Category Archives: Internet

Rabbit surgery

I’m one of several thousand people left with a deceased Nabaztag, or even worse, the newer Karotz, after the respective servers were turned off.

Help was at hand, sadly not for Karotz owners, when someone kindly developed a Raspberry Pi solution; in effect, a Nabaztag can run as intended from such a device. I tried it, with success. Until my cheap eBay phone charger, that is. Said device exploded, as mentioned at the time, leaving me with a dead Pi and, discovered several hours later, a very dead TV.

Anyway, while on my way to work this morning, I came across a blog which appears to have a Nabaztag\Raspberry Pi\Apple vintage focus.

Notice the header? Although the Nabaztag has been deceased for some time now, this blog still uses it in both name and graphic.

Better still,the author has attempted to integrate a Raspberry Pi within a Nabaztag II. OK, so it may not have worked, but it makes one wonder if there’s a less ambitious way to achieve the result. Unfortunately, my French isn’t great, so I’m not 100â„… certain what went wrong. I shall investigate.

Gary Moores

I’ve had my main email address, garymoore@btinternet.com, for twenty and a bit years. I’ve hung onto it mainly because lots of people know it. It’s caused some hassle though, because I’ve a relatively common name and other people with the same name have very similar email addresses. Which results in my frequently being signed-up with various sites and services, as well as receiving mail meant for other people.

It’s a very long time since I’ve had an account with BT, but, like many people, I hung onto the mail account. Quite a few years ago, BT began charging a nominal fee, Â£1.60 a month, for legacy email use. I happily paid this amount, even though the service is hosted by Yahoo and the webmail is ad-laden. A couple of weeks ago, though, in common with many people, I received an email from BT, advising that the charge would be rising to Â£5.00 a month.

Not a huge amount of money, but sixty quid a year for an email account is somewhat excessive. I only pay Â£28 a year for a domain name (this one), web space and unlimited email addresses. Which puts things into perspective and has made the decision to part with my old BT account easy.

Not so easy is remembering all of the accounts and transactions associated with this email address. I’ve set up Thunderbird on the PC, the first time I’ve used a proper e-mail application, apart from at work, in years. It seems to be struggling a little, but it’s currently in the process of downloading several years’ emails.

Perseverance and Gin

A great deal of fruitless time today was spent in attempting to bring our new Hannspree Micro PC back to life. Sadly, to no avail. I was unable either to boot from Linux or restore a Windows image I’d found on the Internet. But, after a couple of stiff Gins, I was inspired. At the point of giving up and putting it down to experience, I had something of a light bulb moment.

In short, we now have a fully working PC on a stick.

It was a painful process, but the outcome was positive. In an awful Windows kind of way.

My resolve is strong though; I shan’t abandon my aim to have a working version of Ubuntu on a pocket device. Apart from my phone, that is. I’d say more about that, but the Gin’s influence prevents me.

Mars

A view of Mars in a hundred years or so.

Well, a view of the future from 1960. Apparently, the Earth is at risk of becoming ‘a mass of boiling mud’. A rogue spaceship, controlled only by its ‘electronic brain’, is destined for collision. Fortunately, an attempt is to be made to reach the spaceship, Alpha Two, from Venus. And Venus is just a short trip from Mars.

Oh, a detour must first be made to rescue people from a lost ‘space taxi’.

Assignment Outer Space (1960). I need to stop watching this rubbish; I’m not twelve any more.

The pit

Quatermass and the Pit, that is.

Quatermass

Or rather, Quatermass ii. The whole series, from 1955, is on YouTube. The film quality isn’t brilliant, but it matches my (very young) childhood memory. The sound’s surprisingly good though; I’m assuming it’s been cleaned up.

It’s so bad, it’s actually quite good. Quatermass and the Pit next I think. It won’t take long to watch this series, since they’re only half hour episodes.

Before you consider viewing too, be warned that it’s unsuitable for children or those of a nervous disposition.

Mr Everett

I must confess that I suspected a hoax when my youngest daughter told me that E, Mark Oliver Everett of Eels, appears in a new Netflix series, Love.

Naturally, curiosity got the better of me and, sure enough, there he is in episode four.

He doesn’t exactly act in this scene, but maybe he’s branching out a little. I’ll say now that I didn’t watch the first three episodes.

Red Alert

The Christmas release of Red Alert on the OpenRA site …

The screenshot doesn’t really do it justice.

Red Alert

I’m not really into computer games, but I did once have a favourite; Command & Conquer, Red Alert. That was a long time ago, the late 90s, early 2000s. I often played the game with my youngest child, across our home network.

It wouldn’t compete nowadays, although there have been several more modern versions.

Anyway, there’s now openra, a cross platform browser based incarnation. It uses reverse engineered code and works pretty well too. Best of all, it runs fine under Linux.