I finally got off my ass and set up a redirect to stop our friendly quotes pages spammer getting on here.

Instead he is sent to The Last Measure (link is safe, goes to Wikipedia description).

Mmm...

So my iMac is back with me, how I missed this computer, especially after struggling with playing WoW at 10-15fps :(

The engineers report said what I suspected - that the graphics card had died and needed to be replaced. Not entirely sure why it failed, either it just was manufactured badly and was a ticking timebomb, or possibly it's because of poor cooling inside the machine cooking the chip when used heavily under load, something I've seen hints of over at the Apple support forums but isn't confirmable.

If i get another couple of years use out of this machine I'll be very happy indeed.

Every swear word from The Sopranos in chronological order. Amazing.

Also, Mr. iMac is still in for repair :(

So Monday night my iMac died on me, I was happily playing World of Warcraft when the graphics corrupted and the computer froze. When I tried to restart it, it would start booting and then freeze and refused to get any further. I started it in target disk mode and the hard drive is fine, so it's probably something with the motherboard or graphics chip that has failed.

I knew something bad had happened straight away as my iMac has never crashed like this in the few years I've had it now. So I was prepared to be spending several hundreds of pounds to get it repaired or consider buying a new machine. Bother of those I don't really want to do.

Luckily though, I typed my iMac's serial number into the Apple support site to look up local repair centres, and lo-and-behold, my iMac is still under warranty! Since I bought the machine under the educational discount scheme a few years back, it came with free extended warranty. I didn't know about this and really cheered me up.

So I dropped my iMac off at the nearest repair centre which amazingly is in Treforest of all places, and all I have to do is put up with the repair time which will be about a week or so because the parts for my out of production iMac will have to be ordered and shipped from far off lands.

Although this means I'm having to put up with my lowly Macbook which doesn't play WoW particularly well but will do for now.

Woo yay.

I implore everyone to see Gran Turino, the new drama with Clint Eastwood. I'm not going to repeat the vast number of reviews but it's good to see a topical social commentary wrapped up in a drama doing so well at the box office (currently US #1).

Also, you really believe that Clint Eastwood could kick you, or anybody else's ass just for looking at him funny.

It took one line of SQL to remove the horrific nonsense from the quotes page. I'm sorry my canadian friend(s) but it had to stop somewhere.

Happy new year etc. etc. and all that.

More soon.

So last weekend at ATP (which was really awesome good time), I was going to pay for a wifi voucher to use the on-site internet access. At £15 for 3 days though I couldn't bring myself to paying that much just for the few hours over the entire 3 days that I'd use it.

After a bit of exploration though I discovered that the sites router would redirect TCP (web/email) traffic to its 'Pay Us Money Now!' signup page, but wasn't blocking or redirecting DNS or ICMP (ping) requests - these were going straight out to the internet.

Annoyingly this meant that I couldn't SSH into my home computer to do this at the time, but I knew there were ways around such measures. Over the weekend I was resigned to streaming videos and music off other peoples iTunes.

So now that I'm back and I've set up not one, but two methods for circumventing this kind of pay-for-access blockage of the internet.

The first is using Ping Tunnel which works but is quite slow (I only managed 100kbit/s or so), but using this client/proxy server combination will get me internet by piggybacking on ICMP ping requests with the real internet sneakily packed inside.

The second, and which is more preffered because of it's speed advantage, is using Ozyman DNS, which packages up real internet and hides it within DNS requests. Again this is a client/server combo where I run the proxy server on my home computer, and then the local client on my laptop would translate for example a SSH connection into DNS and push it out to the internet via my proxy server.

Very nice, and quite clever stuff really.

Also, I love MacPorts for grabbing stuff like this.

No 3000 success for you.

I win.

:)

So I'm off to ATP tomorrow and to be honest I cannot wait. This and ATP in Cambersands earlier this year are basically my holidays and it's going to be a very good weekend of music and general partying. I'm thinking of taking my camera down and more or less liveblogging on here or Facebook or something because I've pre-booked an extortionate £15 weekend pass to the sites wireless internet so by god am I going to use it. If I'm feeling charitable I'll even set up my Macbook as a wireless hotspot to share the internet wealth with people nearby.

ATP woo!

So December is fast approaching, which means it's time for my Ford Focus's annual service. Last year I had the timing belt done since I knew I was going to pass the 100k miles danger mark this year, so that's out of the way and can be forgotten about - unless by some work of magic I still have this car after 175k miles or so.

This year though there's a new batch of jobs to be done after passing 100,000 miles to keep my car running smoothly. Alas, here it goes:

• Oil change.


