Author Archives: Donncha

It is so easy to make flapjacks!

A garage down the road sells chocolate covered flapjacks. I’ve bought a few in the recent past and savoured every bite but the last time I was down there they only had plain ones! What would I do? My life ground to a halt and in desperation I contemplated droving all over the country looking for the hidden chocolate flapjacks! Alas, it was not to be.

Instead I fired up my browser and quickly came upon this simple recipe to make flapjacks. Ingredients and recipe couldn’t be easier – two cups of porridge oat flakes, a few blobs of golden syrup, a lump of butter, salt and sugar and over a heated saucepan the mixture melts and oozes together. Melting chocolate over boiling water has the added bonus of scraping out the left overs after. Yum! I’m going to do make me some flapjacks this weekend!

I can finally lay the rice crispy cakes or buns debate to rest. It’s “rice crispy cakes”. I saw a packet of rice crispy cakes clearly bearing that proud name in our local shop, so it has to be cakes, not buns!

Lesotho table quiz tonight

My brother Donal and his girlfriend Celine are heading to Lesotho next April as part of a charity effort with the ISPCC to renovate a school and build a playground for kids there. They’re holding a table quiz tonight in the Spailpin Fanach to help raise funds.

Donal’s also looking for spot prizes. They have a few already and sponsors will be mentioned on their charity.ie page. I want to make it sweeter for people to help. If you run an online company and would like a link on the sidebar of this PR8 website, with traffic of almost 3,000 page views a day for a month, drop me a mail at donncha @ ocaoimh.ie (or ring me if you have my number) – we need to have the spot prize tonight, in about 6 hours time.

  • Online gift vouchers or something I can print out would be best.
  • The audience is probably not technically minded, so free hosting would be useless. An Amazon or other online retailer voucher on the other hand would be great.
  • I have three slots for your links. According to Text Link Ads a link on my site for a month is worth $275. I’m willing to sell these slots to sponsors for €100 each.

Time is running out. You have six hours. That’s 6pm Irish time, or mid-morning EST! Thanks for your help!

I’ll be there, with camera in hand of course, although I’m useless at quizzes so I don’t know who’ll want me on their team. Don’t tell anyone ok?

Jason's Custom CSS for WordPress MU

Many moons ago, Jason’s Customciser was released onto an unsuspecting WPMU forum. It’s a small plugin that allowed one to change the value of some of the CSS elements in a theme’s style sheet.

Before you get too excited, it’s in rather a raw format, can cause problems and needs work to be usable. The original plugin used some PHP5 conventions and functions which limited the audience who could use it. I’m posting this because people are wondering where the PHP4 port I wrote disappeared to. It’s still here, but please link to this post instead of linking to the zip file.

Download Jason’s Customciser-doc – this plugin needs a lot of work to be usable. I’m not joking!

If you’re wondering, this is not the same plugin that is used on WordPress.com to allow editing of CSS files. I just wonder why someone doesn’t write a simple templating system in Smarty or something that loads through the traditional WordPress theme files? It’s a no-brainer. It may not be the most efficient way of doing it, but it’s one simple way.

Cork Cinema Listings

Every time I want to go to the cinema I search for Cork Cinema and generally end up in the same sites looking up titles and times. If I’m feeling tired and don’t want to go into town, then there’s always the Reel Cinema in Blackpool to find. Enough is enough, for future referene here’s a few cinema related links Cork people will appreciate:

  • The Kino Cinema – because we all like arthouse cinema once in a while. Pah! Commercial considerations? This is art! It is great that you can bring a cup of tea or coffee into the cinema though.
  • The Whazon? cinema listing has links to all cinemas around the city should you wish to go to the Gate, Mahon Point, Douglas, Ballincollig or elsewhere.
  • Entertainment.ie has a page on The Reel Picture Blackpool. That’s where we go most often because it’s the closest. Not a bad cinema either.

What will we see tonight? I think it’ll be Borat. It’s quite probably over-hyped, and I’m not expecting anything but the usual silliness that Sacha Baron Cohen excells at.

