BBQ Rules
June 1, 2009We are about to enter the BBQ season. Therefore it is important to refresh your memory on BBQ etiquette. When a man volunteers to do the BBQ the following chain of events are put into motion:
Routine…
(1) The woman buys the food.
(2) The woman makes the salad, prepares the vegetables, and makes dessert.
(3) The woman prepares the meat for cooking, places it on a tray along with the necessary cooking utensils and sauces, and takes it to the man who is lounging beside the grill - beer in hand.
(4) The woman remains outside the compulsory three meter exclusion zone where the exuberance of testosterone and other manly bonding activities can take place without the interference of the woman.
Here comes the important part:
(5) THE MAN PLACES THE MEAT ON THE GRILL.
More routine…
(6) The woman goes inside to organise the plates and cutlery.
(7) The woman comes out to tell the man that the meat is looking great. He thanks her and asks if she will bring another beer while he flips the meat
Important again:
(8) THE MAN TAKES THE MEAT OFF THE GRILL AND HANDS IT TO THE WOMAN.
More routine…
(9) The woman prepares the plates, salad, bread, utensils, napkins, sauces, and brings them to the table.
(10) After eating, the woman clears the table and does the dishes.
And most important of all:
(11) Everyone PRAISES the MAN and THANKS HIM for his cooking effort s.
(12) The man asks the woman how she enjoyed ‘her night off ‘, and, upon seeing her annoyed reaction, concludes that there’s just no pleasing some women.
Extra man puzzle
May 30, 2009
Where does the extra man come from
Look at this image and count the number of men. Then when it switches their heads, count again.
This will drive you mad for hours and even though I have been given a solution to it, it doesn’t make sense to me and is driving me CRAZY!
Check it out and see if you can work out where he comes from
Facebook cheat code
May 28, 2009Today I read a fun post on a Facebook forum which told me to do the following:
On any Facebook page type in:
up, up, down, down, left, right, left, right, b, a, and then press enterIt will add some nifty effects!
lol..
This may be recognised by many as an old Konami cheat code and it’s pretty cool that facebook has stolen it 
Check it out!
Holidays!!!
May 23, 2009Hey,
Yesterday was the final deadline for all of my assignments and projects at College. This means that I am free now until september!
I can’t wait for the free time and am very glad that I will be able to have more time to put into web projects such as Drag Racer and SJGmusic. The fun won’t last for long as it won’t be long until I run out of money. This weekend is a bank holiday but on Tuesday I intend to do alot of phoning around to get myself a temporary job :).
In the meantime though I have alot of free time which I have thus far wasted playing Facebook games and looking at youtube. It wasn’t fruitless though as I did find this HILARIOUS clip from Galaxy Radio below:
Enjoy
Love
Stephen
Guide: Hackintosh with Asus P5KC
May 10, 2009If you read my previous post you will know that this afternoon I have spent a little while (re)installing MacOS on my PC hardware. The reason is due to a harddrive corruption on the previous install. I do not place the blame for this on the software I am going to tell you to use, but mostly the choice of drivers that I had installed. I would warn you off the drivers in question, but I stupidly neglected to take any notes on my last installation. This time I did not!
Hardware
The hardware I am installing on is as follows:
- Asus P5KC
- Intel Q6600
- 4GB Geil Ram
- NVidia 8800GTX
Software
There are a few choices for which installer to use when installing MacOS on PC hardware. The one I chose was iAtkos, mostly because I already had a DVD burned lying around but I’m sure last time there was an educated reason for it. The following Guide uses iAtkos 5.0i 10.5.5. I’m not going to offer a download link but if you’re creative you should be able to find it pretty easily..
Method
This is not a step-by-step guide. I am merely typing my notes up into readable form in the hope that it is of to some use to somebody. For a step-by-step guide or more information about the osx86 project visit their wiki.
So….
The DVD booted without any problems, I loaded the setup, chose Utility > Disk Utility. I then created a partition and set on my way.
I chose my new partition as the install location and then hit next. On the next screen I chose Customize and this is where the important stuff is chosen.
I am not going to go into details as to what every option does (mostly because I don’t know) but there are descriptions for each on the install disc.
Bootloader:
PC-EFi
X86 Patches:
- Decrypters
Appledecrypt
- Enablers
SmBios Enablers
-Removepowermanagement
-OHR
Drivers:
- VGA
– Nvidia
NVinject
Efi Strings > 8xxx
- System
Sata/IDE
NTFS -3G
Once you have chosen these options (or different if you have slightly different hardware), run the installer and let it reboot. If all has gone well you should be able to Sleep, Shutdown and Reboot. For my the P5KC onboard lan and sound is missing. As I don’t use onboard sound you’ll have to use your initiative. Lan drivers however can be found here.
I am now installing updates to 10.5.6 and then will quest to re-find my soundcard drivers. I hope this information is useful to you.
Stephen
P.S.
is it disc or disk?!
Bye Bye Mr Hackintosh…
I expected that this day would come eventually, but like all software crashes, it still hurt when it did :). Today, my pride and joy hackintosh has finally thrown in the towel.
It was never a perfect install, but I had gotten used to all of the hangs, crashes, bangs and rattles that it had and they would warm my heart like no native MacOS ever could.
