
you don’t get to choose the domain name — one is generated for you
the domain names are nonetheless predictable
you can only provide...
5 tags
How to render an Airport Extreme useless for...
Let us say you have a PC “A” and an Airport Extreme “B”. You also have a number of clients attached to the Airport Extreme, both wired and wireless. You may or may not have a bog standard unmanaged switch between PC “A” and Airport Extreme “B” — it doesn’t make much difference as far as I can tell.
Now, let us say that PC “A” is capable of generating a reasonable amount of multicast...
5 tags
Re: Week 77 — The Media’s War
This is a response to Jody McIntyre’s post about his interview on BBC News recently (yes, that one). I’ve left a comment there, but it’s in the moderation queue, and… well, it’s better here, anyway. Read Jody’s post before this one, of course.
While I think it was a poor interview, the BBC tries very hard not to be state television: publicly-funded and state-operated are two...
1 tag
3 tags
WTF
I spotted this footnote in a document I’d turned up via Google:
The UK DTG Logical Channel Descriptor is used with approval. Copyright of the logical_channel_descriptor is vested in the Digital TV Group.
You want to know what this logical_channel_descriptor is? I’ll tell you.
Like all DVB (in fact, all MPEG Transport Stream) descriptors, there are two leading bytes: descriptor_tag...
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Classification classes
danbri got me thinking about using classification concepts as RDF classes recently. Here follows some thinking out loud…
Right now, we tend to assert that — for example — an episode of a TV show is a comedy programme by having a property of that episode referencing some instance that denotes “Comedy”.
The more I think about it, the more this seems wrong.
“Comedy” isn’t a thing...
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Anonymous
Despite the pronouncements of “freedom” and “democracy”, and despite the somewhat amusing effects of their actions from time to time, I’m not fond of Anonymous. While it’s a step down from face-to-face violent protest (and I’m minded the consider terming it “terrorism” utterly ridiculous), its actions still amount to vigilanteism running counter to the ideals they supposedly...
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Risks of the Cloud
As I mentioned in my last post, lots of people are talking about Wikileaks being pulled by AWS as “a risk of the cloud” — that is, if you make use of Cloud Computing, you risk getting the plug pulled.
Here’s an example, from ComputerWorld UK:
Considering cloud computing? As well as any technical factors, make sure a Terms of Service issue doesn’t put you out of business.
The...
7 tags
Wikileaks
My viewpoint on Wikileaks is shaped first and foremost by my answers the following questions:
Do you agree that governments should not withhold information (which isn’t necessarily kept secret in order to maintain the security of the nation) from those to whom they are accountable?
Do you agree, in general, with newspapers reporting leaked documents in this vein?
My answer to both of...
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The curse of the Top-Level Directory
(This post is probably of more narrow interest than usual; sorry!)
A little while ago, the BBC announced that, as part of its general cost-cutting measures, it would be reducing the number of “top-level directories” on bbc.co.uk. I learned last week that there was even to be a workshop on this exciting cost-cutting measure.
I have a few problems with this approach, it must be said. My...
3 tags
"Forms" for RDF
(This is in part a follow-up and response to Leigh Dodds’ recent blog post and a brief conversation with danbri; it’s poorly-researched, and I’d be amazed if I’m not covering ground and ideas which others haven’t done a million times better).
In the evolution of the RDF-driven Web, there was a little bit of a leap, the sort you’d expect to see the involvement of...