Antispin

Welcome to the life of more or less ever designer/front-ender/developer/creative ever. These guys truly are clients from hell. Via clientsfromhell.net

I have one of these Galaxy S3 things now. The phone is a technological marvel and is honestly one of the greatest pieces of Android kit I’ve used and I’ve gone through: Google G1 HTC Hero HTC Desire Motorola Atrix …so I’ve run the gamut of Android handsets, and have sampled one from pretty much each generation and watched Android develop.There are plenty of reviews on the internet that will go into technical details more than me but here are some important facts. ...

A couple of weeks ago, I installed the Varnish Cache daemon on the server this blog runs on to see if it’d speed it up any. The answer is, emphatically, yes. Images and pages load in seconds, as they’re being served from the static cache. The number of hits to Apache has decreased dramatically, which is fantastic! The tradeoff was that Piwik, my analytics package that produces pretty graphs and charts like these… ...

I never thought I’d post anything Hello Kitty-related, but these cakes are kinda awesome so I’m willing to lift my Hello Kitty embargo just this once!

It’s been a while since I’ve done one of these, so here’s a quick rundown of various chill dubstep/2-step tunes I’ve been listening to that are well worth checking out! Above & Beyond delivering more ethereal vocals combined with epic drops! It sounds like it could be a standard trance track they’d blast out in clubs, but it’s wonderfully surprising! This one came from a contact juggling video by Cyrille & Kyle. ...

I came across this lovely drinking game on thoughtcatalog.com and feel I should share it! The Overthinking Persons’ Drinking Game When you experience a vague sense of inequity or deprivation but don’t have a template for whether your expectations are fair, drink. When you aren’t sure whether the lingering sensation that you aren’t liked enough is a rational response to unfair circumstances or is in fact symptomatic of your tendency to blame your environment for your own failure to self-actualize, drink. ...

This was posted on Books of Adam, hitherto-unknown (to me) blog and follows the conversation between Adam, who went to Vegas and his friend Kristin in NY. Sex with sharks gives you Shark AIDS.

I saw this video on failblog, of all places. A bit misplaced, I thought. Neil Gaiman gave a graduation speech at a university to a bunch of arts graduates. He talks about how important it is to make mistakes and learn from them, how important it is to face success, which nobody prepares you for and how to learn from that, too. Also of grave significance to me is his advice that whoever you are, chances are you’ll come up with something new and some will say it can’t be done because your idea is outside their carefully-crafted model of reality. ...

About this time last year, I shot a bunch of nude photos with a friend of mine for her life modelling portfolio as she needed to get pictures to people. It was such a delightful evening as there’s something really great about doing a photoshoot with a close friend and taking things slowly with plenty of breaks for wine and hugs and the like! One of the things I plan on doing when I go back to Canada is doing another glamorous photoshoot – maybe even somewhere in the woods for that added touch of wildness in the images. ...

I got tired of trawling through forums to find these answers so I collated them for you! My work laptop is a Lenovo ThinkPad x121e. It’s stupidly energy-efficient, quiet and most importantly built like a brick. When I took the bottom cover off to upgrade the RAM to 8GB, I was struck by the build quality and was gratified to see the area around the hard disk and other crucial sections of the mainboard was reinforced with extra structural metalwork. ...

So I figured I’d post a little trip report of my Canadian jaunt to see delightful friends. This will mostly be in the form of photos because I’m too goddamn lazy to write words today. Beaches make for gorgeous photos! We had a cozy bonfire on the beach made from driftwood and chunks of tree that were lying around. Also, wine happened. Lots of wine.  The sneakiest cottage of them all! ...

Really, the title should have some sort of clever warning about not upgrading 11.10 to 12.04 when running a Rackspace Cloud Server. I tried this on Saturday (4 days ago) and it’s taken me this long to recover my server. And by recover I mean ‘snatch the files and data off it, then recreate it from scratch running 11.10’. You see, among other things, Ubuntu seems to require a custom kernel to run on Rackspace’s infrastructure. ...

I recently procured one of these beauties after staring enviously at the one we have on our desk for testing at work. It’s a HP ProLiant MicroServer – a bit of a mouthful, but a good piece of kit! It comes with 2GB RAM 250GB HDD Dual-core AMD Turion II N40L processor Gig Ethernet More USB ports than I know what to do with Three more 3.5″ disk bays, which I filled with 2TB Western Digital disks Some flashy lights I bought it after umm-ing and aah-ing about building a replacement for my ageing Windows Home Server file server. ...

Last year, I went to Burning Man, a festival quite unlike anything else on earth. To call it an ‘Arts Festival’ would be doing it a disservice. I won’t go into the ins and outs of it because it’ll take me several hours to write something satisfactory. Instead, check this out. It’s done the rounds on the Internet and has gone spectacularly viral since its release and is still one of the best Burning Man videos I’ve seen. ...

As I mentioned in a previous post, I’m running a series on ZFS storage systems mostly for the purposes of remembering this stuff and tangentially on the off chance that it’ll help someone too! Today’s documentation entry is concerned with using ZFS’ *send* and *receive* commands to backup datasets over a network. Since installing a new storage server at work, we’ve had an old DL385 G6 chassis with 6 1TB disks kicking about for a good 6 months with a view to converting it to a backup storage device for snapshots and the like. ...

So, in case you have been living under a rock – Beardyman is a beatboxer/comedian/musician who makes up ridiculous sets like this one. It’s really quite fascinating what can be achieved with a Kaoss pad and a bit of creativity!

This infographic makes a great argument in favour of using a blogging platform – ideally self-hosted – as a means of sharing content. Having a blog, I’m fully in control of my content – I own the copyright, I can modify, show, hide, publish and delete at will. The “danger” that prospective employers and so on can look you up on Facebook and other social media sites and may refuse to employ you based on what they find there is easily mitigated by the control that you have over your content. ...

Being ashamed of failure is one the most dangerous psychological traps people fall into. We all do it – every time we’re scared to act because we’re worried about what might go wrong. Every time we want to change something but can’t because we don’t know what will happen if we do. So we get stuck in a loop of wanting to act, but being paralysed. Brené Brown’s talk on TED is illuminating! ...