Tetris, Two Books, Five Blocks
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From Twitter to Mastodon, on your Jekyll Home Page
I’ve been a member of the bird site since 2007. I have sent 39 thousand tweets, to a tiny audience of under 1000 followers and folow-ees (it’s a word now). My first tweet was sent from a dressing gown, on a Saturday, after opening an account, trying to stitch Twitter,...
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Reply to Sonia Sodha's "Stonewall risks all..."
I wrote to the Guardian letters desk, based on a number of messages I
received today. It’s the first time I’ve felt compelled to do so. I fully
expect the letter to disappear in to the ether, so I’m also publishing it
here.
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Dreamfall Chapters
The Longest Journey is by far my favourite adventure game. It’s a great blend of puzzles, voice acting, story and myth.
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Starship Titanic
Let’s start off on the right foot. I like me an adventure game. I like puzzles, I like object puzzles, occassionaly pixel hunting is fun, and nothing makes my day more than insult duelling.
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Obduction
Finally got around to playing Obduction, after having backed it on Kickstarter many moons ago. Obduction is a puzzle adventure from the original creators of Myst, and it’s mechanisms will be very familiar to anyone who has played any of the original games.
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Jo Cox's Death ... outside the bubble.
Jo Cox’’s Death … outside the bubble.Never read the comments.
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King’s Quest 2015
Let me start with a disclaimer. I’ve played and finished all the King’s Quests (with varying degrees of assistance) with the exception of King’s Quest 8. When we bought out first PC, the first game we bought for it was King’s Quest 6. And that was played over and over...
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Last Impressions - Tex Murphy - Tesla Effect
Well, I’ve just finished Tex Murphy.
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First Impressions - Tex Murphy - Tesla Effect
When the new Tex Murphy game was announced, I, like many others, was a little bit excited. I generally prefer regular adventure games to FMV heavy games, but I enjoyed playing Under a Killing Moon and The Pandora Directive last year. There’s an enjoyable blend of first person exploration, object...
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Tesco – Your Customer Service Is Broken
I /was/ hoping that I could write a nice piece about how Tesco pretty much gave me a free tablet, and how pleasant a thing it is.
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Zork Nemesis
Humm.
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Crowdfunding Is Nothing New
Whilst reading Fire In The Valley I came across the following, discussing how companies placed mail order adverts for products that did not as of yet exist:
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Book Review – Fire In The Valley
As a child of the 80s, and a learner of the 90s, I grew up in an exciting era in personal computing. I literally cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum, and then after learning how that worked inside and out, as a family we eventually upgraded to an Escom...
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Productivity – IDEs vs Text Editors is Just The Tip
A few months ago, Rob Conery wrote a blog post discussing his career choices, his choice of .NET over PHP and his reasons for doing so. For many .NET developers, most of this will ring familiar, they were already VB6 or ASP developers, and .NET was the next logical choice....
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Muplug – The Smallest UK USB Charger On the Planet?
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Newsnight and the Year Of Code – A Response
On the 3rd of February Michael Gove called for state schools to be run more like private schools. More exams, longer hours (that’ll at least please parents), and more sport and debating societies. I am becoming increasingly convinced that Gove thinks that there is only one way for schools to...
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Poppies, Future Soldiers, and Remembrance
This week in a press release the Royal British legion published a photograph of four children bearing big smiles, holding giant poppies wearing bright yellow t-shirts. On one of the t-shirts were the words, “My Mum Dad are Veterans”, where the remaining three bore the phrase “Future Soldier”. Today I...
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Folding UK Plugs
Anyone who has spent any time travelling with laptops in the UK will tell you there are two major bug bears – weight, and three pin plugs. Three pin plugs are a scourge upon the earth, their “safety” offset by the annoying bulk and tendency to prod, poke and tear...
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Virgin Media Replies With Respect To Their T&Cs
For those unfamiliar, Virgin Media has a potentially very wide reaching clause in their T&Cs (Section D, Part 1, Line h). I wrote about it here. I was quite surprised by how much noise this generated, journalists (who could be affected over this) have been discussing it on Twitter.
