United Utilites have informed me that they’re increasing my monthly payments to £88.50 a month for my water. I live in the Rossendale Valley in Lancashire which receives over 1200mm of rain every year. It’s raining here almost all the time. As I look out the window now, I see the usual relentless drizzle. Grey, boring, non-stop rain…
Archive
Archive for August, 2009Blizzcon is underway at the moment and they’ve confirmed that there will be a new WoW expansion entitled Cataclysm.
Overplay
Hulu is an awesome web site that allows lucky americans to pick from a very large library of TV programs and stream them over the Internet for free. Awesome… but if you’re not in the United States you can’t use it. Instead you’ll get a message along the lines of “Sorry, currently our video library can only be streamed from within the United States”. Boo!
Not all is lost though! You see, Hulu just looks at your computer’s I.P. address to determine which country you’re in and you can change that using Virtual Private Networking or VPN. One company that can set you up with this is OverPlay for about £6 a month which is peanuts considering what you’ll get access too. They have several servers in the United States and you can use VPN to relay your connection through them so that when Hulu takes a look at your computer’s I.P. address it sees the U.S. server’s address instead of your own.
It might sound complicated but it’s super simple to setup and they even have software that you can download to configure it all for you.
An added bonus is that it also works for videos at CBS and other similar U.S. sites. Also if you’re outside of the United Kingdom and want to watch BBC iPlayer content then they can also relay your connection via U.K. servers. Pretty cool.
The Guild Wars 2 trailer was released today. I don’t think anyone knows the release date as yet but it looks very nice 
I wasn’t really a Guild Wars fan but I think I’ll try this one.
I was trying to get wine working on my Mac. It’s been erroring about something or another so I ran winedbg to see what it was complaining about. The last function on the callstack seemed to be in the libcrypto.0.9.7.dylib library in the /usr/lib directory so in my infinite wisdom I renamed it to see if it was loading a different one from somewhere. Big mistake…
I was left in a position where I could no longer sudo to rename it back. I had no luck from Finder either and I couldn’t open new Terminal sessions. I decided to reboot in safe mode by holding down shift while rebooting to see if I could repair the damage from there but my system just wouldn’t come up – I was left staring at the Apple logo.
In case you should ever find yourself in this position, don’t panic too much – After much panicking myself, I managed to fix it by doing the following. Bear in mind at the time of writing I use Leopard so things may be a little different in future OS X versions.
- Locate your OS X installation disk 1 and pop it in the DVD drive.
- Reboot while holding the C key down to force your Mac to boot from the DVD drive.
- It’ll load up and ask you what language you’d like to use. Pick one (preferably one you can understand lol).
- The next screen is all about reinstalling. That’s a last resort really because we can fix things from here. On the Utilities menu you should see Terminal. Choose it and the Terminal will open with a bash shell.
- Bear in mind that you’ve not booted from your hard disk so the directory structure will look different to what you’re used to. Change directory in to /Volumes and then in to your hard disk, possibly called “Macintosh HD” unless you’ve changed it.
- Now you’re actually looking at your hard disk and should be able to change directory in to usr/lib and mv the file back to it’s original name. Just to clarify, you should not be in /usr/lib. You should be in /Volumes/Macintosh HD/usr/lib.
Good luck!
So Britain has freed the Lockerbie bomber, Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed al Megrahi. He killed 270 people and permanently damaged the lives of countless people. Each one of those passengers was a father, mother, son, daughter, sibling or grandparent to others.
He was sentenced to life imprisonment but as usual our justice system has let everyone down and made a mockery of everyone that died, their families, and the people of the U.K. and also the people of the U.S. who deserved justice for all the citizens that they lost. This man deserved no compassion from anyone.
Once again, I’m ashamed to be British as the international spotlight focuses on us. We just don’t seem to have the balls to do what needs to be done with criminals and terrorists. Letting him die in prison wouldn’t make us as bad as him. If we were as bad as him then we would have murdered 270 of this terrorist’s innocent friends and family as well as Megrahi himself. Instead all we needed to do in order for justice to be done was keep him in prison until he died and we couldn’t even manage that without some do-gooder with a minority opinion interfering.
We need to stop trying to sympathize with criminals and terrorists and quickly come to the realization that there really is good and evil in the world. Someone that murders 270 innocents is indeed an evil person no matter what his race or religion. We should not try to understand and sympathize with monsters.
Every now and then I wish I had a blog. Sometimes I feel the need to step on to my soapbox and let the world know what I think and then I realize I don’t have a soapbox to stand on. Now I do!
Now that it’s set up and working, I’m off to do my workout before it gets too late. I’ve put a TV and DVD player in the garage and I’m currently working my way through all 10 seasons of Stargate: SG1 while I lift weights. Sci-Fi makes you buff.