telnet miku.acm.uiuc.edu

Of course this posting doesn’t end there as the Nyan telent service is not new to me and I have only linked it here because a) it is quite interesting and more people should know about it and b) it lends a nice degree of context to the following paragraphs.

Also linked to on that Reddit post where two relevant applications that where new to me, both of which are hosted on the wonderful Github and each has its own application, or at the very least: reason to exist.

Nyancat CLI

The Nyancat CLI is essentially the same thing as displayed in the telnet link above except you can set it to only output one frame and therefore theoretically it could be set to be run when people log into your server via SSH for a nice welcome. As it is also a very simple C application it could also prove interesting to those learning C, in finding out basic terminal interaction and how to write a makefile for a very simple application with very few header files (I found it interesting for this very reason.)

In any case to have the Nyancat CLI output just one frame use the following code:

./nyancat -esnf 1

This can be used in your login script to output the Nyancat graphic on login over SSH.

Lolcat CLI

The second interesting little tool that is linked to from the Reddit post is called lolcat. Unfortunately unlike the Nyancat CLI, Lolcat has been written in Ruby rather than C and therefore I am unable to install it, mostly because I don’t wish to go through the effort of installing Ruby just to screen grab lolcat running on my development server. Instead I have included an screenshot below taken from the Github page where the Lolcat CLI is hosted. As you will see from the screenshot the Lolcat CLI takes an input and “rainbow-fies” it.

The Doctor has spoken, Bow ties are now cool! They are also now available as cute knitted necklaces for girls with no collars and are available for the reasonable price of $20 from ohjustjess on etsy here.

So what if you dont like gray, or it just wont go with that outfit you wanted to finish off with a bow tie? Well she hand makes them in 20 different colours so you certainly have plenty to choose from. The crocheted bow measures 5in by 3in and hangs on a 20in bronze metal chain and it certainly adds some pizzaz to any outfit.

It could be your new ice breaker?

As it is an Easter weekend and I am in-between projects I decided to sort out the nagging issues with this website, take off the dust covers and tidy up. In doing so I have reinstated an older wordpress theme I designed over two years ago that I love and both updated it and as many posts as I can find with problems (missing images, broken links, poorly written content… the list goes on.)

One post that did take my fancy during this clean up is simply titled Gooimaging and depicts an interesting little boredom breaker that I came up with after watching David Gorman’s Google-whacking adventures. I have decided to revive that game as its 8:59am and I need to wake up properly before getting on with work. As the old rules were written for a google image search that has since been vastly updated and improved upon, I have revised the rules and listed them below:

1. You must image search for a name, male or female. It must be a name that is associated with a person such as “Sam”, “Jamie”, “Keith” or “Max.”
2. Scroll down the equal page number to your birth-date-month and then count along the images until you rest upon the image equal to your birth-date-day. This is your selected image.
3. The image must not be pornographic or non-human (play with safe-search off for increased difficulty,) if it is then you have to go back one link. If at the beginning then start again with a different name.
4. Click on the image in question and open the webpage, you are looking for other names that meet rule one. You then repeat the rules for that name and continue doing so until you come to a dead end or you discover better things to be spending you time doing.

My Game

I began with a search for “Bronwyn”  and it returned 2,260,000 results of very similar looking people, this was however not a very good start as I landed on the only non human picture in the search: a pair of dogs from romanycollies.com. Taking this early defeat in hand I rolled again and searched this time for “Jamie” which amongst 810,000,000 results returned a photo of Jamie Foxx at thecinemasource.com a distinctively human image which has been linked to an article written by Andrea Tuccillo.

After rolling again with “Andrea” google returned 487,000,000 results and I hit upon the below desktop wallpaper image of Andrea Parker hosted at a blogspot blog titled filmovizia. Once again I looked for an attractive name prospect and chose “Alicia“.

Rolling with “Alicia” returned 203,000,000 results with my result in question being the Alicia Keys Wikipedia page and a shamefully small photo at that. Thanks to both google similar image search and Tineye plus a generous slapping of photoshop skills I have been able to recreate the image big enough to include below.