But today, the dreaded day came. I booted up the box this morning to a POST error (I can’t remember what exactly). I thought this was a little strange as the box has always posted despite being overclocked to 3GHz from 2.6GHz. I had turned off the power supply last night as the fans had kept spinning despite shutting down (one of the mac install’s lovable traits). I didn’t think that this was going to be a big deal so I rebooted, got it to post and it started to load MacOS. This is where the problems started.
It hung on boot up, so I rebooted again. This time it got to login prompt but would go no further so I rebooted yet again. This time I tried a verbose boot and it flagged up an error about corrupt HDD (something about keys, I can’t remember exactly). Then came safe mode and it hung again. I repeated this for a few hours trying to boot from my install CD and run Disk Utility. My final try came when I burned Disk Warrior to DVD, only to realise 3 DVDs later that it wasn’t going to boot on PC hardware. I finally (about an hour ago) conceded that there was going to be no way I could recapure the old install so I have began to backup data.
I am using TransMac to copy all of my needed files from the Mac partition onto a FAT32 drive and it is working rather well. I will then be installing a fresh copy of MacOS again and praying that I didn’t leave anything obvious behind. I will be doing a little bit of research before I install as I wasn’t overly happy about the shutdown/restart/sleep not working so I may try a different install CD to iAtkos. Most likely not though as I cba downloading any more ISOs.. I wasted enough DVDs today.
I’ll make some notes during the install and write a little guide up here when I’m done
Stephen
Speed camera boss in 100mph drive
May 9, 2009 From http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/suffolk/8035511.stmThe boss of a speed camera firm has been banned from driving for six months after admitting speeding at more than 100mph on a 70mph road in Suffolk.
Tom Riall expressed “deep regret” over the incident Tom Riall, 49, is a chief executive of Serco, which has provided more than 5,000 speed cameras in the UK.
He appeared at Sudbury Magistrates’ Court and pleaded guilty to driving at 102.9mph on the A14 on 4 January, 2009.
Riall was fined £300, banned from driving for six months and had six points added to his licence.
Riall, from Ufton Nervet, near Reading, was caught speeding in his blue Volvo by a police patrol car on the eastbound dual carriageway just before 1300 BST, the court heard.
Outside court, he said: “I accept the decision of the court. I recognise that speeding is not acceptable.
“I very much regret what happened and I have made a full apology to the court.”
On Serco’s website it states the company prides itself on providing “robust evidence” of drivers’ speeding.
ScreenStamp!
April 29, 2009Craig from youreadmyblog.info let me know a few days ago about a project him and a few of his friends from uni have started called ScreenStamp!
He is looking to get some feedback as far as I know and I think that the software is pretty useful so I will give it a mention here.
Here is the description from Craig himself:
What is ScreenStamp! going to do?When ScreenStamp! has been fully developed for the release of the BETA version, it will once run ask you for a location to save your screen shots to, along with a name that the program will number, allowing the user to concentrate on the job at hand as a pose to saving screen shots.ScreenStamp! will also time and date stamp the screen shot at the top right hand corner.
Where did the ScreenStamp! idea come from?
When myself and my work group at University, where we are studying Ethical Hacking for Computer Security were carrying out an Information Gathering exercise the task of taking and saving screen shots with the clock opened and date showing was becoming really boring, so myself and a couple of other group members decided that and application that would do this for us would be well worth the time spent on creating one, after we had looked at failed to fins an application that did exactly what we had in mind.
I urge you all to go try it out and let us know what you think and of any bugs you find, it is available for both windows and linux with the possibility of Mac version coming soon (although the linux version may work on Mac??)
You can find out more and download @ http://www.screenstamp.co.uk
Mass Pagerank Checker is back!
April 27, 2009I’ve re-uploaded my mass pagerank checker after losing it when I installed Wordpress.
Sorry to anyone who was looking for the tool within the last week or two but it’s back now and fully functioning
Regards
Stephen
Transfer MySQL database to remote server
April 22, 2009Hey,
This week I’ve moved back from my ultimate dedi to a Futurehosting VPS in an effort to cut costs and turn a larger profit from Drag Racer. I tried to make the transfer of data as quick as possible and seeing as how my database is a few hundred MB I transferred it using mysqldump.
First thing’s first, you need to prepare the receiving server. Create a user for the sending server to connect as using this command from the mysql console:
GRANT ALL PRIVILAGES ON *.* TO ‘username’ @ ‘ [OLD SERVER IP] ’ IDENTIFIED BY ‘password’;
This will allow your mysql server with the IP [OLD SERVER IP] (replace this with it’s real ip ofcourse) to connect using the username ‘username’ and password ‘password’.
Next we are going to use mysqldump in the linux shell (or windows cmd prompt, I’m not 100% where it’s located in windows) to dump our databases to our new server. The syntax of the command is as follows:
# mysqldump -u username -p -h [NEW SERVER IP] [DATABASE NAME(S)]
The command to dump two databases (one called database1, the other database2) to ip 192.168.1.1 is as follows.
# mysqldump -u username -p -h 192.168.l.1 database1 database2
mysqldump will now take a few minutes (depending on the size of the database in question) to dump the entire contents of database1 and database2 onto your new server (in this example 192.168.1.1). I recommend that once you are finished with this, you remove the user we created to copy the database over. To do this we use this command from the mysql console:
drop user username;
If you have any questions please leave them below in the comments. I also recommend using the following website to look up the commands I showed and their uses:
mysql.org