denyerec.co.uk

Short post to bring your attentions to a track called “The Underwear Goes Inside the Pants” by someone called Lazyboy.

Simlpe, funny, effective, poignant. I’d buy the album.

I bring you a speech by Ted Stevens, a senator for Alaska, eloquently explaining why Net Neutrality is a bad thing. if you don’t understand why this is hillarious, get off the “free” internet and sign up with AOL on the spot. Net Neutrality is Bad for Families.

For anyone who uses a computer with any amount of seriousness and, also (perhaps oxymorinically, you be the judge) uses Windows, you’ll know that the default file explorer is atrociously bad. Having added nothing new to the mix since the invetion of copy and paste, despite better ideas and featuresets being available since the very first versions of Windows Commander.

Quite why MS feel the need to stifle the way we interact with our precious 1’s and 0’s is beyond me, but there are alternatives.

This one costs £35 which people may or may not view as a reasnoble investment of monetary tokens. It’s called Directory Opus and although I’ve yet to give it a full runaround I’m very keen to. There’s a good guide to the features avialable in this extensive Guide to Opus. Interesting to note that virtual folders and collections are here in full force, even though Micro$oft still haven’t managed to get that going proprly in Vista…

Incidentally I discovered this gem after someone pointed me to a picture portraying perfectly why children and expensive household interiors are generally a very bad idea.

I’m glad I didn’t waste my time writing a hugely sarcastic peice, biting in to the arses of the moneygrabbing telco monopolies that want to discriminate between internet traffic types so they can set tiered prices for skype, MSN and basic web browsing. I’m glad I didn’t bother to rant on about how that’d make it possible for a government to subvert the masses by adding premium charges to non-aligned news websites and services. I’m glad I didn’t bother, as The Register beat me to it and put it better than I probably could have.

Why Net Neutrality is a Bad Thing. Be warned if you’re not good with sarcasm, have someone sit with you to explain this one.

If I can some how sum up the willpower to motivate myself to actual physical action, I’ll be making myself one of these cute little suckers… Data Bear is the solution to your data storage needs, a bold critter who isn’t afraid to dive headfirst into a problem. Or USB port.

Ok so it’s a little propagandist, but hey, isn’t everything else we usually see on Fox and CNN ? 😉
This little video highlights the abuse of powers held by the US Police and for me highlighted just how scary their damn riot cops look. It’s like the bad guys from some exaggerated sci-fi movie for pity’s sake.
US police in action might be a little over the top with respect to melodramatic production value, but it’s worth spending 5 minutes on, to give you something to think about the next time you see peaceful protests pushed back by the militant arm of your government police.

Just who are they protecting and serving, anyway?

The media doesn’t like conspiracy theorists. The movies slam them, TV mocks them and the popular press don’t give them the column inches they need. OK, a lot of them may be crazy, but go painting a whole group of people with the same brush and all of a sudden all followers of Islam are terrorists, all white people are racist and all dingos steal and eat babies.

Oh wait, sorry, the popular press actually DO consider the words “Muslim” and “Terrorist” as interchangeable. Silly me.

Well, getting to my point before we end up with another small essay, the BBC are running a hillarious peice about the new Pentagon footage that, oh surprise, shows us nothing new about the 9/11 attacks. I don’t pitch my tent in any camp when it comes to this, all I’ll say for myself is that I think something is amiss and the evidence doesn’t stack up.

I suppose it’s my own fault for getting lulled once again into thinking the BBC are a news agency instead of a propaganda machine. (Go go Medialens ) Their outright lambasting (Is that right? I’m using it anyway) of popular theories and so called “Conspiracy Theorists” is deplorable. It’s worth noting that a lot of the evidence put forward or questioned by the so called “Crazy People” has not been disproved to any greater degree than anything put forward by governments and news agencies. The only difference being is that the general public has been taught that one side would never do anything wrong, and the other side is a disorganised bunch of nut jobs. (Just in case it wasn’t clear and, admittedly, sometimes it isn’t, the disorganised bunch of nut jobs is here referring to the “Conspiracy Theorists”, not the governments and news agencies.)

The link in question is here: Shameful “Journalism” from the BBC (again).

Why can’t they, you know, collate and report facts for a change, instead of latching on to a tidbit and furthering misconception. The ignoramus who put that peice up there for world review shouldn’t dare call himself a journalist, let alone a “World Affairs Correspondant”. Paul Reynolds open your eyes.

(Of course now, thanks to pervasive media brain-washing, everyone will simply go “Ho Hum” and pitch me in with the rest of the conspiracy theorists. Classic, no? How can anyone get the truth out there if anyone who tries is instantly put down without effort.)

There’s a handy service called DynDNS that lets you give a static name to a dynamic IP. Handy for have-a-go heroes hosting websites from home.
Anyhow, to auto-update the IP stored by DynDNS regularly, the use of some client software is advised. Enter DDClient, which happens to run on Ubuntu.

Now, for anyone who’s having trouble getting ddclient to run on Ubuntu in that it’s not picking up their external IP properly, the fix is simple. All you have to do is replace the following line in your /etc/ddclient.conf file :

use=if , if=web

With the following:

use=web , web=dyndns

You can also obtain some information running ddclient -query from your console.

What this does it tell ddclient not to use a network interface (if) but to use the web, and then tells it which web service to use (dyndns). If you leave it to the defaults it’ll just pull the IP from whichever network interface it’s bound to, typically eth0 by default.