Life in the Bus Lane

Looks like there was a power cut here yesterday afternoon whilst I was in Kettering, and neither of the PCs came back up automatically.

I have seen the future and it is Blu, and so have ordered myself a Playstation 3. The imminent arrival of this necessitated some fairly major reorganising of the AV kit. I’ve retired the VHS machine and MD recorder, neither of which have been used for years, although I might reconnect the VHS at some point as I still have a few things on tape which aren’t available on DVD.

All being well City Link should arrive with a PS3 tomorrow morning, and the Postie should bring the HDMI cable and remote control. Cat5 and Optical cables are already in place awaiting the rest of the kit, and then I can spend the day playing Gran Turismo 5 Prologue.

Update: I’ve just noticed that one of my favourite VHS tapes, Elvis Costello Live: A Case for Song is now available on DVD. All I need now is for The Dangerous Brothers to make it to DVD and I won’t need the player after all.

O2 seem to think that 3G connections should be 128Kb/sec rather than the 384Kb/sec that everyone else understands. I wonder if I can cancel my contract because of this?

The Register: O2 says 128Kb/s is all its 3G customers need

I was amused to find that the volume control on BBC iPlayer goes all the way to eleven.

Wordpress 2.5 is out. It installed cleanly on my development site, but the flickr manager plugin seemed to hang. Eventually I worked out that there was an update available for it which hadn’t been announced and that seemed to solve the problem, so a quick svn sw http://svn.automattic.com/wordpress/tags/2.5/ later and everything was upgraded cleanly.

The newly redesigned admin pages take a bit of getting used to, everything isn’t quite where I expect it to be, but I assume I’ll get used to it fairly quickly. The new dashboard view is better now that it includes a stats widget.

Not only does our new web filter have a problem with Scunthorpe, it also dislikes Clitheroe and Middlesborough.

A couple of weeks ago I enabled SPF checking on my mail server to see if it actually did any good or not, and the answer is a resounding "no". In the time I was running it it only blocked a couple of mails, which almost certainly would have been dropped via other methods anyway, and actually blocked at least one legitimate email. I’ll stick to using a combination of the zen.spamhaus.org DNSBL and greylisting which works perfectly well.

I could watch it for hours.

BBC Clock

From the new look www.bbc.co.uk

A new toy arrived today.

I’ve calibrated both my desktop PC and the laptop already. Currently things look a bit odd, but I suspect that’s because I’d got used to the previous calibrated-by-eye look that was almost, but not entirely, correct.