www.youtube.com/watch

This Simple Act Made Cancer Patients Forget Their Troubles, if Only for a Moment - Cheezburger.

Hands up if you remember wasting hours of your childhood on this game. :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VyN7OtObuvk

Happy 20th Birthday, Doom! - YouTube.

The day shall soon be upon us. The day of the final regeneration….

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TWwYLlcPekA

▶ The Time of the Doctor trailer - Doctor Who Christmas Special 2013 - BBC - YouTube.

If you're not on CyanogenMod there is still hope however, as Dutta revealed over the weekend that he has it working on any rooted device running Android 4.4.1, and may have a way for it to operate even on hardware that's not rooted. Koush has been a busy guy lately, also revealing that Google may add Android-to-Chromecast mirroring soon and releasing a new version of his media streaming AllCast app, we almost feel bad about hoping the Cast SDK adds on a few new opportunities.

via CyanogenMod 11 Screencast video recording is as easy as taking a screenshot.

Although Dungeon Defenders can still be installed off Play, it is not possible to install the additional data files needed to run it, so you can’t play it any longer. There was, for a while at least, a beta of the next DD game, but I didn’t catch it in time.

Be careful out there this morning, it's really foggy. Visibility is down to a few hundred metres in places...

In October, the tech industry's biggest companies petitioned congress to reform the US Government's surveillance policies. Now, the firms are taking their pleas global. Microsoft, Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Yahoo and AOL (Engadget's parent company) have banded together to ask the world's governments to reassess its intelligence practices. This time, however, the firms are presenting more than a strongly worded letter - they've laid out five core reform principals, detailed both on an official website and in full-page ads in national publications.

The breakdown is fairly straightforward; the group asks that government’s authority be imposed with “sensible limitations on their ability to compel service providers to disclose user data,” and that they give more consideration to the link between privacy and trust required by technology providers and their users. The group is also demanding increased oversight, accountability and transparency, outlining a system that allows companies to publish the nature and frequency of user information requests and attached to a “clear legal framework” with “strong checks and balances.” Governments outside of the US are encouraged to work together too, to create a “robust, principled and transparent framework” to guide requests for data across jurisdictions. The group of tech giants also wants these changes to respect the flow of information, and ensure that service providers are able to build infrastructure on a global scale, without needing to store data inside the country for the sake of national government inquiries.

“Unchecked, undisclosed government surveillance inhibits the free flow of information.” Twitter CEO Dick Costolo writes on the movement’s website. “The principles we advance today would reform the current system to appropriately balance the needs of security and privacy while safeguarding the essential human right of free expression.”

An open letter to Washington underlines the campaign, noting that “the balance in many countries has tipped too far in favor of the state and away from the rights of the individual.” The companies pledge to keep user data secure with encryption technology and by fighting unreasonable government requests, but change needs to start from within. “Reports about government surveillance have shown there is a real need for greater disclosure and new limits on how governments collect information.” Mark Zuckerberg stated. “The US government should take this opportunity to lead this reform effort and make things right.” Indeed, the letter asks that Congress do just that: “take lead and make reforms” that would bring the proposed changes to fruition.

While the firms openly acknowledge the government’s need to take certain actions for the public good, it clearly states that the current laws governing surveillance are no good, and may even be hurting future adoption of new technologies. Microsoft’s Brad Smith puts it best, “People won’t use technology they don’t trust. Governments have put this trust at risk, and governments need to help restore it."

Don’t drink from a beer you’ve just dropped into a river. Here’s why:

John Macdonald Develops Mystery Growth From Beer Can He’d Dropped In River In Australia (PICTURES).

Endomondo, ZR

Completed the main story of ZR Season 2 finally. A couple of side missions left, then I can start working on the Race Missions, Airdrop Mode and Supply Missions. Supply Missions will be last because you don’t get any materials, and the only reason for running them is to get the hoarding achievements.

Related articles

• Fitness app Endomondo surpasses 20M users, 1B miles logged, and is now profitable (venturebeat.com)
• Endomondo raises $800K to make cardio training virtually social (venturebeat.com)

Hungry?

Two days this week I’ve driven to work in the early hours (~6am) and both days I’ve encountered some really dangerous behaviour.

