Nile & Rayner play Penultima chess
Fyr's new hair (+ 1 more)
Fyr's new hair,
Non-standard chess
Maria scares things
Happy new year
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Behind the bar (+ 1 more)
The same view again
Guess where I was sitting most of the evening?
People and ferrets
Yet more people
...more band
Better picture of the band
The band were good
More People
Flick chess
Penultima Chess
Peoples
The Pembury Tavern
Amy & FretchenMay the next twelve months be better than the preceding twelve months, and may that always be true.
Also:
From complications
arising from complications arising from things that could have, should have… whatever. Jasper the dog died this morning, of old age in dog years. This was a dog who was once scared of a toy sheep
that was walking towards him, who learnt that lakes weren’t as solid as they looked by attemp
Okay, new Comments interface now live.
Magic thing that detects Livejournal usericons for people who use their LJ as the URL has been temporarily disabled until I convince it to stop ass-raping LJ’s servers (in LJ’s opinion. Aquarionics’ server has now got a 24 hour ban from LJ. Which would improve it’s productivity were it human).
The new interface passes the acid test of stupid length
[More...]
Banana BreadI’m moving house again.
Today I spent two hours looking at houses, and five deliberating which one to actually move in to. There is a genetic trait in my family, when worried or stressed, bakery happens. So.
Having weighed up the pros and cons of each, I ran out of ways not to make the decision and went downstairs. Downstairs was a blessing in disguise: A collection of overripe bananas,
[More...]So, London By London, the list by the people behind The Friday Project, became the wider scoped project “Friday Cities, London” with the aim of becoming the definative guide to various cities around the globe. But then they split off from the rest of the Friday Project company, and the Friday Cities name stopped making sense.
Now, with absolutely no fanfair at all, they’re called Kudocities based around the new central mechanic y
[More...]Rory Parle has posted a puzzle which is the kind of thing a number of people who still read this would be interested in, so:
[More...]You have in front of you one of those tables you get in Asia restaurants with the rotating centre—what one of our product managers described as a lazy susan, though I’ve never heard that phrase from anyone else. Picture the restaurant from the beginning of Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom if you really want to set the scene.
I just got an email from pandora
It says:
[More...]As you probably know, in July of 2007 we had to block usage of Pandora outside the U.S. because of the lack of a viable license structure for Internet radio streaming in other countries. It was a terrible day. We did however hold out some hope that a solution might exist for the UK, so we left it unblocked as we worked diligently with the rights organizations to negotiate an econo
But as a biz dev guy (who doesn’t have time – or a reason – to be online much) – and despite the fact that my job is all about relationships – I find twitter to be pretty pointless. LinkedIn, on the other hand, I use every single day.
Oh.
Good.
I’ve been watching the Social Networking backlash with someth
[More...]How to say ‘Oh my god! there’s an axe in my head!’ in 117 languages
[More...]
My new flat's kitchen
New flat living room
Some more ladybirds
A lot of ladybirds
A ladybird
For Square Wheeled bikes onlySo, I have a new flat in Leyton. It’s physically further from the station, but with a bus it’s quicker than walking from my old place, though I intend to put my bike back together and cycle.
Things that will get progressively less cute about m
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Toasted ManualTraditions are fun. Every two years for the past ten I’ve run though Robert Hayden’s Geek Code test (which hasn’t changed in that time). The rules are simple: I run it without looking at previous years tests. That’s it. I haven’t put it in this entry, because it’s slightly clearer as a text file
See my brief flirtation with Babylon 5 and X files! Watch as my dream of owning a mac
[More...]
living room
bedroom closeup
Aquarion plays on his console
House layout
My new kitchen
Sim Aquarion
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DSCF0211I am a qualified sysadmin. Whilst I currently am in a “I will never be on-call ever again” phase of my career (Very much like the “I will never drink again” phase of a hangover, with much the same future), the fear of people coming to your desk at 17:25 saying “The little lights have stopped flashing on my disk drive, and I’ve got a report for the board due, is this a problem?” never truly goes away. The other thing that office-environment sysadmins l
[More...]Today, I:
Special Helltrutap, the startup who employ me, are looking for PHP webdevs and Perl devs. Details of the perl positions are on the site, PHP stuff will be up soonish. If you want more details, talk to nicholas at trutap dot net.
