Turning off Offensive YouTube popups

Oct 13, 2008

What the hell are they thinking? These awful popups have actually genuinely achieved
a new low: even pop-unders and nefarious crap like that have an obvious way to dismiss the advert.
Apparently it’s also OK to just plaster them all over the content so you can’t even see it.

You go to the arrow at the bottom right and click “Turn Off Annotations”. These are Annotations
in the “Ministry Of Love” sense. Oh, you have to do that for every video by the way. Unlike the
volume control, which of course persists across all videos.

Obviously, YouTube want you to hate them.

Dear clever types

Sep 19, 2008

Can you please hurry up and actually release a decent A4 e-book reader? You guys are so close… I will pay stupid money.

Greg Kroah and Canonical

Sep 18, 2008

I can’t quite get over how arrogant his talk was. If you’re not sending in kernel patches, that means you’re bad and all your developers should get jobs elsewhere, apparently. Things like HAL aren’t “Linux plumbing”, and if you contribute to that, or GNOME in general, tough luck, since other operating systems can use it. GCC, binutils, and X.org are OK though, because, well … just because.

What new horror

Sep 6, 2008

As I just noticed on the TV advert:

Universal Pictures will release a special sing-along edition of the hit movie musical Mamma Mia! in selected theaters nationwide

I’ve thought of a worse thing than this though: a “wit-a-long” version of Sex And The City.

Infoworld: SOFTWARE HAS BUGS!

Aug 29, 2008

Oi noi!

Awful, awful music

Aug 27, 2008

Dave Stewart’s American Prayer makes we wish I was a Republican[1]. And I don’t even live in the US.
Whittaker: stop it. George from Seinfeld: stop it. Stewart: I told you a long time ago.

This is almost as bad as Roger Taylor’s Nazis (at the very least, read the lyrics, if you haven’t - awesome).

[1] a little bit

At last some honesty

Aug 23, 2008

Things I never expected to read in a prominent Intelligent Design blog:

Sorry if I’m offending anyone but these people disgust me. They’re all like “I believe in rational inquiry, science, and bearded thunderers who live in the sky and worry about my immortal soul”. Please. Choose one or the other but not both.

So there you have it. If you’re a Christian you’d better not be an ID proponent, and vice versa. Or, of course,
ID has nothing to do with rational enquiry. I’m not sure they really realised they were saying that.

Raymond Chen: It's not Christmas

Aug 22, 2008

In March of this year, a customer wrote, “I have attached a Word document that describes the problem.” (Hey, here’s an idea: Why not describe the problem in your email message?)

The Word document contained a screenshot.

The screenshot was of an email message.

The email message contained a screenshot.

Bonus remark from the customer liaison: “Once you open the document, you may need to zoom it further to read it.”


Awesome
.

PulseAudio and volume controls

Aug 17, 2008

For those wondering how on earth to access an underlying real device when PulseAudio is enabled (yes, both alsamixer and pavucontrol only show one mixer control - brilliant!), you can do this:

alsamixer -c 0

Of course, this behaviour isn’t documented anywhere. I don’t know how people are supposed to discover this.

Hitler liked some good music, you know?

Aug 12, 2008

In case you needed another fatuous reason for supporting Obama, here it is: Obama’s Top Ten tunes versus
McCain’s. Apart from the U2 stumble, not bad at all, Barack, not bad.