As Alicia’s manager is called Jeff Robinson I have decided to roll again with the name “Jeff“, this returned 2,040,000,000 results and landed me on another Wikipedia page. This time the page in question was that describing the professional wrestler Jeffrey Leonard Jarrett pictured below.

Wiki pages make finding names for this game too easy so in an attempt to make things more difficult I scourer the Jeff Jarrett wiki page for the most obscure name that I could find – the best I could do was “Dixie“. This roll returned about 86,900,000 results, the least amount so far so I was going in the right direction. However the first page of results had plenty of non human images and I was only four rounds in, this was not the time to play Russian Roulette with my results. I got lucky and landed on the below picture hosted at impawards.com of an 1976 poster for Dixie Dynamite!

The page in question only had two choices for names “James Bond” and “Drew Struzan,” as I am going down the obscure path I chose “Drew” for my next roll as I haven’t heard of Drew Stuzan, but every ones grandmother has heard of James Bond. In a search full of pictures of Drew Barrymore I landed on the only male photo in the list – just my luck. My sixth round search gave me a photo of Drew Brees amongst 676,000,000 other results of mostly Miss Barrymore. The photo in question pictured below is hosted at athline.com and a very quick look of that webpage lead me to quickly roll again, this time using the name “Eli.”

Rolling with Eli returned 184,000,000 results not as little as Dixie, but few enough to bring some interest back into the game as up until now the rolls I have made have brought mostly boring webpages. Unfortunately I have to say this my seventh roll was just as disappointing as I landed on a paparazzi family shot of Eli Manning hosted at tmz.com.

After a disappointing couple of rolls I decided a more mainstream name might help and Rolls with “Kourtney” from Kim & Kourtney Kardashian on the Tmz webpage. This roll returned the least amount of results so far, totalling about 44,500,000 and having to click “Click to view more results” for page nine meant I was going in the right direction so far as reducing the number of results. Rather disappointingly and at the same time unsurprisingly I landed on the below photo of the Kardashian’s.

I quickly chose “Lauren” for my next roll and at 696,000,000 results I had managed to shoot away from my previous low record. This time I landed on the below photo of Lauren Conrad hosted at hairstylespics.net and a page full of names to select from.

For my tenth, and for the sake of this blog post final roll. I chose the name “Evangeline” to which google responded with about 11,500,000 results and the following desktop wallpaper of Evangeline Lilly hosted at phombo.com.

By my own admittance, this wasn’t the most interesting series of web-searches (or blog post) and had I not been writing this blog post as I went along I would probably have gone through 100 rolls in the same time its taken me to roll and write this at the same time. Attached below is the timeline of my little adventure. I hope I have at least reduced your boredom levels a little bit.

I thought it funny to see this when I logged in this morning, ever skeptical I logged into twitter.com to check and was only slightly disappointed to find out it was just twitter counter having a funny moment – 1,473 followers would be nice.

This is the Spud model based upon the concept of chopping pieces of a bike to make it lighter and thus faster. The Spud is available in both red and black however from the looks of it you could respray it any colour you liked as these designs appear to be made as customisable as possible by the typical bike enthusiast.

The Ruby model shown above honestly (at least to me) looks like just a slight modification of the Spud design with a smaller exhaust and slight changes on the front and rear metal bits as well as a more flowing body design but with that said it is arguably its own design all-be-it similar to the aforementioned. The manufacturers description of the Ruby design is that its much like the girl-next-door the first love with its flowing design and likeable accessories. The Ruby model comes in two shades black and blue, the blue is really nice.

The above bike design is called the Pea Shooter and comes in the above Silver as well as black, in addition to my previous comments on the Ruby design there does seem to be very little difference between the Pea Shooter and the previous two bikes however all three do contain discrete design modifications which keep them apart. The Pea Shooter for one has a different tank design and a distinct exhaust, from their scrap book you can see the design influences of each design which come across in each really well. With that taken into context I believe these new bikes from a brand new British manufacturer are well worth supporting and while a British motorbike licence is required due to the bikes being powered by the Buell® single cylinder, air-cooled, 2-valve, push rod, 492cc, 5-speed ‘Blast’ engine as they have a bit more oomph than your typical 125cc. I would really love to have a go on one of these, but a I would need to actually take a bike test and pass before going out on the road and b starting bike riding on such a machine might be a bit of a death-wish, still I bet they sound awesome!

