Northern Ireland, its history, and its current situation, are a guaranteed topic of conversation to any self-identifying Northern Irishman, especially one travelling around Europe. As I am neither a historian, a bigot, or particularly political, I don’t know a whole pile of detail, so my explanations become rambling personal perspectives which I generally suspect make things less-clear; otherwise I dumb it down so much that the point is kinda mixed, usually ending something like ‘its weird; its British, but we get to be Irish too, except without being quite so broke’. ...

So as part of my IAESTE placement with PC Engines, I’m investigating the possibility of them making a new board based around the AMD Fusion series of APU’s (CPU+(something else, usually GPU) on single die) and for that board to work with the Open Source Coreboot BIOS. This is my story. Disclaimer I am not a hardware guy, and have never done any pre-OS x86 hardware programming. This will bore the pants of anyone who is an x86 expert, but hopefully some will find it useful and will contribute to the Coreboot project. ...

‘Star Wars: Episode I’ - Obi-wan & Qui-Gon vs Darth Maul - A capella Multitrack Wits with Neil Gaiman, Adam Savage, and Gollum: “I Will Survive” Neil Gaiman, Author supports an #OnionPulitzer

As part of my placement in Zurich, I’ve been doing some BIOS level development around the Coreboot project, working with Flashrom and other tools, but with a particular AMD Fusion (MSI E350IA-E45) Mobo, there was no sensible way to flash the BIOS or to add a ‘vestigial’ BIOS. So, the solution arrived at was to ‘acquire’ a Galep-5 Universal Programmer (Not a cheap piece of kit, but apparently that’s the kind of stuff they have lying around in Zurich). Anyway, long story short, went to the Galep website, downloaded the .run file, installed, all perfect and happy days. Except it was in German. (Even though it says its ‘English only’) ...

Unity Sucks, and I don’t like it. I prefer a combination of Avant Window Navigator, tilda, and Gnome-Do, to go from this ** to this ** Now, I haven’t kept track of all of the changes I’ve made to my configuration files, so YMMV, but gnome-do and Avant have remarkably good GUI configuration tools, so customise to your hearts content! Get rid of Unity sudo apt-get remove unity unity-asset-pool unity-place-applications unity-place-applications ...

Had an issue with Fedora 15 not liking my harddrives that used to be RAIDed. Noting for future reference. “Disk contains BIOS metadata, but is not part of any recognized BIOS RAID sets." Solution: dmraid -r -E /dev/???? Stolen from Kezhong

Social Network of Idiots II : Foamy The Squirrel Why Homosexuality Should Be Banned River Shiver - Pomplamoose Doctor Who: “Series 1-6” - Mega Marathon Trailer (HD) Bruno Mars - The Lazy Song [Official Alternate Version]

More a note for myself than anyone else. Stolen shamelessly from Marc Fletcher. In Settings, alt+e,alt+q, alt+q.

I’ve discovered a strange undocumented* ‘feature’ of the Amazon Kindle document Delivery system. As it stands, if you send a document to [email protected] or @kindle.com, the document is sent onto your device at its convenience. Generally this is fine, but for most documents that people actually use (PDFs) this can be a pain as the service says it does not support PDF reflow, and on a smaller than A4/Letter screen, lovely documents end up looking like this… ...

ANGRY BIRDS theme!!! covered by Pomplamoose (Cat’s crash test) Краштест (Жесть и нереально!!)