Following on from the time travelling theme in my Back to the Future post comes this documentary about the Irish Mail route from London to Dublin that operated from 1848. The documentary was originally broadcast in 1954. It has this lovely old fashioned feel to it. It’s amazing that it took up to 2 days to travel between those cities but that was quick before regular flights were a reality. Also be sure to read about the Chester and Holyhead Railway and this page about tunnel crossings across the Irish Sea. Who knew Irish trains didn’t use standard guage tracks […]
Games
Back to the Future: GTA Style
A heavily modified Grand Theft Auto 4 game that lets you be Marty McFly and drive a DeLorean. Nice. Time travel? Oh yes! It isn’t one single mod so unless you grab his install directory you won’t be playing it any time soon, sorry if I got your hopes up! (thanks Gammagoblin!)
Youtube
Gary Connery, wingsuit landing without a parachute
Gary Connery, a 42-year-old daredevil, plunged from a helicopter in a death-defying jump before landing in an area containing 18,600 cardboard boxes. That’s a lot of boxes but when you see how small they are from the height he jumped from you’ll see how dangerous the stunt was and get an idea how crazy brave he is. Wow! Thanks Matt for the link!
Games
Deepak induces a headache
Warning! If you’re prone to headaches and bright lights hurt your eyes you’re in for a rip roaring pain the head if you click here. Deepak fights Robots is a zany platformer that reminds me of Bubble Bobble (probably because it’s single screen, walk off one side, walk on the other side) and features a rather interesting glaring colour palette. It’s a simple game that sucks you in and while you can buy an offline version there’s a free web version too. I bought it, I Like it. Give it a go! No nasty DRM either which is always a […]
Funny
Star Wars Maybe?
My 5yro son loves Star Wars and he loves that song. I think he’ll love this video.
Linux
Where does Nautilus store it’s folder share info?
Using a GUI is nice and all but sometimes I want to know where configuration data is stored. The Gnome file manager, Nautilus, allows Linux users to share folders on a Windows network. Users of other operating systems will find this hard to believe but before this it was difficult to do as you needed to be an administrator and edit a configuration file called /etc/samba/smb.conf (Users of other desktop managers use similar tools). This was convenient but I wanted to know where Nautilus puts this configuration data. I searched my home directory, I looked in /etc/samba/ (just in case) […]
Games
Mann Vs Machine
Looks wonderful doesn’t it? Humans vs robots in the Team Fortress 2 world. The reality is a bit different. Servers are overloaded as players try to join, but there are free servers so it must be buggy too. I didn’t wait around. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QUXkPC4mAyc&feature=g-all-u http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=73e522L59SM
Games
The many faces of Arma II
Arma II, the game that is still selling like hot cakes because of DayZ, is an excellent game in it’s own right. It’s also extremely modifiable. DayZ isn’t the only zombie mod for the game either. Here’s a simplistic one that looks like fun. And finally Chernarus Apocalypse, another multiplayer zombie mod.
Movies
The Dark Knight was no Batman
I’d been really looking forward to watching The Dark Knight Rises since it came out a few weeks ago. I diligently avoided all spoilers and laughed when I heard one or two strange stories about the ending. I finally got to watch the movie last night in an almost empty theatre. I hated it. It’s not often that I’ll leave a theatre angry at the movie I’ve just watched but this happened last night. The movie was too long and destroyed the Batman mythology. The Batman story has always been flexible. Characters are changed about, sometimes the stories contradict each […]
WordPress
Search more Twitter with Tweet Tweet
My Tweet Tweet plugin hasn’t been updated in a while. It stores Twitter conversations in your local database. Not just your own tweets but also the tweets of those you follow. Storage can be a problem once the plugin has been running for a few months however. The log table gets quite big so last year I added code to the plugin that broke up those tables once they reached a predetermined size. In my case I go with 100,000 rows. I have over 20 of those tables now (some in an old database I haven’t copied over yet) and […]