Owner: Kember.net URL:http://kember.net/ Join Date: Fri, 03 Aug 2007 03:17:37 -0500 Rating:0 Site Description: My ideas, reviews, advice and anecdotes. Site statistics:Click here
Aspire Van Hire 2007-08-01 12:43:22 We used Aspire Van Hire, based in Dunfermline, to move all our furniture to our new house. We hired their Renault Master for the day.
The chap I dealt with was friendly and efficient. The van was in excellent condition. The van was given to me with a full tank of fuel, and I was asked to return it full. This is much better than an “empty to empty” policy, where you end up paying for some of the next customer’s fuel.
The price was competitive with all the major van hire companies in Edinburgh, but I found the paperwork aspects of the hire to be more relaxed than with our previous tussle with Sixt in Bristol. There was a small deposit to pay (by cash or any type of card) and I had to prove my address with a utility bill or bank statement. Insurance was included in the price (the excess was £500).
I got the van for a full 24 hours and would highly recommend Aspire to anybody wanting a local van hire.
Global marketplace 2007-07-31 08:01:45 Amazing. I have an electric toothbrush made by Oral-B. It comes with the curse of unbelievably expensive replacement heads. A pack of two heads in Boots costs £7.49. I’ve just bought 16 heads from Tasmania for £10.31. What’s the lesson here? The further you ship ‘em, the cheaper they get? Read more:Global
Scotland. That's in England, near Paris 2007-07-26 07:28:42 Today I received a very polite email from a supplier in California asking me:
We have received your order. However we have placed it on hold because we need to verify the shipping address. Do you live in Scotland
or Great Britain? Please advise.
This made me chuckle as it’s a very stereotypical American thing to say, but after my recent brush with American geography – discovering that Canada is bigger than the United States and that Florida is on the east coast – I decided to give them the benefit of the doubt.
Did you know?
There is a place called California in Norfolk, England
and another in Falkirk, Scotland
Here, then, is the bluffer’s guide to the British Isles.
The British Isles looks like this (it’s the green bit):
In close-up:
Great Britain is the largest blob, which comprises three countries: England is the red one, where it rains cats and dogs. Scotland is the blue one at the top, where it rains auld wives and pike staves and Read more:Paris
Voltaire redux 2007-07-05 09:39:31 Peter Hitchens made me smirk the other day, when I read his online column in the Mail on Sunday. I’m not a big fan of the Mail, but Hitchens’ writings certainly strike a chord with me.
“A modern British liberal will defend to the death your right to agree with him. Disagree, and he will call the police.”
Holding outspoken views can make you feel like people are looking at you as if you have two heads. The bland rubbish that I publish on here is a testament to my wanting to appear one-headed. This spinelessness really has to stop. Read more:Voltaire
LinkedIn have added a "Remove" button 2007-06-26 10:08:21 LinkedIn is a social networking site for professional work contacts. You can recommend your colleagues and work friends and get introduced to useful people they know.
Until recently, you could link to another person, but couldn’t remove that link.
I linked to Michael Krakovskiy when he revealed that he was behind Dead Programmer’s Cafe. It was a stupid thing to do, as I don’t know him professionally (or personally, for that matter). He’s got lots of contacts in the US, so LinkedIn was always more likely to offer me interesting people to contact in the US, rather than the UK.
Today, at last, I’ve been able to Remove the connection to his profile. Read more:LinkedIn
, button
Fraudulent Paypal email 2007-08-31 03:16:25 I just received an email from PayPal that looks genuine. It warns me of unusual account activity, and asks that I update my records to restore full functionality to my account. The email address it comes from looks genuine, the logo and the link to the privacy policy are genuine. Only the link to update my details isn’t right. It directs me to http://www.paypal-team.com/eg which is a site that asks me to put in all sorts of personal details.
How did I know this? How did I catch this? Am I super-clever? No. I just never visit PayPal by clicking on a link in an email. I always type the web address into the browser. If I type www.paypal.com into the address bar myself, then I’m not getting conned.
I little more investigation showed this article indicating that it’s a fraudulent site. Also, if I visit the site using a recent version of Firefox, the browser warns me that the website is a forgery, designed to steal my identity.
I logged into PayPal – myself: no Read more:Fraudulent
Holywood-style policing causes computer evidence blunder 2007-08-29 07:56:45 From the BBC: When a laptop computer was seized from a terror suspect, evidence was tampered with and possibly destroyed because the laptop was turned on. Nobody typed $ delete_evidence.sh, they just switched it on.
You see, when a computer is switched on, it likes to tidy up after itself, check things, update things, move things around. Just the sort of things that a forensic analyst would be interested in.
This is one of those slip-ups that I see all the time on Midsomer Murders. If I’m alone, I’ll shout at the telly, but mostly I keep quite – my family and friends already know never to play with evidence, and they’re unlikely to be in a position to try.
