Cruel and Unusual Geography

Just today I just came across the Twictures web site.

Update: Twictures seems to be permanently down.

Update 2: updated the links to the Twictures and images.

Continue reading

There are more charities competing for my money than I can possibly afford to support. If I were to be honest I’d admit that I could support more, but am too selfish. Nevertheless, below is a brief list of charities that I personally think are worthy of your support: Continue reading

Vodafone’s current promotion in New Zealand is a young male (the “3GGuy”)  trotting around the country giving away netbooks. They created a Twitter account for the chap, but rather than use that have chosen to spam the Vodafone corporate Twitter account for the duration of the promotion.

Sadly this young chap (and/or his marketing-droid masters) doesn’t seem to understand social media. His first competition was to see who could spam the most.

This has not pleased some folk. Nope. Not at all.

In the Open Source spirit of “if you don’t like it, fix it” I’ve created my first Twitter bot. It parses the @vodafoneNZ Twitter stream and posts all tweets that don’t contain references to 3GGuy to @vfNZno3gguy. The updates aren’t instant, but should come through within half an hour or so.

The filtering is pretty basic at the  moment (it’s keyword-based; feel free to suggest modifications in the comments), but will be updated as I’m able.

Again, the 3Gguy-free Twitter feed is at @vfNZno3gguy. I hope this is of use to some folks.

Update:  the @vfNZno3gguy account was mentionned by @lancewiggs in his “how NOT to Twitter if you are a corporation” post.

I know people who manage several, and in a couple of cases hundreds, of servers. While I’m nowhere near that level — I’m a coder, not a system administrator —I do have a few machines that I’m responsible for. The work subversion repository, for example, and the issue tracker, and one or two others, mostly running various flavours of Ubuntu Server on virtual machines.

Manually checking whether patches are required for the kernel or applications

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

becomes more of an effort when there’s more than one or two machines to manage. Enter apticron, a utility which will automatically email you when there are packages needing upgrading.

Configuration is simple; there’s a nice overview here.

Update: there are brief (but accurate) configuration instructions posted now.

This is some of the most fantastic and beautiful delicate art work I have ever seen:

Carved eggshells. Like nothing I've ever seen.

Slovenian (I think) Franc Grom carves these eggs using a small hand-held electric drill. His more complicated pieces have literally thousands of holes.

Franc Grom works on another egg.

There are a few more photos here, but precious little else that I can discover about him online.

This is just cool. New York arty type Kacie Kinzer has created simple little robots that mindlessly drive along, relying on passers-by to direct them to their destination. Contrary to expectations, no-one stole or vandalised them, and in post-911 NY no-one called “terror attack” when faced with a (small cardboard) robot stalking the city.

A tweenbot gets help from a passer-by in NY.

The tweenbots could only drive forwards, and relied on the kindness of strangers to point them to the destination written on a small attached flag.

There’s more info, including images and video, at the tweenbot website.