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Checking Your Work E-Mail on Virgin Media Residential Could Get You Cut Off
Update
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Lenovo X1 Carbon and Ubuntu 13.04
I’ve had the Lenovo X1 Carbon for a few months, and in all honesty, it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned (including Macbooks). Under Windows, everything works flawlessly, and I’ve had no problems. In Ubuntu, almost everything works out of the box with 13.04, but there are a couple of...
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Hats Off To Quinn At TapContext
For most people that publish Android apps, the following happens:
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Dear Microsoft – Stop Making a Hostile Environment
Attempting to keep up with the 21st Century, my new laptop came with Windows 8.
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FingerWorks TouchStream LP
Random musing.
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Barcamp Blackpool 4
New venue, new hotel, new socks.
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An Open Letter To Lenovo
I’ve emailed the following to Lenovo customer support, since I’m currently interested in Lenovo laptops, but this applies across the board:
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Developer Commandments
I just came across an old e-mail I sent back in 2010. The tooling may have changed a bit, but the ideas still hold true:
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AppsLib – Rather Rude…
Back in 2009, I developed a version of “The Massive Dev Chart” for Android under license by the original owners of the IP, “Digital Truth”. Last year they released their own version of the application and politely asked me to withdraw mine, to which I agreed (these had been the...
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An aside – Fonts on EInk Readers
For those that haven’t yet got the hint, I have a lot of love for my Kobo.
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A Grimm Testing Story
Sit down children, and let me tell you a story.
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Kobo Touch EReader
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The Battle of Sausage (hereafter known as the Battle of 2011)
Our hero had finished his journey down south,
sharing his culture, being quite loud.
And whist awaiting his return back up to the north,
accepted one final tribute, a breakfast of sorts.
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Dennis Ritchie vs Steve Jobs
Two titans of the computing industry passed away recently. Each respected for very different reasons, each with a very different philosophy on computing and life.
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Gadaffi Dead – BBC and NU.nl go for Gorefest
So, Gadaffi appears to have been finally hunted down and killed. We know this because it’s all the news channels are showing, and it’s all the news website can show.
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24… 72… Since Thursday with a Motorola Xoom
I have an apology to make. My Xoom arrived on Thursday, at which point I tweeted I would post a review of it after 24 hours. Well, I’ve been a little busy getting to grips with it and making it fit in to my daily workflow that… ah, who am...
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National Freelancers Day
Well, I didn’t see that coming.
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Android Tablets – In Reply to the @thehodge
This is in response to a twitter post from Dom Hogdeson, in which the Hodge asks:
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iPad – It’s just a big frickin’ iPhone, surely?
Since I’ve seen a few posts about the damn thing, I’m going to weigh in with my two pence.
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The Vote Now Show – Pure Filth
The Vote Now Show has been doing a sterling job of reporting on the events of the election campaigning for the past few weeks.
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Anti-Politics and the Naughty Step
Dear Tory and Labour politicians,
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Android Market, Copy Protection And the HTC Desire
There’s a fault with the HTC Desire in that it’s not showing copy protected paid apps in the Android Market. This is apparently due to HTC failing to the get the ROM signed by Google (or some similar such). If you’ve already got apps you’ve paid for on a previous...
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Almost 24 hours with the HTC Desire
Well, I’ve had this handset for almost 24 hours now, so its probably time to give a few first impressions.
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Digital Economy and the Pains of Democracy
I’ve just finished watching this evenings debate, votes and reading of the DEB. I’ll admit that I had lost hope a few weeks ago of this bill being voted down, but some things became clear as I was watching this evenings proceedings.
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UK Libel Laws
For those that don’t follow Private Eye, there’s been extensive coverage of the mess that is the UK Libel process for … ohh, forver. It’s quite a scary situation. Pretty much anyone can now be sued in the UK for saying anything about anyone anywhere in the world. Marcus Brigstocke...
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Static IPs in VMWare Fusion
It’s a simple problem, but one I keep forgetting how to resolve whenever I need to nuke a box. So in case anyone else needs to do it, here’s how to give a static IP to a guest OS in VMWare Fusion.