That a real-life police officer thought booting the laptop for a quick look was a good idea means that he or she lacks training or discipline. There are many people who don’t have the technical nous to understand why a running computer is less useful evidence than an untouched one, but that&rsquo Read more:causes
Gift list 2007-08-28 04:13:47 If you’d like to buy me a present, but need inspiration, you could look at my Amazon wish-list, or the list below.
Metal Pen Key Ring (£20)
Regular Expressions Shirt (£14, remember international shipping)
Creating a self-signed SSL certificate 2007-09-12 04:27:45 There are some really long-winded ways of creating a self-signed SSL certificate for Apache out there on the Intarweb. Most I don’t understand well enough to implement, and the few that were simple enough to implement didn’t work.
I’m not sure that this is worth shouting from the rooftops, but I’ll stand at a fairly high window and say,
It’s really simple, people. The Apache documentation tells us to do this small thing, and it Just Works.
Read more:Creating
Roundup issue tracker page redirects badly 2007-09-06 02:06:42 This isn’t going to be a pretty article, but I’m aiming to catch Google’s attention, along with anybody else who got the same problem as me when they installed the Roundup issue
tracker, followed the instructions but got redirection problems ending up with urls containing ‘//////////’ and stuff like that.
Firefox catches this issue and displays the warning:
The page isn’t redirecting properly
The stdout message can show a different url depending on what action you were trying to perform when it got itself wedged, but it’ll end with //////////////////// HTTP/1.1" 301
The problem is in the config file, under [tracker]. The web= section is wrong. I know – you followed the instructions. So did I. They say,
The web address that the tracker is viewable at.
This will be included in information sent to users of the tracker.
The URL MUST include the cgi-bin part or anything else
that is required to get to the home page of th
Does alcohol really boil away in cooking? 2007-09-30 12:04:58
“Don’t worry, there’s no alcohol in this red wine sauce – it’s cooked.”
Heard that before? It’s the accepted wisdom about hot food made with alcoholic drinks. However, all is not as it seems – the accepted wisdom is wrong.
In this article, it’s explained that baking or simmering for 15 minutes leaves 40% of the alcohol. 1 hour of cooking
leaves 25% of the alcohol.
The raw taste of the alcohol very quickly fades when the food is heated, but a large amount of alcohol remains.
I do not like Tumblelogs 2007-09-26 05:21:58 I’ve occasionally looked for a good bit of software to set up Kember.net as a tumblelog – a weblog designed for short, title-less articles that contain a few thoughts.
Tumblelogs make publishing much easier. People can see my ideas and thoughts from the totality of postings rather than from a few long articles. When I have interesting thoughts, I could just slap them up on the website. Most of these thoughts never make it to Kember.net at the moment, because expanding them into full-blown articles tends to vapourise them.
However, I’ve come to realise that I hate reading tumblelogs. There’s not enough consistency to keep my attention. The articles aren’t long enough to tell me something meaningful or make me think. They’re so… In your face. Therefore, I shall carry on as I am.
Going to be a daddy 2007-10-17 07:59:35 Praise the Lord! We’re expecting this black and white smudge will be born in April.
Read more:Going
Clean database humour 2007-10-19 13:39:54 From XKCD, true geek humour in the tradition of calling your children stupid names:
Read more:Clean
Talktalk modem settings 2007-11-13 04:43:26 Currently, the settings Talktalk recommend for modems are:
MTU: 14321
VPI: 02
VCI: 382
DNS (primary): 62.24.199.132
DNS (secondary): 62.24.199.232
Authentication: CHAP2
Encapsulation mode: PPP over ATM (PPPoA). VC-MUX2
1 Talktalk website, 13/11/2007
2 Talktalk website, 13/11/2007
Obscure python urllib2 proxy gotcha 2007-11-21 04:42:54 This is going to be very obscure, technical and humourless1, so unless you suspect your environment-set http proxy is messing with your python, you can stop reading now.
This is actually two problems, and three solutions.
Problem:
My python script bombs out with:
File "c:Python23liburllib2.py", line 506, in proxy_open
if '@' in host:
TypeError: iterable argument required
Solution:
Your ‘http_proxy’ environment variable must include ‘http://’ at the start.
Problem:
But why’s it happening in the first place? I’m not even using the environment-set proxy – I’m defining my own, thus:
proxy_handler = urllib2.ProxyHandler({'http': 'http://myproxy.net:3128'})
opener = urllib2.build_opener()
opener.add_handler(proxy_handler)
Solution:
Ah! But urllib2.build_opener() has a set of default handlers, one of which is a proxy handler. Guess what the default behaviour of the proxy handler is, wh
Feed reading 2007-12-12 07:05:11 This is a list of sites I have in my RSS newsreader (Thunderbird). I read them because I find them interesting. I don't agree with a lot of what's said on some of them, and don't condone the content of many of them, but here they are, nonetheless:
A List Apart — Practical web design
Antipixel — Jeremy Hedley's weblog
Baekdal.com — Usability
BBC News Magazine Monitor: How to Say — Pronunciation help
Collision detection — Weird research
Deleted by tomorrow — Lemuel Kolkava's blog from Slovakia
Joyeur — Joyent's blog
Light blue touch-paper — Computer security
OK/Cancel — Comic strip about usability
Schneier on security — Security related opinion
Schussman dot com — A PhD sociology student's site
SimpleBits — Dan Cederholm's site
Soldier ant — A man who works for Yahoo
The B-List — James Bennett's blog
We make money not art — Crazy stuff
Seat reservations for National Express / GNER 2007-12-18 07:14:32 I know that not many people read my website, but if this saves one poor soul from having to dangle on the end of as many automated phone systems as I’ve just done, then it’s worth it.
