Love Apple or Hate them, You cannot ignore the fact that Steve Jobs & Steve Wozniak did a LOT to change the face of modern technology, and any fan of the modern phones, tablets, mp3 players, etc should take a moment today to remember Steve Jobs who died last night.
We here at the Ninja Temple wanted to take a minute to remember Mr Jobs.
This post has been brought to you By Windows 7, And trying to set it up to work happily with a Gentoo Server & Linux NAS.
Well, Just trying to get it to work in a useful productive way really. Or put simply, in deference to Microsoft, to just not FAIL.
CNDoes anyone remember the old TV series (Or the book it was based on) called “Logan’s Run?” You know the one set in the future where every person has a small jewel in the palm of their hands that starts flashing when they reach a set age. I think we need something similar today, not to “put to sleep” those who reach thirty, but have a cut off age when people are no longer allowed to get new technology.
Let me tell you know why I have decided that this is the course we should follow. This morning before going to work, I popped over to see my parents as I’m looking after their dog for the weekend. Now my Mother has just got herself a new mobile phone, and decided to go for a “smart phone“. So just as I was leaving she asks me “I’ve got a weird shape thing on my phone, what’s it mean?“, I enquire to what it looks like “its a sort of thing, with a bit, and another thing” *turns phone at different angle* “It kinda looks like old video tapes”
I took the phone off her to check and informed her she had a voicemail, and if she clicked on it she could hear the message. So she clicked on it and started listening to the first time use recording, you know the one that tells you how to set a pin, and use the voicemail system. Only my mother removed the phone from her ear as the recording explained what to do “There’s a woman talking about pin’s and hash and stuff, I don’t know what she’s on about”
I sighed and explained you had to listen to the whole message to understand what she was saying, but not to worry as I’ll set it all up later for her. It was then that the voicemail started playing. I know this from my Mothers half of the conversation. “Oh HI, I was just going to call you.” “hello?”, “oh, you’ll be arriving then, do you need a lift” I interjected here “Its a voicemail” I was shusshed with “The woman said I had a message“. “right see you there then“. For my sanity I tried again “Its a voicemail, a recording!”
I then left the house laughing my head off as my mother was saying goodbye to the recording. Old people should not be allowed technology!
http://xkcd.com/627/
Well yesterday saw the release of the alpha code for Diaspora, So today I am playing about with it to see what it can do.
“What is Diaspora?”
“Good question. According to the Diaspora Team. ‘Diaspora is an awesome, distributed, open source social network in the making from some young hackers at NYU.‘”
It looks interesting so far, and I have only managed to break it and pull up error screens a couple of times.
Yesterday I gave in to the masses, who had been giving me a hard time for not going to the doctor with my “Vampire Eye“.
So I woke up yesterday, got dressed up in my Ninja Gi, loaded up with all the weapons and tools of the Ninja, and prepared for the dangerous, and arduous task that is trying to book an appointment at my medical centre. And was I in for a surprise.
I get ready with the house phone, my mobile, & a scripted PBX to attempt the impossible first step, actually getting hold of someone. I dial and……. I get an automated welcome message, welcoming me to the medical centre, informing me my call may be recorded for training purposes and telling me i shall have options to pick from. WOW. My Doctors place has got themselves a decent phone system that’s not some old woman sat at a desk moving wires about.
I then get to the menu system of the phone call. “Press one for…..” there then followed a huge list of all the possible reasons you may press option one. Then SILENCE, I waited, and waited, but still there was silence. “OK? so the first part of the menu is press 1 or press 1” I pressed 1, and the phone started ringing and I got a real person. Yes their automated phone messaging system goes. Press 1 and get person. They have managed to add a pointless step in the process of PHONE-RINGS->ANSWER-PHONE.
I get my appointment and dutifully turn up at the surgery on time. Only its all different, its bigger, better, and different. In fact its like they had built a huge new building next to the original, then knocked down the original to make additional car parking spaces. Well the old place had been there for dozens of years, and was a bit small and dingy.
I enter the posh new building to be greeted by a large wall mounted flat screen TV with the word “Welcome” on it in a button like box. I then touched the button on the screen like you do, it changed to two buttons [Male] & [Female] “Wow, they really gone to town on making the patients feel comfortable while waiting, they even supply company for you“. I quickly pressed the [Female] button, it now asked for a D.O.B. “wow. I wonder if they ask for my preferred hair colour and such?“ I hit a few random options for a birth date, and waited for my order to arrive.
The screen in front of me said “Welcome Mrs ***** ****** ******, please take a seat in the waiting area.” *SHIT* its a login system, not a online ordering thing. I hit reset, and put my details in, and made my way to sit innocently in the waiting room. Where there was an even bigger flat screen TV informing me that “smoking is bad” “unsafe sex is bad” “yada yada yada” and occasional beeping and telling someone they should go to room **. Modern technology is great, instead of the old yellowing posters telling me everything fun is bad for me, they now get to do it in wide screen, high definition.