Crook gets his

michaelcrook01.pngMichael Crook is a shady character who convinced men on Craiglist to reveal photos and personal sexual information about themselves which he published afterwards to embarrass them. He sent a fake DMCA notice Boing Boing in an attempt to stop them publishing a photo of him but they’re laughing at him. Others have now taken up the cause including Thomas Hawk and Fark have a great photoshop contest! Thomas points out that his his real name could be “Scott Vogel”.

The DMCA is supposed to be used for copyright infringement, and he is being sued by the EFF for improperly using it for trying to silence critical sites. Good luck to them!

It’s great when a bully gets what’s coming to him.

See how easily you can get rich?

News this morning is that elected politicians in Ireland “will receive more than €1,000 for every day they sit in the Dáil.” Not bad eh?

“Get Elected” was one of the 30 ways to spend your SSIA on Eddie Hobbs’ show recently. He suggested that investing your €20,000 in an election attempt was a great way to invest your lump sum. Given that a TD will earn more than €103,000 that’s a great investment if you have the hair and height for it!

According to today’s Irish Independent, the average basic wage for a TD will increase to more than €103,000, while a golden handshake, amounting to €4.7m, will be paid to TDs and Senators who lose their seats in next year’s general election.

Tomorrow we meet, virtually

Me in the Blarney Stone Irish Bar James is organising BlarneyCamp tomorrow at 3pm. It’s not your run of the mill get together where people meet others, enormous amounts of drink are consumed and everyone has a laugh. I’ts virtual.

Tomorrow we meet virtually on Second Life.

I found out a few days ago that Second Life is available for the Mac and Linux so I downloaded the Mac version and gave it a spin. After a brief registration process I was in. Yes, this is the much vaunted virtual reality system everyone is talking about! I can travel all over the place! I can meet everyone! I can, what can I do? Where are the baddies to shoot? The TOS specifically disallow shooting anyone or doing violence to another character. Hmm.

Conn had a better experience than I did. Hearing your name from the DJ would be sort of cool. I’m already looking forward to teleporting to the Temple Bar tomorrow and finding the Blarney Stone Irish Bar.

The Killinaskully Halloween Episode

patshorttrobinhood.jpg zombie-5-shot.jpg If you missed the Halloween episode of Killinaskully find someone who has recorded it! We just watched it and I haven’t laughed as much in a long time!
It’s all because Dieter offered the local populace some new cheese he had. Nightmares were the hilarious result. Robin Hood was ridiculously funny, and it’s obvious the zombie dance got it’s inspiration from a certain Thrilling song!

Marvelous stuff by Pat Shortt and company. Check out the site above for video clips to give you a taste of what Killinaskully is like as well as the usual promotional gig and video stuff.

Introducing Ms. Dewey

Ms. Dewey is the attractive front end of Microsoft Search. She’s entertaining and comments on search items and does her own thing if you leave her alone for a minute or two! Search for President Bush or even gmail for some great stuff! If the search for Yo Mama doesn’t make you smile and laugh I don’t know what will!

That was fun for about five minutes but she’s definitely the most attractive search mascot/helper I’ve seen online and good linkbait to get people to try their search technology! (via the Natural Search Blog)

msdewey.jpg

Linux Ubuntu Dapper to Edgy – no problem

I upgraded my Ubuntu 6.06 install to the new Edgy soon after it’s release using the simple command gksu "update-manager -c". Several hours later, and after clicking on a few dialog boxes to update files in /etc/, I’m not running Ubuntu Edgy on my desktop box.

Initially I wondered where Firefox 2.0 was hiding, but on my upgraded system it’s /usb/bin/firefox.ubuntu so it’ll live alongside version 1.5. I also noticed that when saving files in the GIMP the filename would disappear when I clicked on a new folder in the “bookmark” folder of the Gnome file dialog. Once I noticed, ctrl-c to record the filename and ctrl-v to paste it in again worked fine. I rename my files when saving so it’s not much of a hardship.

My machine seems slightly faster but I haven’t delved too deeply into what has been upgraded but Firefox, xchat, terminal, GIMP and Gthumb all work fine! Did your upgrade go as well?

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