There is no pricing up on the manufacturers website however you can get in touch if you are interested, or just wish to give the chaps at mac motorcycles your support.

Source: filthyluker

There is too much emphasis put on New Year celebrations however from watching the fireworks live on BBC News 24 all I can say is what an anti-climax. This years celebrations where half-arsed to put it plainly there did not appear to be much in the way of celebration and those who where seen on the cameras being interviewed just weren’t all that cheerfull. Even the presenter found it difficult to come up with anything to say while the fireworks went off making the effort too say how long it took for the scene to be set up on the London Eye. I don’t know why I expected any different maybe becase the 2007 celebrations where quite a bit more entertaining than five minutes of bangs and a half interested reporters mutterings.

Then again we are facing a huge economic crash people saw it coming a mile off like a giant super-tanker about to crash on a paradise island – something could have been done but people where too happy to over-indulge and further screw up what little was left of the financial system to do anything about it. The problem there was ignorance and greed by a few and unfortunately we all have to pay the price for it, Woolworths have died a tragic death and now many other high-street brands are disappearing leaving a lot of smaller towns and city’s without valuable sources of children’s toys and clothes (in the case of Woolworths disappearing from Sittingbourne) or other commodities which people in such situations are having to more and more source from the internet – if they first have access to it and second knowledge to use it within that context. The economic crash isn’t just worrying because of the loss of big high street brands from rural high streets there is the loss of jobs which come as a result of it and the social unrest as a result of that. On top of all this there are the students to worry about, as with the banks tightening their belts students are less likely to be given credit thus student accounts and large interest free overdrafts dissapearing the scene leaving many British students with the conundrum of finding a job, keeping that job and working full-time/part-time to just keep afloat.

With a huge economic crash comes the recent problems in the Middle East with Israel attacking the Gaza Strip and causing world wide outrage not to mention the huge humanitarian crisis in the Strip which is worsening by the hour. It is hard to ignore that while both sides are attempting to utilize the worlds media to gain positive propaganda – both sides are in the wrong and have undertaken in unethical practices which need to be addressed.

So it most definitely is not a “happy” new year, it is a 2009 for what that is worth and it has for the most part not started well. All I can hope for is that the banking crisis gets sorted out and politicians stop pretending to be economists, students get recognised for the valuable resource that they are, Obama does some amazing things within his first 100 days as Americas first leader in a long time and that Israel begins to understand the serious implications its actions have and to that point all I have to say is I hope you had a nice new year; mine was.

As reported on the bbc website, Brent crude oil has dropped in price to below $50 (£33.60 apx) not that we should all be getting too excited about that because it would require oil prices to remain below that price for a length of time before the savings where passed on to consumers. Last night I bought a tanks worth of petrol from the cheapest petrol station in Coventry for 90.1pence per litre the cheapest I have seen it sold anywhere in at least a year. However considering back in June and July when the price of oil was at its highest, petrol was just over £1.20 a litre, there hasn’t been all that much a difference at the pumps – barely 30pence actually. If I see petrol prices drop below 89pence a litre then I may become a little less pessimistic.

This is quite amazing and as its the run up to Christmas I thought I would share it with my visitors (you) even though I hate the fact that shops are getting ready, hypocritical I know. This short post isn’t about Christmas instead I have discovered browsershots.org an amazing online tool which allows you view any website under a selection of browsers, browser versions and operating systems. The following three screen shots have been generated by browser shots and are a good example of how useful it is because you can clearly see they have several computers set up which automatically set up the browser and settings before sending to the website, this means that the screenshot will be an accurate representation as it is a complete screenshot rather than a rendering of just the web page itself. Going back to the snow man its quite interesting to see how three different operating systems show up the font differently, the font being Arial Unicode MS. Of course the browser running under windows is most likely to show it correctly while Camino under osx has the most abstract looking more like a fez than a snow man. While a bit of a silly example of browsershots.org I have shown an interesting new tool and to some extent it’s ability at showing how a website appears differently on different platforms.