Happy new year! May 2009 be even better than 2008! PS. I shot this with my Canon 50mm 1.8 and it kicks the ass of the same image I shot with my Sigma 18-200 zoom (not surprisingly). Donations for “Donncha’s fund to buy L series lenses” should be sent to ..
C64
VirtualC64 for Mac OS X
VirtualC64 is a new Commodore 64 emulator for Mac OS X. It’s a promising project, let down by the fact that it’s still in beta but by the looks of things development is moving at a steady pace. When you first run the emulator it will ask you for C64 roms: basic, kernal, chargen and vc1541. Ironically, you can find all these roms inside Vice, another C64 emulator. Look in /Applications/VICE.app/Contents/Resources/ROM/. The 1541 ROM is DRIVES/dos1541. Loading a game or demo is as easy as dragging the d64 or t64 image into VirtualC64. When you do you’ll see a dialog […]
Donncha
Christmas Day Ten Years Ago
I’ll always remember Christmas Day 1998. Ten years ago on the night of Christmas Eve we returned from the Regional Hospital without our mother and my father without his wife. I was in Kerry 2 weeks before when my father rang with the news my mother had collapsed. A massive aneurysm in her brain had burst. She spent the next 15 days in hospital, sometimes awake and able to talk, but most of the time drowsy or asleep. The day before Christmas Eve she suffered another hemorrhage. An emergency operation was carried out to insert a stint in the blood […]
Donncha , Ireland
Recession in Cork
The world is in recession, and it’s even affected Cork. The city was busy but it’s been much busier in previous years. Every second shop had a “Closing Down sale” or “50% off sale” sign. Usually you have to wait until the January sales. It’s great that prices are down, but depressing what it means for the economy. I heard that many stores on North Main Street have already closed their doors. Construction work still continues in the center of the city though. I bet the developers of those sites are not looking forward to the job of selling floor […]
C64
Wizball live at the church
This blew me away the first time I heard it. The title tune of classic C64 game Wizball recreated by Reyn Ouwehand. You could watch the embedded movie, but for the full stereo HD experience take a look at the high quality version on Youtube. Reyn explains why he did it: I also play this track in my C64 live-set but then I got some beats and the arpeggios coming out of Ableton Live. During the live show I couldn’t get Ableton to work and it kept on crashing on me and then Leoni challenged me to do it acoustically […]
Web
Me and my Santa hat
Thank you Walter for my Santa hat! Walter has created a simple Pixenate app that adds a Santa hat to your Twitter avatar. Check out some of the other Christmas Avatars! As my Gravatar is used anywhere I comment, I updated that too. It’s been a while since I updated it, and it’s nice to see it’s as simple to update as before. It even stores my old Gravatar so it’ll be simple to change back at the end of the month. A nice demo of the capabilities of Pixenate, good job Walter!
Linux
Backups save the day
A few weeks ago I blogged about my backup system. How I have two 1TB Iomega external drives and how one drive is a duplicate of everything on the other drive, and how I backup everything on my laptop and VPS accounts. It sometimes seem excessive but I’m paranoid. This morning I’m very glad I went to such lengths. I wanted to copy some stuff onto my Macbook, and there’s nothing like the bandwidth available from a directly connected disk. I unmounted my drive, at least I tried. Something was keeping it mounted. Instead of following my own advice and […]
Linux
How to fix ssh timeout problems
If you use ssh a lot, you may have noticed that your ssh session times out and you’re logged out every once in a while. Annoying isn’t it? Read from remote host ocaoimh.ie: Connection reset by peer Connection to ocaoimh.ie closed. There’s a quick fix for that. Actually, there are 2 ways to fix it. You only need to do one of them so choose whichever one is easiest for you. You’ll need root access, so for most people it’s probably safer to do the client fix rather than the server fix. On the server, login as root and edit […]
Linux
Fixing Ubuntu 8.10
I suppose you could say I’m a long time Debian/Ubuntu Linux user, but the recent upgrade to 8.10 completely messed up my desktop machine. Sound was broken in Flash. That’s happened before and doing an aptitude install flashplugin-nonfree-extrasound fixed that, but from time to time sound would break and I’d have to killall -9 pulseaudio;pulseaudio -D to get it working again. My shiny new Xbox360 controller refused to work correctly in Ubuntu 8.10. Despite assurances on various Ubuntu sites that a fully updated system should now work, it didn’t. Moving the analogue stick moved the mouse pointer. Editing a spreadsheet […]
Donncha
2 candles and an apple pie
So, I enter my 33rd year on this planet. Highlight of the day was our lunch in the Castle Hotel in Blarney where Adam was on his best behaviour and I was surprised with an apple pie and a rendition of “Happy Birthday” sung by my wife and 2 of the staff! The burger I had for lunch was delicious too. Yum.