50 year old Pepsi bottle

Posted: Saturday 06th of March 2010 at 13:59:46
1950's pepsi bottle
Hmm.. I wonder what this would have tasted like back in the day, and what it would have been like to buy one of these at a drive-in cinema sitting in some gaz guzzler with a fine beour.
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Google Buzz sucks

Posted: Tuesday 02nd of March 2010 at 20:59:17
Obligatory post :)
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Cloghvoolia

Posted: Sunday 21st of February 2010 at 23:19:48
Cloghvoolia abandoned house?

I wonder who owns this place. Its so eerie. There is a large 3 cylinder deezle generator in the shed but I'd say it hasn't been used in about 20 years.
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A somewhat convincing 419

Posted: Sunday 14th of February 2010 at 18:59:32
Normal 419's are full of bad English and the like but these guys put in quite a bit of effort.
For one they registered a domain name specifically for the purpose about a month ago, and filled in all the details as "Unknown" (sure nobody checks those anyway with the amount of .com registrations)

The email server hasn't even been done for spamming, which must mean they don't send out altogether too many of these spam emails, user agent all looks normal too. but of course it's still a scam.
From - Fri Feb 12 20:57:09 2010
X-Account-Key: account6
X-UIDL: 1265846874996.3079809968.1a4.Via
X-Mozilla-Status: 0001
X-Mozilla-Status2: 00000000
X-Mozilla-Keys:                                                                                 
Received: from nts1.komdadm.local ([210.17.133.162]:19822)
	by mail.pineapple.vg ([192.168.1.8]:25) with [XMail 1.26 ESMTP Server]
	id  for  from ;
	Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:07:52 -0000
Received: from info ([77.68.44.170]) by nts1.komdadm.local with
 Microsoft SMTPSVC(6.0.3790.3959);
	 Thu, 11 Feb 2010 08:05:23 +0800
Reply-To: 
From: "Corporal Williams Barnes"
Subject: MISSION!!!!
Date: Thu, 11 Feb 2010 00:07:47 -0000
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain;
	charset="Windows-1251"
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit
X-Priority: 3
X-MSMail-Priority: Normal
X-Mailer: Microsoft Outlook Express 6.00.2600.0000
X-MimeOLE: Produced By Microsoft MimeOLE V6.00.2600.0000
Return-Path: secure@usmc.mil
Message-ID: 
X-OriginalArrivalTime: 11 Feb 2010 00:05:24.0265 (UTC) FILETIME=
[E8A4A990:01CAAAAD]

Hi there,

How are you doing today? I am Corporal Williams Barnes, a US Marine currently 
serving in Iraq. I am actually one of the few Marines remaining in Iraq. We 
are waiting for executive order for our next deployment to Afghanistan this 
new year. I got your email from a business directory and I believe that you 
will maintain the level of confidence and trust that this mission I am about 
to inform you of require. Several months ago, my unit discovered some 
abandoned cash in the mansion of a militant ruler during a covert military 
raid. The total cash we discovered was $11.5 Million USD. We stashed all the 
funds in one trunk box and moved it secretly out of Iraq to Kuwait for 
safekeeping. We waited for several months to ensure that nobody is on our 
trail. Now, we need to move the money out of Kuwait. I am contacting you 
because we need your assistance in receiving the box for us on our behalf, and
 securing the cash until we return home from service. 
Please note that we cannot use any of our known relative or friend for this 
mission because they are listed as acquaintance on our military file and this
 will compromise the covertness of this mission. 

In order to proceed with this mission, we need the following details from you.

1. Your Full name                                                                                                                   
2. The address where you want the box to be delivered                                                                 
3. Your private telephone number where you can be reached 24 hours

If for some reasons you don't want to or can't help us, I want you to delete 
this message immediately and assume we never had this conversation. However, 
if you are going to fully cooperate with us in this transaction, we will 
compensate you with 25% of the total cash after the mission is accomplished. 
Like I said earlier, we are a GO and waiting for your response. This is a very 
serious deal and I wouldn't be asking for your help if I am not convinced that
this is not going to bring any harm to you or your family, or put you in a
 risky position. We have worked the kinks out and am very convinced this is 
gonna be successful.
Please note that I am sending this message via a secure email and cannot 
receive a response on that address. If you are interested in this mission, 
please send your response to williams.barnes@infantrymarine.com

Once we get a positive response from you with the info requested, we will 
proceed into the next step and I will give you further instructions. I hope I
 can rely on your sense of discretion. Write back soon buddy. 

In God we trust,

Bill

williams.barnes@infantrymarine.com

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HOWTO: Rip videos off RTE's iPlayer clone (linux)

Posted: Tuesday 02nd of February 2010 at 01:03:59
iPlayers and their look-alikes, they are the latest iteration of Web 2.0 annoyances and represent the broadcasting industry's attempt to keep control of their files and keep you dependent on their distribution platform. RTE, unlike some state broadcasters fill their iPlayer rip-off with ads. First they want your money and now they want your eyeballs too, but thats a rant for another day.

