Cricalix.Net

So the folks over at Zooomr are offering free professional accounts ($20 USD a year or some such) for free to anyone with a blog. You have to host at least one image with them, but that’s it. I have to wonder what they get out of it – perhaps just the publicity from posts like this one? :)

I obviously have my own gallery for hosting my photos, but I can see some uses for Zooomr – like photos of Newcastle that I just want to geo-tag so other people can see what the place looks like, without bogging down my gallery (which I think I’ll reserve as a gallery of ‘good’ stuff), or pictures of food (for the Ars Technica food thread).

And just to make sure this post qualifies for the Pro account, I give you a rose :)

It’s interesting how simple acts of help / kindness towards other people can make my day.

Walking home from work the other day, I happened to notice an older gentleman trying to lever a wooden post off of his wall and out of the ground.  I stopped to watch for a few, and noticed he wasn’t really making any progress, so I nipped over the road and inquired whether he’d like some assistance with the post.  He seemed quite surprised at the offer, but readily accepted it.

A few minutes later, after a bit of thought and brute force, the top half of the post was off the wall, and the bottom half was out of the ground.  It turns out he was still recovering from a stroke, which might have explained the trouble he was having with the post.  He was quite happy once the post was out of the ground, and I walked off with a smile on my face.

Funny old thing, life.

Silly me decided to try again to upgrade my ZyXEL firmware. I believe there’s a definition of insanity that reads ‘Trying the same thing over and over, expecting different results.’ I’m insane :)

This time, not only did SIP break, but I couldn’t downgrade either. This is a bit painful, as it means I can’t talk to a friend in the USA, or my parents, for free as I am wont to do. I tried e-mailing ZyXEL support with trepidation, as my last conversation via e-mail with them wasn’t exactly useful. All props to them this time though, they were able to help me solve the problem with RomPager erroring out on my 660HW-61. A full reset using the button (45 seconds to reset properly) allowed me to downgrade from PE.10 to PE.9. PE.11 is meant to be out in a month or so, at which point I’ll try upgrading again. See definition of insanity in first paragraph :)

I’ve also found that I really don’t need to have the stateful firewall engaged, as the router is able to do everything I need with just the NAT port forwards. I don’t get any packet tracking, but everything works, so I’m happy.

Amarok 1.4.1 just came out for Kubuntu Dapper, and it includes better support for Last.FM’s stuff.  With 1.4 (and I think 1.3.x), you could set up a Last.FM account, and feed data in to the relational system they use to recommend music for you to listen to.  1.4.1 has introduced support for playing the custom radio stations that Last.FM offer, and it’s absolutely fantastic.

I’ve been listening to SKY Reggae for a while now, and I think this has biased my Last.FM stream quite heavily – so far I’ve had Anthony B, Tony Rebel, Jacob Miller, Sanchez, Glen Washington and Barry Brown.  I have Winamp set up at home to feed in my music collection, but it’s either not working, or it’s not offsetting the reggae enough.  Not that I’m complaining about reggae, it’s good music.

Amarok has also introduced usage of the UID and related tags in various music formats to provide song tracking, regardless of movement in the underlying file system.  Nifty feature!

I’ve been poking Zooomr.com recently – it’s pretty much Flickr, but on steroids in some areas.  Geo-tagging is really nifty – the site uses Google Maps to allow you to find other pictures from other posters who have tagged the photo as being ‘near‘ you.  Near is a relative term I think, as tags for the UK show someone in London (200 miles or so) as being near.

The peas have been producing quite well, despite the onslaught from slugs and snails.  I refuse to use modern chemical methods for getting rid of slugs and snails – they’re quite handy in other parts of my garden.  I just don’t want them near my peas, onions and carrots!

Dinner last night consisted of cold roast beef, fragrant thai rice and fresh peas – very tasty.

The oven is working out quite nicely – this weekend saw two treacle tarts (Gran style, [no lemon and ginger] but with a bit too much syrup unfortunately),  and some homemade bread.  Pity I messed up the yeast amount for the bread – the flavour was a bit off.  Still good bread though.  This weekend might see a Texas Sheet Cake – a recipe I picked up in the US that uses sour cream to make a cake.  It’s a bit odd, but it tastes sooo good.