I knew this song was familiar when I first heard it. It’s the theme tune to the game Uplink which I haven’t actually played at all but I had the OST from some game bundle.
Turns out it was used in a party invite for Assembly ’94. It was a favourite of mine from back then. You can download the brilliant .s3m version here.
Anyone else have fond memories of the MOD scene? The top favourites on modarchives.org will help!
So, I needed a list of US telephone area codes for a project I’m working on but it turned out to be harder than I thought to find such a list. I did find one here but then had to create an account there to download it. Bah!
To save your fingers from extra typing I created a pastebin of the list which you can find here.
It’s interesting to note that Wikipedia has a page for each area code. I had a look at a few in my attempts to verify the list was good and 985 caught my attention:
Area code 985 is the telephone area code for southeastern Louisiana, excluding New Orleans and St. Bernard and Plaquemines parishes. The area code was created in 2001 when it was split off from area code 504.
Area code 985 also originally included areas southeast of New Orleans. However, after Hurricane Katrina in late August 2005, much of this area switched back to 504. These communities are now being served with dialtone from telephone switching facilities in New Orleans following near-total destruction of local switching facilities due to flooding from Katrina. Permissive use of 504 alongside 985 to reach these downriver communities began on July 29, 2007. Mandatory use of 504 to “again” reach these communities began on May 1, 2008. These communities are on both sides of the Mississippi River in “lower” Plaquemines Parish, including Pointe à la Hache on the east bank, with Port Sulphur, Buras, and Boothville on the west bank.
The list of Irish area codes is much shorter and 021, the area code for Cork shares it’s page with a number of other regions.
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?
A heavily modified Grand Theft Auto 4 game that lets you be Marty McFly and drive a DeLorean. Nice. Time travel? Oh yes!
It isn’t one single mod so unless you grab his install directory you won’t be playing it any time soon, sorry if I got your hopes up! (thanks Gammagoblin!)
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!
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)
My 5yro son loves Star Wars and he loves that song. I think he’ll love this video.
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.
Looks wonderful doesn’t it? Humans vs robots in the Team Fortress 2 world.
The reality is a bit different. Servers are overloaded as players try to join, but there are free servers so it must be buggy too. I didn’t wait around.
Arma II, the game that is still selling like hot cakes because of DayZ, is an excellent game in it’s own right. It’s also extremely modifiable.
DayZ isn’t the only zombie mod for the game either. Here’s a simplistic one that looks like fun.
And finally Chernarus Apocalypse, another multiplayer zombie mod.