Get the clipID
This is in the little popup window, look through the source and you will find something like
javascript:playClip(1234567, null,228)
Thats your clipID

Next download your .smil file
While looking through their mountains of JavaShit code they use several functions to come up with the url but really its simply
http://dynamic.rte.ie/av/1234567.smil

Mplayer doesn't really like .smil files (not my version anyway) so you will have to manually extract the URL of the stream from the .smil, it looks a bit like this

rtsp://od2.rte.ie/1890/0501/name-of-shitty-tv-show.rm

mplayer likes this format better. now you can simply run
mplayer rtsp://url-goes-here.rm -dumpstream
and the resulting "stream.dump" gets placed in the current directory, for me it comes in at about 60kb/s but since rtsp is UDP-based packets can get lost if your connection is congested, so best to leave it alone while its doing it's thing.

(optional) Convert to another format
Now you should have a perfect copy of the video on your PC but some might like to use something besides the much hated RealMedia format. This can be done using ffmpeg, for example
ffmpeg -i stream.dump -vcodec libtheora -acodec libvorbis -ab 112000 -vb 512000 test.ogg
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Slashdot subculture

Posted: Saturday 30th of January 2010 at 01:33:29
A list of Slashdot memes used to be on its Wikipedia, but has since been removed. It definitely seems like a list worth keeping but unfortunately the resident horde of bureaucratic pedants on Wikipedia wanted it gone, so they got rid of it. Of course there is still a copy in the revision history so I dugg it out

As Slashdot has existed for so many years, it has developed its own subculture, especially running jokes and gags, and the continued obsession with repeating certain quotes or phrases, as well as the use of obscure puns. These include:

* Goatse (For years, a common tactic of Slashdot pranksters was to place comments with links which appeared to be article-relevant sites but were in fact links to the goatse.cx site, which featured nothing but a shock image.)

* Natalie Portman (Referencing her attractiveness, a meme that began on Slashdot around the time of the release of Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace)

* "Hot Grits" Troll (Referring to a probably apocryphal story about Southern women pouring hot grits mixed with lye into the pants of unfaithful male lovers to maim them; usually combined with Natalie Portman references)

* In Soviet Russia... (Referencing a hackneyed joke form popularized by the '80s comedian Yakov Smirnoff)

* Al Gore References (Joking references to Gore's semi-apocryphal claim to have "invented the internet", when the subject is the Internet. Headlines referring to Gore are also frequently tagged with "manbearpig", in reference to episode 145 of South Park.)

* “Imagine a Beowulf cluster of those” (Slashdot's early history coincided with the rise to prominence of the Linux-based parallel computing Beowulf system; speculation about powerful new computers arrayed in a Beowulf cluster quickly became an overused comment.)

* “You must be new here.” (Invoked frequently after a poster complains of a common Slashdot issue such as duplicate stories or perceived bias by certain editors) o This is sometimes answered with "No, I'm New Here" by a user named New Here.

* “But does it run Linux?” (especially regarding Linux devices)

* I, for one, welcome our new overlords (Referencing the famous quote from newscaster turned would-be alien invasion collaborator Kent Brockman of The Simpsons)

* “I , you insensitive clod!” which originates from a Calvin and Hobbes comic strip dated 1986-02-14.

* 1) « some action » 2) ??? 3) profit! [7]. Originates from the South Park episode involving the Underpants Gnomes and Harbucks Coffee

* Defective by Design (Referring to Microsoft products, DRM, or any technology that undermines the user's best interests)

* Series of tubes variations (Referencing Alaska Senator Ted Stevens's infamous explanation of the Internet as being a "series of tubes")

* ". Cancel or Allow?" (Referring to Windows Vista’s User Account Control, which is reputed to frequently ask for permission to perform an action.)

* "Stephen King is dead" variants (Referring to a popular early Slashdot troll which claimed to be posting breaking news that author Stephen King had died)

* "Move along, nothing to see here." (Referring to a frequent line by Officer Barbrady on South Park, sometimes to discourage rubbernecking and other times hoping to cover up his own incompetence. This line is actually from when articles were posted to the front page, but the 'more' page had not yet been created and thus displayed only the text "Move along, nothing to see here."

* Using "Young Sebastian" to refer to an innocent child.[8]

* The high system requirements for Microsoft Windows Vista.

* Reference to Steve Ballmer throwing a chair [9].

* References to William Shatner's halting vocal style when a user is deemed to have either overused or incorrectly used commas.

* Most of online polls seen on Slashdot include an option involving CowboyNeal.

* “In Korea, only old people use ” (origin)

* References to the Back to the Future trilogy.

