Okay, here’s a trip down Memory Lane… Sock Master’s Video Game Controller Family Tree is a history of game controller evolution through time, showing all the main consoles and where they borrowed ideas from etc. An interesting read, and makes me want to dig out my SNES :)
Cutty Sark suspect identified
Police have released a photo of the main suspect of the Cutty Sark arson.
Anyone who has an idea of who and where this individual is, please call CRIMESTOPPERS on 0800 555 555.
Please do not approach him as he is to be armed with a very long sword, and under the influence of unidentified substances, possibly rum.
Irritating yet clever game
OK, StumbleUpon led me to this irritating yet very clever game. It’s like Breakout in that you move a paddle to keep a ball bouncing… but there’s a second ball balancing, and every time you move your paddle to one side, the platform the second ball is on moves the other way. Annoyingly addictive to try to beat your best time. So far I’ve managed 22.995 secs… can you do better?
Nice illustrations (Will Murai)
Found Will Murai’s site via StumbleUpon – some brilliant illustration work, this guy has skills!
A test “aside”
This is a test entry in the “asides” category. K2 (the WP theme I use) allows “asides”, which are small entries of lower importance than regular blog entries.
I’d like to be able to use that for little trivial updates. Alternatively, I might try out Twitter and show latest Twitter updates in my sidebar.
Lyrics::Fetcher v0.4.0 released to CPAN
Just released version v0.4.0 of Lyrics::Fetcher - a Perl module to fetch song lyrics">Lyrics::Fetcher to CPAN… it’ll take a little while to be distributed to the various CPAN mirrors.
Version 0.4.0 introduces the ability to automatically try all available fetcher modules until one suceeds, or pass an arrayref of fetchers to try in order. Lyrics::Fetcher::LyricsNet has been removed from the package until it can be fixed up (the LyricsNet search doesn’t seem to work at the moment).
Logitech QuickCam Messenger under Linux
I bought a cheap (~£20) Logitech Quickcam Messenger to connect up to my Linux box at home to act as a basic security camera – coupled with the cunningly-titled motion detection program “motion”, it can detect movement, capture images and/or video, and execute any commands etc. (More on this setup in a future post!).
The Linux kernel now includes a quickcam_messenger driver, but it didn’t work for my camera. Checking the USB ID showed that it’s a different product ID, so they’ve changed the way the camera works, but kept the name (I wish they wouldn’t do that). I had to use the spca5xx/gspca driver.
Continue reading Logitech QuickCam Messenger under Linux
Installing Samsung ML-1610 Linux driver manually
I’ve got a Samsung ML-1610 laser printer, which is a great value solid little laser printer (it was around fifty quid IIRC). Samsung even supply Linux drivers for it, which is great. However, their drivers use a GUI installer, which isn’t a lot of use if the box you’re connecting the printer to doesn’t run X (i.e. it’s a server).
For my future reference, and for anyone else who finds it useful, simple steps to get it working (for CUPS):
Continue reading Installing Samsung ML-1610 Linux driver manually
Amazing bike control
Okay, this dude has serious skills… that’s some amazing bike control!
procmail fails to write to large mailbox
Okay, I’ve been having strange problems where procmail will suddenly stop moving messages to a mailbox.
It works fine for a while, then (with no changes to the recipes) it’ll suddenly stop moving incoming spam to my spam box.
Looking at the procmail log shows it’s failing to write to the mbox file:
Continue reading procmail fails to write to large mailbox