The advice comes in separate chunks for easy digesting:
Lots of train tickets come with automatic seat allocation and reservation- check your tickets. The following is for those who don’t have reservations.
If you’re travelling on the train at Christmas, book seats.
If you booked tickets with NationalExpress
(was GNER) by phone call them on 08457 225225 to reserve seats.
If you booked tickets with National Express (was GNER) on the new, National Express website, phone 08457 225111 to reserve seats. You may also be able to do it online, I don’t know.
If you booked tickets with GNER (now National Express) using their old-style booking system (run by thetrainline.com) then you have two choices:
Go to any station that has a ticket office and reserve your seats
Kingdom Letting Services 2007-12-14 07:30:11 We rented a flat in Dunfermline through KLS from October 2006 to May 2007.
Good points:
Efficient at signing us up and taking our money
Eventually repaid deposit in full
Bad points:
Two month notice period. (It’s in the contract, but one month is almost universal at other agencies.) Don’t be caught out.
Unconcerned by faulty fittings (light fittings, oven) and lack of smoke alarm
Require written proof that all utility bills and council tax are paid up to leaving date. This is unusual, as the utility contracts are not tied to the property, but to us. The council had to make a special exception for us and send us a screenshot of their payment database.
Conclusion: Avoid if possible. Read more:Services
, Kingdom
, Letting
Lunch by Nikki 2008-03-11 07:38:36 Yes, it’s another article about my lunch. This time there’s no photo, but the food’s just as good.
I’ve had wraps from Nikki
’s twice now, and I’m impressed by the amount of filling they manage to get in. The wrap isn’t always as neat and robust as you’d get in a supermarket, but that’s the price you pay for having it stuffed full of goodies. My chicken, tzatziki and mixed bean wrap was £2.50. Read more:Lunch
Text editor showstoppers 2008-03-06 09:00:03 I’ve tried a number of times to write up a comparison of my favourite text editors, showing which features each one has. However, this is a long and complicated job that nobody will pay me to do. As a result, I’m going to keep a list of the problems that cause me to switch away from a certain editor. This at least will stop me switching back and forwards between editors – not because they’ve improved, but because I’ve forgotten why they were bad.
The first entry goes to PSPad, which treats underscores and dashes as word-separators, so when selecting text, ‘ab-sol_utely’ looks like three words.
Automatic subdomains broken 2008-03-06 04:34:02 It looks like the DNS provider change has broken the automatic subdomain feature where is automatically routed to
Unless this is a feature somebody uses, I’m not planning to fix this.
Changing DNS provider 2008-02-27 09:00:24 The DNS provider for Kember.net is changing. This will provide me with fine-grained control over the domain as we change our email provider to Google. Read more:Changing
Emailing photos with T-Mobile Just Works 2008-02-25 01:00:00 I’m always impressed when things Just Work TM. I took a photo of my lunch with my phone camera and realised that I had neither a bluetooth dongle nor my phone usb cable to hand. On a whim, I pressed the send button and filled in my email address. Read more:photos
, Mobile
, Works
REISUB - the gentle Linux restart 2008-04-23 09:29:27 According to Lifehacker a frozen Linux
system that’s not responding to the Ctrl-Alt-Delete three-finger-salute can be restarted more safely than by pushing the power button, which is usually the next step.
Holding down Alt and SysRq (which is the Print Screen key) while slowly typing REISUB will get you safely restarted. REISUO will do a shutdown rather than a restart.
Dilbert redesign 2008-04-28 07:48:34 Dilbert.com has been redesign
ed into a web 2.0 colour crazy flash-based megasite.
On the up-side, the Dilbert people have also provided a no-frills, no-flash, no-clutter site and an rss feed. Why the extra site? For ultra-techies. Sweet. Read more:Dilbert
Unfashionable redesign 2008-05-06 15:26:27 According to Dean, nobody wants to know that I’m re-styling the site. When it looks like you’ve broken the Internet, don’t worry – it’s my fault. Read more:redesign
Eat no snacks 2008-05-09 07:42:28 I shall eat no snacks
for a week.
Start weight: 11 stone 12 lbs. Goal: 11 stone 3 lbs.
Current weight: 11 stone 12 lbs
CSS by Meyer 2008-07-01 12:00:00 Just a quick, and probably non-permanent, note to say I’ve just realised that a good proportion of the style on my website has been stolen from Eric Meyer
.
Recommend Site To A Friend