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Billed Under Client Code “Frosty”
Dear client,
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Barcamp Manchester
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Euro Hotels London – Place to Avoid
<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawlty_Towers" style="float: right;"> <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d6/Fawlty_Towers_title_card.jpg/250px-Fawlty_Towers_title_card.jpg" /> <br />Fawlty Towers from Wikipedia </a>
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Geek Girl Dinner 4
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An Android App In 20 Minutes
Wikimedia Photo
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Barcamp Blackpool
Photo by Josh Semens
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You know, XKCD is right…
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Fundamentalists Welcome
Our industry is passioned and opinionated. This is a statement of fact. Be it Emacs vs Vi, Linux vs Windows, iPod vs … errr[1], people often fall in love with tools, philosophies and companies. And this is fine. Within the industry we call them “holy wars”, since the genuine fundamentalists...
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First Techcrunch – Now Forbes
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Ecommerce Headaches – Prices & VAT
I felt this warranted a blog post.
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Android 1.6 – Brings Awesome Bar
The Android 1.6 API has now been released, and with it is coming one feature which outshines all others. The “Quick Search Bar” provides instant access to local phone and Google results in near real-time.
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Bolton Bazaar (7th – 8th August 2009) – Free Tickets
My partner, Cat Ashton is doing the photography for the Bolton Bazaar this year. The bazaar is a celebration of the cultural mix of Bolton’s communities. You can see some of the photographs from the rehearsals on this link.
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Ooops… TechCrunch just dropped the bomb on Spinvox
This just dropped into my RSS reader. By the look of the title, people weren’t supposed to know just yet. It’s still on the cached RSS feed, but not on the website so by now its probably common knowledge.
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Trucking Hell … In Bits
Back in January, I wrote about Trucking Hell, a entertaining book by “Bowen T Hunter” available through Lulu. It’s an entertaining book, if a little rough around the edges.
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Tweetup Manchester
Well that was a fun evening.
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Kian’s Rules For Freelancing
I occasionally make insightful, if somewhat obvious posts to the GeekUp community. One of my most linked to and pointed posts was in response to a common thread: “how to set up a freelancing business”. I formed “Kian’s Rules For Freelancing”, and present them here for your consideration. The old...
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Conferences, Geek Events, etc.
I admit that I have been somewhat absent from community offerings for the past few months. The projects that I am currently working on have been a little hectic, with some appropriate last minute deadlines changes.
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Geek Girl Dinner – Manchester
Last night Cat took me to the Geek Girl Dinner in Manchester. What’s a Geek Girl Dinner? Well most tech events have a heavy male ratio and bias. Geek Girl Dinners (GGDs) aim to change that balance by only allowing boys to attend that are invited by the girls as...
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UK Votes
Reposted with permission. I believe in this strongly:
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How to radicalise a middle class white man.
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American Soda GEEK Discount
I’ve been in discussions with one of my fine clients American Soda securing a discount for our the needs of fellow geeks. They’re also hoping to sponsor some community events in the future, so if you’re running a BarCamp, local user group or some such give us a ping.
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Coffee – Red Roaster, Brighton
It’s a pre-requisite of almost all technical people – a good supply of coffee. I’ve noted in t’ North that our supply of high quality caffine has fallen off completely. Yes there are Neros, Starbucks and Costas, but these provide only mediocre caffine quality. Really high quality coffee can only...
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Books For Bricks
Sometimes the world just decides to drop a large brick on you. Here at Tentacle Towers, we’ve had the work bag and laptop nicked one month from a Barcamp, followed by a break-in this month.
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Fool me once, shame on — shame on you. Fool me — you can’t get fooled again.
I was slightly entertained by this, so I thought I had better share. It’s a good example of how a central data store shared by a number of third party services can be effected by one small mistake.
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Trucking Hell
Trucking Hell is the second book by “Bowen T Hunter” and has had something of a turbulent history, not unlike the author himself. The book was scheduled to be published through a real bona-fide publisher and everything. Unfortunately due to one thing and another it didn’t happen, so Hunter was...
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New Phishing Scam – Please Read
I’ve just been forwarded details of this rather intricate phishing scam from Aquarion. Please read the details, it’s subtle and not your usual muppet-catching routine.
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New MBP, Developer Tools Not Year Ready
I’ve just got off the phone from a Product Specialist at Apple Care.
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Barcamp Sheffield
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Took You Long Enough…
I had a small revelation over the weekend.
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I'm Kian Ryan
TLDR; I sport, code, make stuff, and play adventure games.
Stay safe. Go Make. Trans rights are human rights. Still get f-ed Putin. Might need to stock up on milkshakes.
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