We’re also looking for producty people and mobile-focused QA-like people. See the link above for further details.
All positions are London based, the office has a w
[More...]Being a mobile company, it’s vitally important we get to test the new and shiniest phones, which is why I will never buy a Motorola, don’t think the N95 is as shiny as many people appear to think, and how I got to borrow the Office iPhone for a while.
The Office iPhone was bought when we launched last autumn and is a US model with the hack so we could use it in this country and install applications on it. I didn’t use many third party apps,
[More...]...there were vikings and boats and some plans for a furniture store.
I went to Ikea with a List. I have to go to Ikea with a List, otherwise I end up with a trolley full of crap that is astoundingly useful but is not what I went in for. I went to:
Bounce on some sofas a bit.
Buy some instances of Billy the Bookcase
...and another bookcase.
...some more bookcases.
And a wardrobe, and a chest of
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A park
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Time Expired
The AmazonYesterday marked the ten year anniversary of Mozilla.org, a celebration of the single most successful transition of a closed source product to an open source one. Arguably.
If you’re wondering why there’s been no announcement of a party, there’s a bug for that, and when JWZ o
[More...]There is a good explanation for this. Well, better than “We were at the pub and it seemed like a good idea at the time”. Except the last one, that’s got nothing to do with me.

bq. Our 25 Inch Field Cannon is our loudest carbide cannon! This cannon features an automatic charger mechanism for rapid, multiple firing plus an automatic flint ignitor. Weighing 7 lbs, it
operates on the same principle as a gas engine in an automobile—using gas, fresh air, and a spark. Powdered calcium carbide “ammo” is added to the water
Something that interests me. I’ve been used as a psychological study in a marketing consultation report. Or, actually, in 2004, someone took my Names article (Itself three years old at that point, and now seven) and used it as a basis for part of Three Dreams: New Qualitative Analysis in the Dreamworld.
It says:
[More...]With that in
Still no idea what I’m going to do at BarcampBrighton next weekend. Ideas anyone?
I’ve been running an IRC bot for a channel I’m an admin for. One of the things we want it do do is biblical quotations. Actually, we only need it to do one biblical quotation, which is Revelations 2:5, which it already does by a simple text match, but I wanted to solve the general problem.
Turns out there&
[More...]So, I was going to go to SXSW this weekend, but I lost the company iPhone, so I didn’t have the money for the tickets. Woe. Cancelled.
So, I was going to Scotland this weekend, but Stuff Happened. Woe. Cancelled.
So, I was going to be helping Mitch Benn and doing roadie stuff for the video for his new single (an update of Happy Birthday War) today,
[More...]So, I was playing City of Heroes, and a thought came to me. This game was released in 2004 (It’s had a few graphical upgrades since then, but this demo doesn’t really show them):
[More...]
This is a video of a neurologist talking about self-analysis while she had a stroke:
[More...]
php.net syntax error
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Red hair and bathroom mirror
Oasis.water.gkhs.net
Stuff in my bag
The bag that the stuff is in
Stuff in my WalletIf you use a mac, and iTunes, you’ll know about the little arrow links on the currently playing track that take you to the iTunes store search for that artist/track.
I’ve never used these, and I don’t like them. But now I know about this:
defaults write com.apple.iTunes invertStoreLinks -bool YES
This makes all the little arrows search your internal library instead. So clicking the arrow beside “Hello City” takes me to the al
[More...]A few hours before Jonathan Coulton performed his very first gig in the UK ever (And the first outside the states, I believe), he bought a Tenori-on which is apparently only available over here.
This means we ended up being the first people to ever see him perform playing with a new geeky toy. It looked very much like this:
[More...]
AstoundThe Byron Report was released. It said “Video games are fine, unless played by people without a grip on reality”. Well, roughly. The reaction from the British press in support of this validation of a growing medium has been a joy to behold. I have replaced one word in this quote from The Times:
[More...]I hate [boo
Leyton Allotments! IN! THE SNOW!!