• New oil filter


• New air filter


• New cabin air filter


• Engine coolant flush & change


• General fluid top up


• Fuel filter


• New valve rocker cover gasket


• New PCV valve and hoses

So nothing really crazy to be done except the valve cover gasket and PCV valve, which I'm having done to try and cure two minor issues. First, there's a very tiny oil leak from the rocker cover, which is to be expected from an engine that's done this many miles as the rubber of the gasket breaks down.

Secondly, my Focus is giving off slight burning oil/exhaust smell when warm which disapears when moving but comes back when I slow down/stop at traffic lights etc. This could also be caused by the tiny oil leak from the rocker gasket burning off but is more commonly made by the PCV valve degrading or the hoses splitting from age.

Most excellently though I recieved a cheque to reimburse me for my tuition fees because I paid too much, which is more than enough to cover the cost of two services! Woot!

So my external 500GB hard drive started to die.

I splashed out on a Drobo and two 500GB hard drives for it.

I just manage to copy my stuff off before the old external drive dies completely.

Everything is good. Time passes.

Tonight one of the new drives in the Drobo died.

Already the Drobo has paid for itself because I haven't lost anything.

Everything is good. Time passes...

Anticipating the launch of the Wratch of the Lich King expansion for World of Warcraft, I've renewed my subscription to WoW and started playing again. It was kind of bewildering at first all of the quite small changes to the interface, the world and and the things to do now. It goes to show how much effort Blizzard are still putting into the game when just by leaving for not even a year you can come back and find almost a completely new game experience.

As soon as I logged in I recieved a flurry of whispers from people who hadn't seen me online in a long time, and I also got invited straight away into a guild filled with many of my old WoW buddies.

Now it's just a matter of getting as many in-game achievements as possible :E

So I've had my car back from having the silly old woman scrape repaired and I am impressed despite also being slightly annoyed at the whole affair taking nearly two weeks to complete. In the two times that my Focus has been repaired by Evans Halshaw it's taken a bit too long to get done but the results are damn good.

From what was on the report they fitted a new bumper, rear wheel arch and side panel and it looks perfect and is all aligned straight and true.

To top it all off to say sorry for taking so long they properly cleaned the entire (admittedly stinking) car and even did something to the wheels to make them look like new. I don't know if they just used some cleaning agent or did something fancier but really they look like new now it's amazing.

Maybe they just had some trainee or work experience kid to give busywork to but I'm not complaining.

So I go to my car this morning and discover a lovely big scrape on the rear corner. After a good 'for fucks sake not again!' I turned my thoughts to about how I'm gonna have to pay for the repair because it was probably some uninsured bum/drunk/gypo/chav last night and they haven't left a note and buggered off forever.

Luckily they left a piece of their car on the road.

And this pinpointed the make of the car.

And so after a quick Google image search I narrowed it down to a door trim off a silver Citroen C3. And I know for a fact there's an old lady that lives on the cul-de-sac that owns that exact car.

As a matter of fact while I was taking the photos above she came over and apologised many times and we swapped insurance details and she apologised some more but it's ok I guess not a terrible amount of damage done - mostly paint work and a small few dents.

So tomorrow now I have to phone up my side and get a repair sorted. I wonder what over-the-top courtesy car I'll get this time, the VW estate I had last time was pretty nice.

I swear as time goes on my car is going up in value because of the repairs being done on damage caused by other people. I'm not complaining but still it's a pain in the arse nonetheless.

BBC Weather FAIL

So I completed Metal Gear Solid 4 last night and to be honest - what a game.

Not so much a game, more of an extended cut-scene with gameplay parts mixed in but nonetheless it was a gourmet gaming experience. It was genuinely horrible to see what had become of Snake and in the last battle scenes you just don't want him to give up yet.

I'm so glad Hideo Kojima didn't take the easy way out and have Snake discover some super-treatment for him that makes everything rainbows and sunshine at the end.

Solid Snake has to come to and end at some point and now is as good as ever.

We're entering a strange situation now where the Mozilla Organisation is developing a plugin for Internet Explorer that gives Microsoft's browser HTML5 functionality, more specifically the Canvas tag. This is how old, broken and underdeveloped Internet Explorer is becoming.

The Ars Technica piece goes on to say how Mozilla are also working on a plugin to give IE the same Javascript engine as used by Firefox to promote the development of better web applications.

I've been spending my evening lately watching classic films from the 80's and 90's including but not excluding others:

• Ghostbusters I & II


• Highlander I, II, III


• Escape from New York


• Escape from L.A.


• Mad Max I & II


• Brazil


• The Warriors


• They Live


• Big Trouble in Little China

Also I've been watching through up on MST3K which I've been slowing working my way through from the first (technically 4th) episode and I've nearly finished the second season now. The mountain of 198 episodes is monstrously huge even for my series-bingeing TV watching nature.

Watching TV without a TV is awesome.