Category Archives: Uncategorized

What if you were invited to your own funeral?

25 Jul 2018 By in Uncategorized

I posted this a while ago.

But given I’ve had my uncle lose his fight for life, and my uncle’s mother-in-law also lose her fight for life, I wanted to reference this article again. This article might be about speeding, but there’s an important point within in — you have a chance to speak to your family. To your loved ones. Right now. Talk to them, call them, write to them. You have no idea whether they will be around tomorrow — or you, for that matter.

Blender Fox

Some chronic speeders were, and found the result very difficult to handle.

Turn on captions for other languages.

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The Linux commands you should NEVER use (Hewlett Packard Enterprise)

19 Dec 2017 By in Linux, Uncategorized Tags: ,

Source: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/insights/articles/the-linux-commands-you-should-never-use-1712.html

The classic rm -rf / is there, along with accidental dd‘ing or mkfs‘ing the wrong disk (I’ve done that before), but the lesser known fork bombs and moving to /dev/null are in there (I often redirect output to /dev/null, but not moved files into there. That’s an interesting way of getting rid of files.

Goodbye Apple, goodbye Microsoft… hello Linux

20 Nov 2017 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , 4 Comments

Not often I quote from a publication from Ireland, but this was quite an intriguing read. Someone who went from Windows to Mac to Linux (Mint)

Linux is everywhere – and will free your computer from corporate clutches

It was 2002, I was up against a deadline and a bullying software bubble popped up in Windows every few minutes. Unless I paid to upgrade my virus scanner – now! – terrible things would happen.

We’ve all had that right?

In a moment of clarity I realised that the virus scanner – and its developer’s aggressive business model – was more of a pest than any virus I’d encountered. Microsoft’s operating system was full of this kind of nonsense, so, ignoring snorts of derision from tech friends, I switched to the Apple universe.

It was a great choice: a system that just worked, designed by a team that clearly put a lot of thought into stability and usability. Eventually the iPhone came along, and I was sucked in farther, marvelling at the simple elegance of life on Planet Apple and giving little thought to the consequences.

Then the dream developed cracks. My MacBook is 10 years old and technically fine, particularly since I replaced my knackered old hard drive with a fast new solid-state drive. So why the hourly demands to update my Apple operating system, an insistence that reminded of the Windows virus scanner of old?

Apple is no different to Microsoft it seems.

I don’t want to upgrade. My machine isn’t up to it, and I’m just fine as I am. But, like Microsoft, Apple has ways of making you upgrade. Why? Because, as a listed company, it has quarterly sales targets to meet. And users of older MacBooks like me are fair game.

I looked at the price of a replacement MacBook but laughed at the idea of a midrange laptop giving me small change from €1,200. Two years after I de-Googled my life(iti.ms/2ASlrdY) I began my Apple prison break.

He eventually went for Linux Mint, which for a casual user is fine. I use Fedora and Ubuntu (and a really old version of Ubuntu since my workplace VPN doesn’t seem to work properly with anything above Ubuntu 14 – their way of forcing me onto either a Windows or Mac machine)

Source: https://www.irishtimes.com/business/technology/goodbye-apple-goodbye-microsoft-hello-linux-1.3295781

Reviving running and new goal

22 Oct 2017 By in Fitness & Health, Thoughts, Uncategorized Tags: , ,

I’ve been slacking in my running for a fair bit, and not doing my usual distances.

This last week, I’ve been through the painful process of saying goodbye to my uncle from the viewing in the mortuary, to the final viewing, the funeral, and the internment of the ashes.

Cancer is a horrible condition, indiscriminate and relentless. But it doesn’t always mean death. Research has allowed cancer patients a good quality of life compared to a few decades ago and it continues to grow as research progresses.

In 2014 I did the Royal Parks Half Marathon (completion post here). It was a painful experience, but one I’m going to attempt to go for again. I’m going to train up for another Half Marathon and this time nominate a cancer charity. The current primary charity I’m thinking of is Cancer Research UK.

CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it first appeared | Ars Technica

22 Sep 2017 By in Uncategorized Tags: , , , , , ,

The malware backdoor in this story is quite intriguing. They are targeting specific companies (Samsung, Akamai, Cisco, Microsoft amongst them) and only attempting the second level attack if they are detecting they are being installed there.

The advice mentioned in the article is that anyone who installed the software on their system should REFORMAT THEIR DRIVE. Quite an extreme recommendation. My suggestion – stop using Windows.

Source: CCleaner malware outbreak is much worse than it first appeared | Ars Technica

The foolproof way to never forgetting a name

18 Jan 2017 By in Uncategorized
The foolproof way to never forgetting a name

The Muslim Times

Source: BBC

By Renuka Rayasam

17 January 2017

In the early 1990s Mark Channon was working at a London bar, when a friend taught him a technique to remember names. At the time, Channon, who was an aspiring actor, could remember lines for a performance, but had a terrible memory for names.

One of the most powerful things is if you are able to walk into a room and use everyone’s names

With the name-memorisation technique, however, he was soon remembering customers’ names and drink orders even during busy nights. Within a few years he designed a game show for the BBC called Monkhouse Memory Masters where he would teach contestants memory strategies and they would then compete in memory games. By 1995 he had come sixth in the World Memory Championships, becoming one of the first International Grand Masters of Memory.

Today Channon teaches workers these memory strategies to…

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