Oliver!

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DRM

An oldie from XKCD http://xkcd.com/546/

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Book burning in the modern age

From the ever funny xkcd.com.

On a similar topic, it’s nice to see the new Kindle getting some good reviews – Wired ran this yesterday. I know what I want for Christmas!

Amazon.co.uk Ltd. registered office: Patriot Court, 1-9 The Grove, Slough, Berkshire SL1 1QP. Registered in the United Kingdom. Registration number 3223028.

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Beware... Security Tool

Yes, I've had another little break from posting... I think if you're still following this blog then you probably realise by now that I'm far from a regular blogger so I'm not going to feel guilty about it!

It's entirely due to my job at Amazon - not only is it incredibly busy throughout the day but my commute is also twice as long now so my chances to post anything are reduced. I should say that this is a good thing since it's far preferable to being sat at work bored.

The thing that prompted me to come out of online seclusion is a malicious bit of code called Security Tool which may initially appear to be a virus checker is in fact a dodgy bit of malware which hides it's processes under numbered id's and is rather persistant when you try to remove it. It also blocks you from running any of the usual tools you might want to open to aid you with this task. Nice work guys, cheers.

Anyway, there's obviously plenty of others who have been hit by this so there are some good guides to removing it - after a bit of delving into the registry and some detective work to identify the problem files and I'm cured but I was definitely worried for a few hours. Thanks to these guys for their help.

And before you say it I do run anti-virus software. McAfee apparantly didn't help in this case - I've recently moved to Avast! which seems a pretty good, free alternative which has marginally more protection than the widely known AVG.

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My MythBox so far

So the MythTV project continues; I've been gathering the bits and building it when I've got some spare time. Things got a little delayed by me buying the wrong memory for my motherboard... they used to be generic I'm sure!

Anyway; the setup is:

Antec VERIS Fusion case
CIT 550W Silent ATX Power Supply
Asus AM3 M4A785TD-M Evo motherboard
AMD Athlon II X2 3GHz 2MB Dual Core Processor
Kingston 1333Mz DDR3 memory
Sony DVD writer
DViCO FusionHDTV DVB-T Dual Digital 4

The case is pretty funky; it's nicely styled and will fit into my hifi stack very well - it's a solid piece of kit too with the front panel made from brushed metal.
It's well laid out inside too which has made installing everything pretty easy although for a microATX case it's pretty bulky; the width of my hifi kit but a bit deeper and taller. The built in IR receiver, VFC display and bundled remote control are all pretty promising too.

The DViCO card had twin Freeview-HD tuners onboard so I can record two programmes at once - my TV's got another normal freeview tuner so I can also watch that while recording.

Everything else is fairly standard - I made sure that the motherboard had decent onboard graphics with an HDMI output and that things were as silent as I could make them without spending a fortune. It needs to be a fairly meaty system to playback HD recordings otherwise a MythBox can be far simpler and cheaper.

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Go wide!

I saw this a couple of months ago but it's just been sent around again so I thought I'd share it - it's a very impressive image capturing over 170 people on a railway bridge in Germany. the impressive bit isn't that it's got some many people but that the print is 100m wide!

 

http://www.simonhoegsberg.com/we_are_all_gonna_die/slider.html

 

 

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Great work from www.stop43.org.uk #DEbill

You've got to love this image - pass this around to raise some awareness about the risks of the Digital Economy Bill that's about to come before parliament.

 

 

I wouldn't be a supporter of this if I didn't credit the image to stop43.org.uk! Follow the link to find out how to contact your MP.

It's more important than ever to do this since there's an Early Day Motion to allow the bill to actually be debated properly but they need to raise support which means you need to contact your MP now.

 

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