Fridge water filters

Posted on August 13, 2007 by Simon

Just recently our fridge water filter needed replacing and because the recommended supplier (some place in Birmingham) was out of stock I decided to look around. After a bit of searching, I found this site -American Fridge Filters.
They were about 20 pounds cheaper than the place in Birmingham, replied to my enquiry quickly, had the filter in stock and shipped it promptly. All in all, excellent customer service and I’ll be using them in 6-9 months when the filter light comes on again.

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Using vmware server console on Mac OSX

Posted on August 5, 2007 by Simon

Just recently I’ve been experimenting with VMWare Server on a Linux host and although it’s easy enough to use the console to manage it from a Windows PC, I normally only have my aging PowerBook to hand.
Since there’s no proper OSX console application for VMWare (why not!?), I needed to figure out a different way to manage the virtual servers.
Two options immediately spring to mind – (1) Fire up Virtual PC, Start Windows, Use the Windows console, or (2) Find a way to use the Linux VMWare console.

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Programming language that’s a little bit different

Posted on June 16, 2007 by Simon

Came across this tonight, I’ve seen lolcats before, but not the programming language lolcode.
http://lolcode.com/

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Reading: Dragon by Clive Cussler

Posted on May 8, 2007 by Simon

I’ve been reading Dragon by Clive Cussler – it’s a good book. Plenty of action and despite not having read any other “Dirk Pitt novels” (he’s one of the lead characters) it didn’t seem to matter at all and I was able to still get into the story.

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Flying bananas

Posted on April 5, 2007 by Simon

How’s this for a truly bizarre project? http://www.geostationarybananaovertexas.com/
For me, this raises a few questions though, the first of which is Why? The second is WHY?
I had a quick look through the site and in the legal bit it says there are basically very few laws that apply for traffic between 25,000m and “space” – but they have to get it to an altitude of 25,000m first.. and then what about it coming back down afterwards? I can just imagine a pilot report seeing a giant banana in their flightpath :)

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Merging two hashrefs in Perl

Posted on March 3, 2007 by Simon

I came across an interesting and very simple way to merge the contents of two hashrefs today. A hash is made up of pairs – a key and a corresponding value. As an example, the following can be pasted into a shell session on most machines that have perl installed.
perl -MData::Dumper -le ‘
$x = { a => 1, b => 2 };
$y = { c => 3, d => 4 };
$x = { %$x, %$y };
print Dumper($x);
‘

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Shartak – now with added music

Posted on February 24, 2007 by Simon

Before you start complaining, I didn’t go crazy and add a dodgy midi track to the Shartak website. I stumbled across a forum thread this evening and apparently Shartak players are forming their own record label.
Once finished, the Heads Down tracks will be available at a MySpace account – http://www.myspace.com/headsdownriot
*EDIT* URI of MySpace account changed – 3rd March 2007.

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New mobile phone

Posted on February 22, 2007 by Simon

I finally got around to switching to a new mobile phone and decided to try a Windows Pocket PC phone instead of the more traditional style. It works pretty well most of the time, but it has crashed once already in the couple of weeks that I’ve had it.

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Optical Illusion

Posted on December 22, 2006 by Simon

Just been sent a link to a rather neat optical illusion. http://mightyillusions.blogspot.com/2006/12/happy-kettles.html
Very clever.

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Time to change mobile phones

Posted on December 18, 2006 by Simon

I’m completely out of my old mobile contract now, any tariff change will result in a contract renewal for 12 or 18 months, and my ‘would-likes’ have changed so the time has come to investigate changing mobile phone providers.
I’ve been fairly happy with Orange for the last year and a bit, with the exception of keep getting these stupid resellers phoning me up pestering me about upgrading my handset and thus renewing my contract. I must admit I got quite rude with the last couple that phoned.

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