tenthofjune

My sister (and friends) are once again running the 10k at Tatton Park for Cancer Research UK.

Last year was run in fancy dress through the rain and mud, but this year they’ve decided to opt for the pink Breast Cancer t-shirts.

Most of us know someone who has been affected by cancer, so please show your support by sponsoring the Pink Ladies at www.10ksponsorme.org/PinkLadies. If you’re a UK taxpayer an extra 28% in tax will be added to your gift at no extra cost to you.

Airline cabin announcements. All too rarely, airline attendants make an effort to make the in flight “safety lecture” and announcements a bit more entertaining. Here are some examples that have been heard or reported:
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More problems with Parcelforce (aka Parcelfarce).

I ordered some stuff from the Nokia Shop on Monday 14th May. Unfortunately, they will only deliver to the cardholder address, so getting it shipped to work was not an option. Nokia’s website doesn’t specify the carrier, so I was disappointed to find a card through the door last Thursday from Parcelforce. Another card appeared on Friday, so we used Parcelforce’s website to book a redelivery. The website offered to retry on Saturday, so we accepted and it even gave a confirmation number.

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Just been to the digital photography review site dpreview.com to find that they have been bought out by Amazon. Not sure this is good news. The press release says that dpreview will continue to operate as a standalone operation based in London. Let’s hope Amazon refrain from meddling.

Well surprise, surprise, Sat Nav is once more being blamed for the idiocy of a driver who blindly follows it into a dangerous situation. This 20 year old student narrowly avoided being nominated for the Darwin Awards.

Sat Nav is no different to a road atlas, both have map errors, but no-one hears of them being blamed for the driver deciding to follow a back lane across a railway level crossing, so why do people follow Sat Nav instructions without question? If the Sat Nav told you to turn left, half way across a bridge, would you comply?

It’s just another example of ‘not my fault’ attitude.

My iMac lost its network connection this morning. The system.log was full of these:

May 11 10:54:11 iMac configd[48]: bootp_session_transmit: bpf_write(en2) failed: No buffer space available (55)
May 11 10:54:11 iMac configd[48]: DHCP en2: INIT transmit failed

which is odd, because the iMac only has two ethernet interfaces: en0 (wired) and en1 (wireless), so what is en2?

It seems that 10.4.9 introduced something called ‘Bluetooth PAN‘ and when I paired up my new Nokia 6300, OS X enabled this. Unfortunately, it is this which causes the DHCP issue shown in system.log.

The solution (thanks to Jonas Salling’s comment on Justin Williams’ Blog) is to disable Bluetooth PAN in system preferences.

Google Analytics have come up with a flash new interface, but have made one glaring error – They have lumped the ex-Soviet Union into Europe, not Asia. Click on the thumbnail below to see.

BBC Have Your Say has recently started showing statistics about the posts made to a topic. Look, however, at the figures on this post. Out of 1138 posts, they have only got around to posting a measly 57. That’s only 5%. If you haven’t got the staff to moderate it, then they should make it reactively moderated or don’t bother including the topic. Very soon, people will realise there’s no point in bothering.

The implementation also fails to allow proper threaded conversation. People often quote others but because of the disjointed nature of the post order, it is not possible to see the original quoted post.

As well as recommending a post, it should also be possible to mark it negatively. A more conventional forum or newsgroup style would work better and should be adopted.

While moving house recently, I found an old Sony portable radio which my parents had given me back in the 70s. The model number is a TR-3550. It is Medium Wave only but is still working. The only repair I had to do was replace the battery connection. It is interesting to note the complete lack of integrated circuits. All components are discrete components. Click on the pictures below for some views.

According to VirginMedia’s own website, they have started to automatically reduce the broadband speed of people who they determine are using too much bandwidth. It would appear that downloading an ISO image is enough to trigger this throttling.