Uncategorized | Nothing of Any Quincyquonce

Philadelphia, New Order and Apple

by ezs | Jan 10, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Uncategorized

I’m in Philadelphia for a couple of days visiting customers; currently in my hotel room IMing with Jose and talking about Apple.

The new MacBook Pro looks sweet.

I’m watching a DVD of New Order music videos – NEW order A COLLECTION. It’s stunning. Music videos that are almost twenty years old for Bizarre Love Triangle, True Faith and Round&Round look really fresh.

There is also an interesting – and half completed – web site http://www.kinoteca.net from Michael Shamberg which describes a lot of the background to his music videos for New Order.

WordPress 2.0

by ezs | Jan 10, 2006 | blogging, evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

It’s live. I updated this blog to WordPress 2.0.

So far so good. The new WYSIWYG editor looks pretty sweet too 🙂

Swimming and iPod

by ezs | Jan 10, 2006 | evilzenscientist, fun stuff, Uncategorized

Normally you can’t go swimming with your iPod. (Pedants will point out that you could – it’s just a one time thing.)

Grania swims a lot during the summer (when the bubble roof comes off the pool) – and last year we saw some cool headphones and a small MP3 player that worked under water. We thought this would be good if you could use your existing iPod.

I just found this:

It’s a soft neoprene cover for your iPod. It caught my eye because they support all sizes of iPod – even the new Nano; also they have partnered to offer ‘flood insurance’ for the iPod itself.

Now that’s cool.

Mail, spam and viruses – update

by ezs | Jan 9, 2006 | evilzenscientist, Linux, Uncategorized

I experimented several times during the holidays on various configurations of SpamAssassin and the like. I finally settled on something I liked and was easy to manage.

I found an addition to IPcop that added these services in a controllable manner – CopFilter – http://www.copFilter.org.

CopFilter plugs into IPcop and adds (for me) an SMTP proxy, ClamAV, SpamAssassin – as well as giving me a really simple web UI to manage things. Best of all all of the components are GPL.

I’ve trained the anti-spam – and it’s really working better so far than my own manual tweaking on a seperate server. 🙂

So far so good – I’ll keep track of the performance and post the results later.

Audible redux

by ezs | Jan 6, 2006 | Books, evilzenscientist, Uncategorized

I rejoined Audible a few months ago.

I first tried it out about three years ago when I got my first iPod (wow! three years!) and found it – somewhat clunky. Audible support was patchy on my old iPod, the software didn’t work too well – and the content was somewhat sparse.

Things have changed dramatically in the last couple of years. I am now listening to several books a month; mainly on plane journeys, also on my commute into the office.

I am currently listening to Michael Palins “Around the World in Eighty Days” – I first read this at University many years ago (1992!). Turns out the whole book is now available online.