On Monday, outside Wembley Central station (http://goo.gl/maps/AFHp0), a cyclist cycled along the pavement, then dives into the road without looking back or signalling. I’ve said it before, and I’ve said it again. Road users on two wheels complain about not getting respect on the road. If you behave like this, how can you expect respect from other road users? I have more gripes with motorcyclists than pedal cyclists, but the majority of my complains about the two-wheeled road users are the same: lack of signalling, darting in and out of traffic, jumping red lights, riding too close to car users then complaining when they are hit by wing mirrors.

youtu.be/_TF5BJjb9…

On Tuesday, I’m at the junction between the A504 Finchley Lane and the A1 Great North Way (http://goo.gl/maps/2HFBT). The A504 is a black spot for queue jumping, and I had a VW queue jump me at the junction - violating road markings in the lane which indicate it is right-turn only. Then, if that wasn’t bad enough, further along, at the junction with the A504 Church Road/B552 Parson Street/A502 Brent Street (http://goo.gl/maps/MYemg), this same car then jumps the red lights.

youtu.be/j4NMIeH6U…

Oh, and both were caught on my dashcam. Will be passing these onto the police. Whereas there’s little they can do about the cyclist, they can at least take the VW off the road, or at least put some points on his/her license (I hope)

I’ve finished studying for the first of two exams for the LPIC-1 certification, and I have found some exam questions (about 600 of them), and have started to go through them.

The first thing that struck me about these questions is either I’ve not been studying all the topics, or some topics have been removed out of the exam. For example, some of the questions reference LILO, but according to the LPI page on the 101 exam, there’s no mention of LILO (but there is mention of Grub 2 and Grub Legacy). Then again LILO and Grub Legacy are quite limited by today’s standards, so it could be that they really are removed out of the exam. Guess I’ll have to take that chance.

Related articles

• Pass the LPIC 1 Exam (razercattleya.wordpress.com)
• LPI Linux Certification in a Nutshell (razercattleya.wordpress.com)
• LPI study material (community.spiceworks.com)
• Revisiting Certifications (javacodegeeks.com)
• Lilo (wiki.archlinux.org)

Memory is a funny thing, isn’t it?

nypost.com/2013/11/3…

Had a very eventful weekend, and my entire Sunday was taking up trying to figure out a weird symptom on my linux installation.

In the weeks leading up to today, I used to get strange behaviour from my Fedora box. The behaviour resulting in an error being detected by the ABRT tool, regarding a null reference. Sunday, my laptop conked out and refused to startup. I tried reinstalling Fedora, Debian, Mint, openSUSE, and even OpenMandriva – none of them could complete the installation. They either failed with error part way through, or hung completely.

I decided to try installing Windows XP over everything. That failed with an IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO blue screen. Then I tried Windows 7. That installation succeeded, and I started running updates. Then it blue screened me again. This time MEMORY_MANAGEMENT was the message. Hmmm. So, could it be that one of my memory chips was dodgy? That would account for why it was intermittent. I have 2x 2GB chips in my laptop, so I took both out and rebooted. No splash screen. Good. That’s expected.

Put in one of the chips. Booted, BIOS showed 2GB. Good, that’s OK.

Took it out and put in the other 2GB. No splash screen. Looks like that’s the dodgy one. I dug out my 1GB from when I got my laptop originally, and put that back into the other slot, so I get a 3GB installation. Checked boot. Splash screen displayed. Good. So I then ran a BIOS memory check, and all 3GB passed.

So then I decided, maybe I should try doing a restore, in case the dodgy memory was the cause of my failure to restore previously. It worked fine, so now I’m back up with my previous setup. :D

Cause: Faulty 2GB memory

h7FE74136 (500×458).

If you go blind from monitoring my internet activity, that's not my fault. It's yours for eavesdropping on my activity in the first place.

www.youtube.com/watch

Hope you’re didn’t eat from here….

Anything is better than X-Factor.

Making progress now in the game. Finally hit my first PvP area. Haven’t tried it yet, though. In addition, I’ve finally decided to try the Blood Arena area. I can get a few monsters in, but die pretty quickly. Some of the monsters there are quite tough. Others, fall quite easily. The more often and better I fight in the arena, the better my score, and the better the prizes I collect at the end of the week.

Related articles

• Dungeon Hunter 4 (blenderfox.com)
• Gameloft Updates Dungeon Hunter 4 with Blood Match Weekly Tournaments (news.softpedia.com)