More Zonkyness

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  • Old Portsmouth & Southsea

    #1: The Sea Fort

    The Sea Fort

    #2: Leaving Harbour

    Leaving Harbour

    #3: The Not Quite So Square Tower

    The Not So Square Tower

    #4: The Sea

    The Sea

  • Firing Jeremy Clarkson?

    Today we learned that next Sunday's episode of Top Gear is not to be shown, and Jeremy Clarkson has been suspended pending an investigation. Apparently because of a "fracas" with a producer.

    Which is all a bit mysterious, but it is interesting to see people assuming that Clarkson is in trouble because of his mouth. It would be hardly be a big surprise if his mouth has gotten him into trouble again; his public persona is a bit of a loud-mouthed idiot so it is hardly surprising if he says something dumb, obnoxious, or even offensive at times.

    When he goes too far, he usually apologises (here, here, here, and I dare say you can find plenty more).

    But if this latest fracas has anything to do with the something stupid he has said, the BBC are being a bit two-faced about suspending him. The Top Gear show was a bit of a dreary bore before Clarkson's brand of idiocy spiced it up into something even car-haters can enjoy on occasion. If you employ an obnoxious idiot because he's an obnoxious idiot, it's wrong to suspend him for being an obnoxious idiot.

    Of course we're all making assumptions about what went on today. And frankly a "fracas" sounds a bit more serious than just a few badly chosen phrases, so I think we should all wait and see how this develops.

     

     

  • Brighton

    #1: Sailing On A Shining Sea

    Sailing On A Shining Sea

    #2: Grumpy Seagull

    Grumpy Seagull

    #3: Fencing Off The Sky

    Fencing Off The Sky

  • An Awesome Custom Help Screen

    So there I was, wandering down the street thinking about :-

    1. Sometimes being unable to remember custom key sequences that I've configured.
    2. That my "Help" button on my keyboard was unused.

    And I thought that it would be fun to knock up a little application that would pop up a window and show a file. Then I got real, and realised that the application was already written and allowed fancy formatting of the help file(s) – it's called a browser.

    Now for a whole bunch of reasons, you probably don't want to use a full blown browser, but something a little simpler and without any fancy controls, and I plumped for dillo. Turns out that the "-f" flag turns off the fancy menu and toolbar, so what I needed was to persuade my window manager (Awesome) to run it when I pressed "Help" :- 

    	awful.key({ }, "Help", function () awful.util.spawn("dillo -f /home/mike/lib/help-files/index.html") end))

    If you need help adding that to your Awesome configuration file, you're in the wrong place!

    And of course it works :-

    2015-03-07_1457

    (And now of course I need to spend some time writing some help files!)

  • Too Offensive For Nashville?

    (Click on the banner for a link to the source story). Turns out this advertising banner was too "offensive" to be put up in Nashville. In the same country that allowed this :-

    The acid test for freedom of speech is to allow speech that you do not agree with; looks like America fails.