D.A.W.G are fundraising in Blarney this afternoon. Please support them if you’re passing this way!
Get your adventures on the cheap
The Bundle in a box promotion is still going, but only for the next 4 hours. It’s a collection of point and click adventures and can be bought for the tiny sum of $0.99!
I already had “Ben There, Dan That!” and “Time Gentlemen, Please!” and enjoyed them. I’m hopeless at adventure game puzzles though so I must go look for a walkthrough. I love the stories however. I remember long ago reading through the adventure sections of Your Sinclair. The games mentioned were always just a little oddball, a little out of the ordinary and usually weren’t sold in shops but by mail order. Buying from Indie developers is a lot easier these days.
Thanks Gnome for helping to organise the bundle. Adventures are a niche though but if this is your first exposure to them this is a great way to start. So go on, drop them a Dollar and get some great games!
The Venus Transit: history and stories
Mark Anderson, author of the book The Day The World Discovered the Sun on the Science Talk podcast last week talked about the transit of Venus that’s happening today. Also make sure you listen to part 2 of the podcast!
It’s an amazing story about the efforts in 1760 to measure the distance to Venus. They had to travel far north and also south to the tropics to measure the angle of view from two known locations. Astonishing that they did this so long ago, even using the moon as a GPS, a technique that had only just been figured out.
The global positioning satellite in this case was the moon. In the 1760s science was for the first time able to predict with uncanny accuracy the moon’s exact motion in the sky years ahead of time. So some of these Venus transit pioneers, especially England’s Astronomer Royal Nevil Maskelyne, had mastered a method by which a ship’s navigator anywhere on the Earth could observe the moon with a £8 sextant and a reference manual (costing a few shillings) — and in short order discover their exact location on the planet. The long-sought solution to the longitude problem was now easy, inexpensive and at hand. (source)
Edit: Some amazing photos of the Venus transit, as taken from the Nasa website: 1, 2, 3
Vertigo sitting at my desk
You may have seen these videos before but if not make sure you’re sitting down and play them fullscreen. I promise you’ll go “WOAH!” at least once.
Recurring Nightmares
I’d forgotten how good Batman: Arkham Asylum was but now I’m playing it again having picked it up on release 2 years ago. The Scarecrow character in the comics had some great stories and the recurring nightmares in this game are terrifying the first time you come across them!
(Spoiler alert! Don’t watch or you’ll ruin a great section of the game!)
I still remember the first time I entered that morgue, gave me the shivers. Watch the video fullscreen, headphones on and in a dark room!
Zombie Carnage
Left 4 Dead 2, a great game for killing zombies, but not for the squeamish.
This is how you pop the question
On Wednesday, May 23rd, 2012, I told my girlfriend to meet me at my parent’s house for dinner. When she arrived I had stationed my brother to sit her in the back of an open Honda CRV and give her some headphones. He “wanted to play her a song”…
What she got instead was the world’s first Live Lip-Dub Proposal.
Damn onions.
No. I am your father
Happy birthday Star Wars! Apparently you’re 35 today! I’m not a fan of you though. I only saw this scene in French while I was an exchange student in the town of Morlaix in Brittany many years ago and other films I saw in English had such wooden acting I had to stop watching. My son is a fan though but only from the Lego games. In a bizarre twist, he knows the main characters yet hasn’t seen the movies.
Even though I never saw this scene in English I still thought the quote from this scene was, “Luke, I am Your Father”. It’s so famous, it’s listed on this page of misquotations!
Lots of mattresses too. Love that. Comfy. (via)
(Thanks C_64 for tweeting about the birthday!)
Mount box.net drives in Linux
I was one of the lucky few to receive a 50GB upgrade from box.net, (or box.com where they now live, marketing fail?) when I installed their Android app. I don’t have a use for that much storage on my phone but on my desktop machines? Oh yes!
This forum post describes in detail how to mount a Box drive on a Debian/Ubuntu machine although the instructions will mostly apply to other systems too as long as they have the davfs2 package.
There is a gotcha. Instead of using http://www.box.net/ you can use https://www.box.com/ which is a good gotcha. Also, I’m not the only person to notice that the mount point has a lot less storage than I thought it would have. It should be 50GB total but this is what I see from df -h:
https://www.box.com/dav 26G 13G 13G 50% /mnt/box.net
It’s enough for my needs. I’m going to copy snapshots of my local email there every night.
PS. Are you a Windows user? Sync any folder with Google Drive using the instructions here (but it uses “hardlinks” which have limitations, read the comments for more).
Actually, forget what it says in that post. Copy your files to your Google Drive and then place a symlink on your local drive to the copied files or folders using mklink. Make sure you run cmd.exe as an Administrator. I found this worked perfectly to sync the Pictures folder after I had copied it to my Google Drive:
cd c:\Users\USERNAME\
mklink /d Pictures “c:\Users\USERNAME\Google Drive\Pictures”
Any files copied into the Pictures folder are copied to the Google Drive now!
WP Super cache 1.1
This is a bugfix release of the full page caching plugin WP Super Cache for WordPress.
Not much has changed in the week or so since I asked for testers but in case you missed that post here are the changes since 1.0:
- Use $_SERVER[ ‘SERVER_NAME’ ] to create cache directories. No more non existant blogs appearing in your cache supercache and blogs folders.
- Only create blogs cached directories if valid requests and blogs exist.
- Only clear current blog’s cache files if navigation menu is modified
- Added clean_post_cache action to clear cache on post actions
- Removed garbage collection details on Contents tab
- Added wp_cache_check_mobile cacheaction filter to shortcircuit mobile device check.
- Don’t delete cache files for draft posts
- Added action on wp_trash_post to clear the cache when trashed posts are deleted
- Show a warning when 304 browser caching is disabled (because mod_rewrite caching is on)
- New check for safe mode if using less that PHP 5.3.0
- Added wp_supercache_remove_cookies filter to disable anonymous browsing mode.
- Fixed garbage collection schedule dropdown
- Fixed preload problem clearing site’s cache on “page on front” sites.
- Fix for PHP variable not defined warnings
- Fixed problem refreshing cache when comments made as siteurl() sometimes didn’t work
- Preloading of taxonomies is now optional
- Domain mapping fixes.
- Better support for https sites. Remove https:// to get cache paths.
- Added AddDefaultCharset .htaccess rule back in and added an option to remove it if required.
- Added multisite plugin that adds a “Cached” column to Network->Sites to disable caching on a per site basis.
- Added WPTouch plugin to modify browser and prefix list in mobile detection code. Added support for that plugin’s exclude list.
- Fixed cache tester
- Filter the tags that are used to detect end-of-page using the wp_cache_eof_tags filter.
- Removed debug level from logging as it wasn’t helpful.
- Removed mention of wp-minify.
As ever, the support forum is the best place to go for help as I monitor it all the time. Before you post there use Google to search for any error strings and use the debug system in the plugin as it will probably tell you what’s going on.