PreshBlog

OK, I’ve been really bad at doing Friday fun posts for the last few weeks. D’oh. Today was mostly filled with Christmas shopping (the annoying part of Christmas) – but thankfully Amazon made some of it a lot easier :)

OK, on with a few minor funnies: (continue reading…)

Finally, an answer to our stupidly high fuel prices… a new company called Petrol Direct is offering petrol and diesel at much lower prices, who “ship directly from countries with the lowest tax rates to the UK and save you money.”.

They have the following to say about themselves:

As far as we know the direct supply of highly volatile fuels through the post is an as-yet untapped market. Indeed, you can get just about anything else mail order these days so we thought that it was high time we started to leverage the synergies of the worldwide energy macroeconomy to produce a paradigm shift of groundbreaking proportions.

Check them out :)

I forgot to do my Friday fun post last week – oops!

Never mind – here’s a little something, it’s been around for a fair while but it’s pretty cool. It’s a little magic trick by a friend of a friend, Colin Soper, who is a rather talented balloon modeller.

Balloon mind reader

Arse – I updated my Arch Linux install last night, and X will no longer start using my previous config. I can start X using the vesa driver, so X itself isn’t broken, but when I try to start up with my multiple monitor setup (3 screens on 3 seperate ATI Radeon 7000 PCI cards) I get a crash, with the following backtrace:


Backtrace:
0: X(xf86SigHandler+0x7e) [0x80d9d5e]
1: [0xb7ef4420]
2: X(xf86RandR12SetRotations+0x6b) [0x80f58ab]
3: X(xf86CrtcScreenInit+0x9e) [0x80f173e]
4: /usr/lib/xorg/modules/drivers//radeon_drv.so(RADEONScreenInit+0x17fa) [0xb7adfcaa]
5: X(AddScreen+0x1fc) [0x80733dc]
6: X(InitOutput+0x21e) [0x80a769e]
7: X(main+0x296) [0x8073b66]
8: /lib/libc.so.6(__libc_start_main+0xe0) [0xb7cb9390]
9: X(FontFileCompleteXLFD+0x201) [0x80730d1]


How annoying.

I think the issue is down to changes in the X server for Xinerama (used to spread your display across multiple screens) to use RandR, which doesn’t seem to play well.

I’ll post updates here as/when I find a fix.

I’ve been getting too many spam comments slipping past Akismet lately, so I’m trying out reCAPTCHA to see if it’s useful.

I didn’t really want to add a CAPTCHA-based system in case it makes it harder to comment (and therefore might perhaps discourage people from posting comments, not that many do anyway) but I thought I’d give it a try. Also of course it’s hard on blind people.

I decided that, if I’m going to use any CAPTCHA system, I may as well use reCAPTCHA, since the effort used to decipher the image isn’t wasted, it’s helping to digitize books.

What do you think? Does a CAPTCHA put you off commenting? Are the reCAPTCHA images too hard to decipher? (That’s something I’m particularly worried about, some of the ones I’ve seen so far looked hard to read).

According to this report, Camelot have had to withdraw a scratch card because the general public are too thick to understand negative numbers.

From the article:

Tina Farrell, from Levenshulme, called Camelot after failing to win with several cards.

The 23-year-old, who said she had left school without a maths GCSE, said: “On one of my cards it said I had to find temperatures lower than -8. The numbers I uncovered were -6 and -7 so I thought I had won, and so did the woman in the shop. But when she scanned the card the machine said I hadn’t.

“I phoned Camelot and they fobbed me off with some story that -6 is higher – not lower – than -8 but I’m not having it.

(continue reading…)

Another Friday fun post. Thankfully I’ve got today booked off work for a long weekend :)

A woman is standing, naked, in front of a mirror. She says to her husband, “I’m horrible, fat, and ugly,could you pay me a compliment and cheer me up?”

Husband replies………….

“Well, your eyesight’s f**king spot-on!”

(continue reading…)