Kirrus' Blog

Why I hate colds

Kirrus — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 15:00:32 +0000

I use an iPhone app called ‘Sleep Cycle’ to monitor my sleep patterns, and wake me whilst I’m naturally most awake, within a half hour window at the end of the night. It is really useful, and works really well, when I have a good night.

Having a cold robs me of a good night:

I really hate colds
Sleep Cycle iTunes page

To the Oxfordshire Police Force

Kirrus — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 19:51:49 +0000

I was impressed by the tobogganing policemen, for having a sense of humour, and getting involved with the local community. As a UK tax payer I whole heartedly endorse this use of my money.

I as not impressed by them being told off.

Have fun (or not, as the case is much more likely to be).

Ref: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/14/sledging_coppers/

Easy on the eyes

garreth — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:37:03 +0000

Just a quick post here…

Recently my eyes have been a little strained using the computer. I think it probably has something to do with the misplacement of my reading glasses somewhere at University. Hopefully I’ll find them before my Mum finds out and goes nuts lol.

Anyways to reduce browser related eye strain, I found a handy script for Greasemonkey (in Firefox) that kinda inverts the webpage/makes it less white and a bit easier to read (higher contrast). Its not perfect but it’s a handy hack until I can do some more hunting for my glasses!

Anyway enough text, here’s the links:

Invert web page colours (lifehacker)

Direct link to Greasemonkey script

Options are customisable, so you can restrict the websites it works on…

Oh, and here’s a screenshot:

Prevent Adobe Acrobat Crashing Firefox

garreth — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 06:04:19 +0000

I’m using Adobe Acrobat (for compatibilities sake only, please post your favourite PDF program in the comments below!), but I’ve been rather annoyed recently at it having a tendency to hang Firefox if I tried to open more than one PDF file from the internet.

Simple fix/hack – make Firefox save PDF files rather than open them.

Open Options (Tools \ Options in Windows and Edit \ Preferences in Linux)
Open the Applications tab
under ‘Adobe Acrobat Document’ change the value of the dropdown to ‘Save file’

OK the change
All done. Hopefully that’s one less annoying crash to worry about!

Ps get Session manager to save yourself loosing a window full of tabs or having to do a horribly manual procedure like recovering tabs from a accidentally closed Firefox window.

Books

Kirrus — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 22:45:26 +0000

I’m a bookworm. I love curling up with a cup of tea and a good book, to read.

So far at the moment, I’m re-reading two books, “The fifth elephant” – Terry Pratchett, and “Harry Potter and The Philosophers Stone” by you know who

Two books, because I got a bit into Terry Pratchett’s book, and then got bored, and I try to re-read Harry Potter every couple of years. Seems I am always re-reading it around Christmas..

The majority of my books I get from charity shops. A few I get from bookmooch.com, the rest I buy from amazon, or am given by relatives for christmas and birthday (The Company, by Max Barry was a Christmas present )

Where do you buy your books?

Christmas shopping

Kirrus — Tue, 24 Nov 2009 23:24:59 +0000

Christmas shopping today, in between watching episodes of the season 2 of Bones

If you want to get interesting fair-trade presents in London, check out “fair share”, at the end of bewick street, next to the red light district of picadilly circus (hope I’ve got the spelling right). Very cool little things, made in interesting and deprived places. Worth giving it a look, if you’re looking for something a little quirky as a gift

Quick interesting stuff for today

Kirrus — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 22:04:07 +0000

Addictive flash/iPhone game: canabalt
Elwoodicious just wrote an interesting price on elastic load balancing with amazon’s virtual servers: http://elwoodicious.com
RPS a uk pc gaming site/blog got mentioned on a BBC news article about the laws of war, and how they’re broken in computer games

That’s all for today!

Denial of Service attacks.

Kirrus — Sun, 22 Nov 2009 23:02:53 +0000

I don’t like them. But, at least some of them I can work around using bash, logfiles, awk, grep, tail, cut and netstat are handy tools

That’s all for today, I’m afraid. Not much else to talk about

Hopefully I’ll be able to produce some proper posts next week!

Long day

Kirrus — Sat, 21 Nov 2009 23:26:05 +0000

Hard day today. Can’t go into details, but emergency work always trumps scheduled work,unfortunately.

Not much fun stuff today. I’ve been re-reading crimsondark.com, a really good web-comic. Updates on Mondays, needs help funding hosting at the moment

Must post before midnight…

Kirrus — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 23:52:11 +0000

Got to be quick. Today is the closest ie come to failing the challenge (using my brothers post earlier to give me a break, hope that doesn’t break the rules!

Today, used the east-coast train. Sat opposite to an older Irish lady, who looked like she had a lot of money, and seemed a little rude, the little I spoke to her. Don’t know if she was or not, it was very early in the morning. Then spent the rest of the day preparing a server, to move a site onto it in a rush this weekend. Kinda out-grown shared hosting all of a sudden, being a Christmas targetted website! Mine because I phoned the customer with the “we need to turn you off” call fun fun. Anyway must post. Cutting it fine!