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!)
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.
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.
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:
In any home where a dog is indoors that dog is going to pee on the carpet sooner or later. Hopefully the “little accident” will be noticed quickly but if not it’ll dry into your carpet and you might not even notice it for a while if the house is well ventilated.
Then some time later comes that unmistakeable odour. The sickly sweet smell of urine, of a dirty public toilet in your living room corner or in a neglected spare room. You just know that it’s deep in the carpet by now. Bacteria doing their thing in the fibres of your precious floor covering. Ugh!
You’ll be happy to hear there’s a really easy way to clean it up. No need to buy an expensive carpet cleaner containing exotic sounding chemicals. There’s no need to fumigate the room, or steam wash the carpet. Just white vinegar and water first and then dry it. Follow up with bread soda and then a dilute bleach, 3% hydrogen peroxide mixed with a little washing up liquid.
It’s quite amazing how well it works.
The Commodore 64 is 30 years old this year and it went on sale in August 1982 so I think it’s about time I wished it a happy birthday. Back then I was messing on a Commodore Vic 20 (or more likely it was 1984 or so), then I had a Speccy and I didn’t get my hands on a C64 until 1989. It was already declining somewhat but it still had a few years of life left in it. Issue 50 of Zzap! 64 was the first issue of that famous magazine I owned. My brother and I bought it in Paul’s Street Shopping Centre! The newsagent is long gone but I have that issue around here somewhere ..
Matt Allen visited a primary school and a secondary school and asked kids there what they thought of the Commodore 64. I don’t think they were impressed by loading errors and long loading times. He probably should have brought a 1541 disk drive and an Action Replay cartridge!