I think I nailed that YouTube article. We’ll see how it goes. Also I finished Angry Birds.
So today, Bob the Intern and I had a game of Kings of War, with me playing the Dwarfs and Bob taking the Undead. Bob’s played a couple of games before, but this time I totally ruined him:
* Bob rolled to go first, and moved all his forces up by 5 inches. Taking advantage of move and shoot with the skeletons, and scoring a couple of hits on my Ironclad Warriors. The Balefire Catapult failed, however.
* My Shieldbreakers moved on up at the double, while the Ironwatch and Ironclads slowly inched forward, shooting up the Skeletons as they went. The Organ Gun also successfully knocked a couple of hits on the Skeletons too.
* The Skeleton’s moved ever closer, shooting as they went and the Balefire Catapult managed to get a couple of hits off this time as well.
* I was soon able to charge my Shieldbreakers into the side of his unit of Revenants, and later had my units destroying his final units from the front, side and rear.

I worked from home today, looking after Robin who’s sick with a cold, but also to try and get some more work done on a piece I’m writing about YouTube Rentals. YouTube Rentals is by far one of the stupidest things YouTube have done lately — going against all their good work in the area of web standards and accessible, free formats for the masses and shoveling an ill-conceived rental program to try and compete with… someone.
I get most of my entertainment from Netflix and the web. I don’t want to rent a video I can watch on my laptop — I’d happily pay pretty much anyone a dollar to own a DRM-free copy of a movie, maybe 35 cents for a TV episode. I recently experimented with Hulu Plus, but cancelled only a day into my free trial due to their butchering of Peep Show episodes — with adverts cutting in haphazardly, and even in the middle of sentences.
I am also addicted to the web version of Angry Birds.

Last night was pretty fun, a bunch of people came out for my weekly trivia night. It’s essentially a pub quiz, for those of you who have no idea what trivia is. The theme this week was (appropriately) 1981 — some of the questions, which Don usually assembles were somewhat contrived, but its hard to come up with 15 interesting questions that people might actually get.
I’m now the proud owner of a set of ‘Bottle Top’ — a revolutionary new product for putting a flip-open bottle cap on a can of soda.

I suppose they might be useful for beer, but I really ought to stop drinking soda. Still, it gave me an idea: Over the last ten years or so, there’s been a decline in good comedy on TV, with only a small resurgence in the last year or two. At the same time, I feel as if I’ve sat through hundreds of hours of stupid commercials (and a few good ones) for various ‘As Seen on TV’ products — we need an artistic trust of some kind that will buy up these spots on late night TV for cheap and show rising and established comedians.

Our next meeting will be February 19th 2008, with Stuart Langridge (also known as Aq) of LUGRadio fame joining us for a talk about his experiences with free software.

• More information
• Let us know you’re coming
• Do a lightning talk

The event takes place on the 19th of February at 7pm at Manchester Digital Development Agency on Portland Street.
How to get there
Manchester Digital Development Agency
Lower Ground Floor
117-119 Portland Street
Manchester
M1 6ED
UK
Forthcoming speakers also include Alex Hudson from Bongo and John Leach from Everybody Loves Eric Raymond/Brightbox Hosting.
In the past, we’ve had Matthew Bloch from Bytemark and Aidan McGuire from Blue Fountain.

I believe prefacing the term “Linux” with the term “GNU” serves the useful purpose of highlighting that GNU/Linux is a compound of many elements and has what many developers would term a “GNU Userland” wrapped around a “Linux kernel”. That’s why I have made it Sun’s policy to refer to GNU/Linux when speaking of Linux-based operating system distributions, and it’s why I encourage Nexenta to describe itself as “GNU/OpenSolaris”

Simon Phipps, Sun Microsystems (source)

Ugh.
Qtrax files contain Digital [Restrictions] Management software, allowing the company to see how many times a song has been downloaded and played. Artists, record companies and publishers will be paid in proportion to the popularity of their music, while also taking a cut of advertising revenues.
The singer James Blunt gave Qtrax a cautious welcome. “I’m amazed that we now accept that people steal music,”? he said. “I was taught not to steal sweets from a sweet shop. But I want to learn how this service works, given the condition the music industry is in.”?

1. http://www.facebook.com/privacy.php?view=platform&tab=myapps – remove everything apart from…
2. Photos, Events, Posted Items, Notes and Groups.
3. http://www.facebook.com/privacy.php?view=platform&tab=ext
4. Remove anything here.
5. Save
6. http://www.facebook.com/privacy.php?view=platform&tab=all
7. Select “Do not share any information about me through the Facebook API”
8. http://www.facebook.com/privacy.php?view=search
9. Under What Can People Do With My Search Results
10. ‘See your picture’ and ‘Add you as a friend’ should be ticked. The rest not.
11. Done.

Windows’ Genuine Disadvantage
If you can, please help Digg this!

In 2008, the Free Software Foundation will be fighting DRM, abolishing software patents, and defending user freedom. Benjamin Mako Hill presents the case for supporting the FSF in this fight. They are just 120 members short of their fundraising goal of 500 new members or $100,000 by January 31.

School fingerprints lunch pupils

Catering staff at an Essex school are taking the fingerprints of pupils at lunchtime to ensure they get the meals their parents want them to eat.

You couldn’t make this stuff up.