* "itsatrap" tag and comment (sometimes "I have a bad feeling about this.."), reciting quotes from Admiral Ackbar and Han Solo from Star Wars. Usually used with articles describing a "generous" or "benevolent" act by a company or entity not usually known for either, and maybe as an allusion that the act has a negative ulterior motive. (example: "Microsoft To Open Source Some of Silverlight")

* “There. Fixed it for you.” Used after humorously or insightfully modifying the parent post.

* “All your are belong to us.” quoting a mistranslation from the video game Zero Wing for the Sega Genesis video game console.

* "Sharks with frickin' laser beams attached to their heads." Quoting Dr. Evil in Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery. Inevitably appearing in comments on any story involving laser technology. Often alluded to simply as "fricken' lasers".

* "BSD is dying" lengthy, frequently repeated troll post which explains that the BSD family of operating systems are moribund. The general form "Netcraft confirms it: is dying" might also be spotted. Example: [2]

* Libraries of Congress as a measure of data capacity. Such as in an article about a new hard disk capacity breakthrough "How many Libraries of Congress is that?". Relates to the amount of data that would be required to store a digitized version of the library.

* Car analogies.

* References to the release of game Duke Nukem Forever, which was first promised in 1997. This took the place of the earlier long delayed but eventually delivered Daikatana.

* Schrödinger's cat.

Additionally, the ID of the Slashdot user is sometimes regarded as a sign of how 1337 the user is, although this is not taken very literally. Having a user ID that is a prime number or other significant mathematical number is also valued. Some people have successfully sold their Slashdot ID (usually because it was a low 4 digit or smaller), although the website's policy on this isn't exactly clear. Slashdot assigns user ID numbers in the order that the user registered; i.e., lower user ID numbers correspond to older accounts. A 3 digit user ID was among a number of items that were auctioned for the benefit of the Electronic Frontier Foundation.

Recently, a Slashdot community poll indicated that the 'In Soviet Russia...' meme is considered the most popular in Slashdot's first 10 years. The grits meme received the least votes.

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WoW-themed Mountain Dew energy drink

Posted: Monday 25th of January 2010 at 02:11:20
When I saw something so ridiculous as a dedicated WoW drink I had to try it. Of course it is made of cheap, substandard mass produced American ingredients so it's never going to be healthy.

The taste was also rather disappointing, it tastes like a long discontinued red version of Wrigley's sugar free chewing gum that I used to be mad about in the early 1990's when I was just a wee boy. I would buy them from the local shop off a woman called Chrissie who used to give my neighbour free stale bread for the "doggeen"

Its horrible, artificial and never seen a real cherry much like the 90's chewing gum. Of course the average World of Warcraft player won't be bothered by such minor details as it tasting like ass or being made from industrial chemicals because it's endorsed by Blizzard and therefore it has to be good.

Tastes like ass
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Prosody XMPP server

Posted: Thursday 21st of January 2010 at 05:27:03
After the jabberd14 server being almost not maintained anymore for quite a while now it was starting to cause trouble and after trying to get TLS working in the thing I decided to give this 'Prosody' thing a go.

A monkey could set up this server, much easier than things like Jabberd2 and ejabberd, despite being written in an obscure scripting language called 'lua' which I never heard of. Config files are much more readable since they were not designed by the original bunch of overzealous XML loving fanboys who wrote the original Jabber servers.

It also comes with its own multi-user chat module, rather than some obscure unmaintained separate service one would need for jabberd14 and doesn't depend on MySQL.
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Happy Saint Stephenseseses day!

Posted: Saturday 26th of December 2009 at 15:01:29
Everyone always seems to forget St. Stephen, the poor fecker can't be happy about Jesus stealing all the fun from his day and all that's left for Stephen is a pile of stinking turkey bones and a distinct lack of presents.

Anyone who calls it "Saint Stephen's day" is obviously a West Brit who complains about how backwards this country is as a real Irish person would call it Saint Stephenses day or even better, Saint Stephenseses day

Of course the worst part about Saint Stephenseses day is the horrible dish of Stephenses Day Pie. You look at it and think, 'there's a nice Shepherds Pie I can't wait to tuck into'. But then you do and you discover whats inside

Little bits of left over turkey

And I hate turkey!
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O2 giving away free sim cards at Gatwick airport

Posted: Wednesday 16th of December 2009 at 19:52:46
You'd think there would be something against giving away free SIM cards in the police state that is the UK but apparently not. For a 10GBP top up they give you an extra 50 free international minutes.

Except the international minutes do not count for satellite phones - they specifically mention on the packaging that calls to satellite phones are not included. Not only that but they specifically mention Thuraya. It's almost like the person who wrote that notice did so purely to annoy me.

Still it is not a bad deal at all. Over here for 10e a month (bill paid) I only get a meagre 50 nationwide minutes that for some reason don't even count for "Lo-call" 1890 numbers and 076 VoiP numbers

People arriving at Gatwick from other countries with iPhones will be pissed off that they bought into the whole perma-locked phone thing.
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