Today at work during my lunch break I quite fancied a quick go on Mario Kart DS, I have been quite addicted to Mario Kart Wii recently, especially the online play and having a DS and copy of MK at work the only thing I was lacking was a WiFi connection.

I take my Mac to work and connect to the Internet via a wired LAN connection, this leaves my Mac's WiFi card free to use for sharing my Internet connection with my DS. There are a few pitfall's that one can encounter when doing this so this news post is just a quick guide written in the hope that someone else may stumble upon it and find it useful.

Read More...

0 Comments

I think by default many of us make the assumption that we have unique qualities, quirks and opinions. Perhaps apart from those who strive to be like the rest of the crowd most of us notice these traits of our character and can become quite fond of them. I'm talking about things like if, for instance, you are the type of person who remembers small details about past conversations and gets satisfaction from recalling them or if you have a particular unusual outlook on something or if a quality such as kindness provokes feelings in certain situations you feel others would not know.

There are many many such things, none of which alone appear to be too unique for others to share but in total you would assume the chances highly unlikely, nearing impossibility to share near every such thing, hundreds of them, with another person.

However, how would you feel if you discovered just that, a person so similar in such respect?

Read More...

0 Comments

As you drive your car onto my drive there is quite a pointy square piece of metal which the gate uses as a stopper once closed. The obvious not to do is drive over this with your car and up until yesterday that plan had been working fine. However... lazily turning onto my drive has probably produced many near misses and this eventually a near hit.
I pulled on my drive to be greeted by a loud "psssst". Oh how very annoying for a such a marginal error to have caused a large problem. Fortunately my spare tyre was brand new, I bought it only a few months ago to replace the front tyre which has become rather fond of a screw it found somewhere along the road and has decided to keep it firmly lodged inside it. Any attempt to remove it an the tyre will hiss at you. Anyway, enough digression. I had not got around to replacing the front tyre due to being unable to find the jacking point for the front wheel which according to many searches on the Internet is a pain to find.
However... desperate times forced me to have another luck and discover the very jacking point for the rear wheel which lead me to discover the jacking point for the front wheel also which is indeed handy information.
So the wheel/tyre is all changed and well and now I need to find a place, perhaps later today to get a new tyre and part with some money for the pleasure.

0 Comments

My car is out of action for this week and possibly Monday too, some problem most likely related too wheel bearings who knows? Anyhow I have been forced to travel on the bus like I did in the "good old days". It's always the case that you never realise how much you like something till it's gone. As humans we have a wonderful tendency to take anything and everything for granted. Well, true to this rule I now find myself realising just how terrible the buses are. Unreliable, annoying stop changes, cold, uncomfortable, no privacy and highly inconvenient. Needless to say I can't wait till my car is fixed.

Whilst travelling on the bus I listen to music for the entire journey. I do this for two reasons, because I enjoy listening to music and because I don't enjoy listening to a commentary of last nights TV programming, football results or general gossip all wrapped up in bountiful swear words and a thick black country accent to further drive one insane. However, two nights ago someone was having a rather different conversation. It must be noted that this is the first time I have ever heard such a conversation on a bus and so I consider it a great rarity.

Read More...

1 Comment

I have a 900Mhz Pentium M laptop which should be able to run DVD's and other videos with ease using Totem on Ubuntu. After installing all necessary codecs for the default gStreamer backed I found it does not, not only was it inefficient causing high CPU load (when it worked properly) but most of the time it failed to render the videos with my laptops hardware, using software rendering instead causing even higher load pixelation and near unwatchable fullscreen playback.

The fix however was simple, move to the totem xine backend. Here is the one magic line that will do this, install codecs and allow you to watch DVD's.

Code:
sudo aptitude install totem-xine libxine1-plugins

Now my laptop plays back videos with little more than 30% CPU load, the way it should be

0 Comments