Monthly Archives: August 2012

Step back into the past on the Irish Mail train

Following on from the time travelling theme in my Back to the Future post comes this documentary about the Irish Mail route from London to Dublin that operated from 1848. The documentary was originally broadcast in 1954. It has this lovely old fashioned feel to it.

It’s amazing that it took up to 2 days to travel between those cities but that was quick before regular flights were a reality.

Also be sure to read about the Chester and Holyhead Railway and this page about tunnel crossings across the Irish Sea. Who knew Irish trains didn’t use standard guage tracks eh? Whose bright idea was that then?

Gary Connery, wingsuit landing without a parachute

Gary Connery, a 42-year-old daredevil, plunged from a helicopter in a death-defying jump before landing in an area containing 18,600 cardboard boxes.

That’s a lot of boxes but when you see how small they are from the height he jumped from you’ll see how dangerous the stunt was and get an idea how crazy brave he is. Wow!

Thanks Matt for the link!

Deepak induces a headache

Warning! If you’re prone to headaches and bright lights hurt your eyes you’re in for a rip roaring pain the head if you click here.

Deepak fights Robots is a zany platformer that reminds me of Bubble Bobble (probably because it’s single screen, walk off one side, walk on the other side) and features a rather interesting glaring colour palette. It’s a simple game that sucks you in and while you can buy an offline version there’s a free web version too.

I bought it, I Like it. Give it a go! No nasty DRM either which is always a plus. (via here and then here)

Where does Nautilus store it’s folder share info?

Using a GUI is nice and all but sometimes I want to know where configuration data is stored.

The Gnome file manager, Nautilus, allows Linux users to share folders on a Windows network. Users of other operating systems will find this hard to believe but before this it was difficult to do as you needed to be an administrator and edit a configuration file called /etc/samba/smb.conf (Users of other desktop managers use similar tools).

This was convenient but I wanted to know where Nautilus puts this configuration data. I searched my home directory, I looked in /etc/samba/ (just in case) and eventually found this page:

I located the config files.

It appears as though /var/lib/samba/usershares holds a text file for each share that has been created.

The usershares directory is owned by root:sambashare and the files inside are owned by the user sharing the folder, so I guess it’s a compromise between a system process (Samba) and users wanting to configure it.

Editing those files is simple, and I guess I could use “net usershare” too. I had to restart Samba too which probably wouldn’t be needed if I had use the “net” command.

The Dark Knight was no Batman

I’d been really looking forward to watching The Dark Knight Rises since it came out a few weeks ago. I diligently avoided all spoilers and laughed when I heard one or two strange stories about the ending. I finally got to watch the movie last night in an almost empty theatre.

I hated it.

It’s not often that I’ll leave a theatre angry at the movie I’ve just watched but this happened last night. The movie was too long and destroyed the Batman mythology. The Batman story has always been flexible. Characters are changed about, sometimes the stories contradict each other but usually those stories are seen as separate to the main Batman story line. That might excuse some changes but this movie knocked huge gaping holes in it and threw a twist in at the end to make sure it was completely destroyed. *sigh*

I’ll leave you with this, The Dark Knight Rises: 20 Mistakes Nolan Should Have Avoided which is a pretty good overview of mistakes made in the movie. Do not read if you haven’t watched the movie.

Oh, and go read Batman: Knightfall. It’s the story this movie was based on but it’s so much better.

Search more Twitter with Tweet Tweet

My Tweet Tweet plugin hasn’t been updated in a while. It stores Twitter conversations in your local database. Not just your own tweets but also the tweets of those you follow.

Storage can be a problem once the plugin has been running for a few months however. The log table gets quite big so last year I added code to the plugin that broke up those tables once they reached a predetermined size. In my case I go with 100,000 rows. I have over 20 of those tables now (some in an old database I haven’t copied over yet) and until today the search function in the plugin only searched the most recently created table.

All that’s changed now. It’ll search back through the other tables and compile a list of up to 10,000 tweets. It’s still a little rough but if you’ve been running the plugin for some time give the development version on the developers page a go. Here’s a search for Aurora. The original image was 21793 pixels high, so this is the latest and earlier tweets in that search:

aurora search on twitter

aurora search on twitter

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Ad-blocker not detected

Consider installing a browser extension that blocks ads and other malicious scripts in your browser to protect your privacy and security. Here are a few options.

  • uBlock Origin is a free, open source, ad blocker for your browser.
  • Use pi-hole if you have a spare Raspberry Pi on your network.
  • Set the private DNS settings on your phone to dns.adguard.com to block adverts and trackers.