After all that, the Doc told me nothing I didn’t already know, and I was in with him for about 3 minutes. This is why I never bother going to see the Doctor.
Well today I have discovered one of my greatest wishes has almost come true. Someone has built a working lightsaber.
OK, I realise its not a real lightsaber as in the weapon of the Jedi and all that, But it will set fire and burn flesh and objects. Its portable & hand held. So I think its heading in the right direction. And I want one.
Some Technobable! (more…)
Due to a very lucky (for me) set of events at the weekend I now have a PS3. (On top of having a XBOX 360, Wii, PS2, DS, Saga Mega Drive, etc.)
My eldest Nephew decided to watch a film with his girlfriend Saturday night. He got the film, and just before going to watch it he remembered the video lead for his PS3 was at a friends house, and he was unable to retrieve it till Monday. So he popped to an acquaintances house, who he knew was after money and had a spare lead.
My nephew being who he is, ended up buying a full PS3 system off him, since the price was so low. He used it that one evening to watch the film, with the intention to sell it on the following day. Only since he bumped into me before he had a chance to sell it on, I picked it up from him for pennies.
I now need suggestions of good games that are only out on the PS3.
Last night was LOI. And it was a good evening, well OK. It was a good evening apart from a case of “Too many cooks spoil the broth!” which I may talk about in a different post. Someone remind me about it.
Just before the end of the evening (We were doing a 1st) during the bit where the W.M. gives the Candidate the normal documents, one of the P.M.’s who is a Mentor at one of the Lodges who make up the LOI stands up to inform us of recent changes, that require “NEW & IMPROVED” words to be added there. He opens his magical book that no one else has to show the words, and suggests that everyone write them down for further use.
So at the close of the evening there were roughly thirteen people trying to make a note of a couple of pages of writing. The only problem was, no one was prepared. So between them they were able to find a semi-functioning pen, and a small piece of torn paper they found under a bench (Approx. one inch square). In other words they were stuck.
At this point I wonder over to where they are gathered, unlock my iPhone, load the PDFscanner app and quickly scan the two pages of text. Convert them into a PDF document, and email it to several people who’s email addresses I have on me.
You know. Sometimes Technology just Rocks!
You may remember a short while back I experienced a lot of problems putting a *nix flavour onto my personal laptop, and in the end to my great shame resorted to replacing windows xp on there. Well thankfully my plans to commit seppuku have been placed on hold, and the dreaded Microshite OS removed from the laptop.
The name of my saviour is Sabayon Linux. A lovely flavour of linux, based on gentoo. Only with a more user friendly, not have to compile everything from scratch front end. It even came with the correct drivers for my wireless card.
So I now am back on track, I have linux on my machine, and just need time now to fully set it up with all the apps i use.
CN
I recently decided to remove windows off my home laptop, and like the techie I am, I decided to do this without checking for driver compatibility. I just jumped right in with the install (OK I will admit since my laptop has a hidden partition with a drive image on I did have a fall back to get it factory reset!)
I’ve never really used this OS before, and it looks good so I fancied giving it a try. I also had recently been given a 8Gig USB pen that’s both a Live Version & Install Disk. So the installation was done, and it worked pretty good with just a few bits of hardware not compatible. Unfortunately one of the bit was the wireless (which is an important part of a laptop.) Now it did very helpfully inform me i could get the windows drivers and do some magic with them to make a wrapper driver which may work. It seemed a bit much work for an OS i am not really familiar with. So the project was put on a back burner with a future plan of dual booting with opensolaris.
OK. thinks I… The Laptop version of Old Faithful. So I grab a spare disk thats lying around and install ubuntu, after all it does seem to handle all drivers fine. Ok, make that all drivers bar acer weird propriety wireless devices. The best it could offer me was an unstable beta that may or may not work. At this point I gave up. I may be a geek & Linux Lover, but i’ll keep windowz on the laptop and make sure when I upgrade it, I get a *nix friendly one.
Reboot the laptop, wait for the acer logo to popup and hit ALT F10…. Nothing… Ok I missed, reboot ALT F10…. Nothing… WTF? “Arggghhhhh!!” of course, the new OS’s I’d installed had overwritten the acer MBR removing the ALT F10 recovery flag. “That’s no problem!” I had sensibly burnt off the recovery disks when I first got my Laptop. So Reboot with recovery disks in, and watch as it ghosts a copy of my main partition back onto the hard drive. “YES!“… Done.
Now. I like the ALT F10 ability. Its quite handy, and saves you having to hunt out where you stored your recovery media. So I wanted it back. Its bloody handy. Luckily you have everything you need (bar one bit of software) to reclaim your acer MBR.This is what you do.
And you should be all back and running again.
Now for days of microsoft updates!!!!
CN
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Based on a work at three-ninjas.co.uk
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