A TREE! IN! THE! SNOW!!
The Tree Outside My Flat. In The Snow.
A Rose Bush! IN THE SNOW!!
Leyton Marshes. In The Snow.
Children Playing! IN THE SNOW!
Footprints. In the snow.
MY FOOT! IN THE Snow!
A horse. In the snow
A Field Of Snow. IN The Snow!
Gas Storage Thingies! In The Snow!
Photo 1In the long-held traditions of bloggery, I cannot compete in the realm of cat pictures. Instead, dog pictures:
[More...]On Youtube, there is an archive of videos of Tom Lehrer performing.
This is him performing songs you've not heard before, even if you have the full box set:
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Bobbie opens the show
Geeks! And Jellybeans!
Rock Band (+ 3 more)
Steve on vocals in Rock Band
More Arts!
Arts!
Neil & Melinda
Shelving (+ 1 more)
Melon. And pineapple
Melon (+ 1 more)
Coke! IN BOTTLES!
Shelving. 3rooms is fun
Ryan Alexander on drums
Steve Marshall: Rock Star Hair
Wii Bowling
The view from the 3rooms balcony
the outside gardenLondon has elected Boris Johnson mayor of London.
This is Not Good. However, I am – from now – reserving judgement until he actually manages to screw up. Clock starts in three and a third hours.
New design is New, and is light and airy and calm, which is nice. It’s also simple, which is even nicer. I’ve still got to fix the right hand column, which is a bit texty and stark. I’ve also got to fix my admin system, which is displaying all text boxes
[More...]I didn’t expect Alexander ‘Boris’ Johnson to be the new London Mayor. I hoped Ken would carry on, because I live in (the outer edges of) central London, and everything Ken’s done over the last eight years to join up the transport network has improved the live of me, personally. I am a fan of the congestion charge, and that it isn’t on account, because it means taking the car into London means you have to do
[More...]I went to Gamecamp. It’s becoming quite common in reports of this event to wax lyrical about the location for a little while first, so I’ll do that. It was held at 3Rooms (I’m sixth from the left in that photo), which is a PR venue belonging to Sony’s PlayStation division. Effectively, it’s where they take
[More...]Coding Horror – The Angle Bracket Tax vs. ESF, now coming up to its sixth birthday with no revision.
Coming up on Aquarionics:
* LARP * Dante 01 * GTA4 & XBoxes * Pareidol * Your Interface Sucks.... as soon as I get around to writing this stuff.
[More...]I got back from work this evening at about 7ish, decided I couldn’t deal with socialness at the pub, and so fired up Ikariam, a web-based Civ-type game, where I am playing on Eta. I’m currently saving up for a new palace so I can build a new colony, which is going to require 50,000 bits of wood. So I set some more of my colonists to slave away in the newly upgraded lumber mill on my capital’s island and shut it down so they could get on with
[More...]When we reached the cliff face, we knew this was where we were supposed to be. Around us was the green grass and trees, the freshwater lake, the clean path from the mountains for the caravans to come though. The rocks behind us were Jet, and there was clay to the south and – unless my faithful hammer tap decieved me – oynx in further down. So we stopped, and we layed out our belongings and broke down the wagon for wood. Our fortress would begin here.
I personally struck t
[More...]A while ago, I invented a concept of “Magic Trees”, named after the story of a vicar who chopped down a 140 year old tree and justified it by saying “A paedophile might have been hiding behind it”. This was later expanded to include invisible terrorists.
This morning a different story caught my attention. A social network site I’ve never heard of has recently banned a large number of its users over 36, possib
[More...]This post is entirely useless.
I mean, you already know that Warren Ellis is writing a free webcomic, issues released every friday, called FreakAngels, don’t you?
And you already know he wrote Transmet, and various other important things like the novel Crooked Little Vein which you should also read if you haven’t.
You know all this, so there is no poi
[More...]
LARP archery
Conrad attempts LARP weaponry
LARP fighting (+ 5 more)
Kit!
The kit dump
Marshall Enterprises' new tent
Not yet a shrine
Rosie and the Weaver
Folks (+ 1 more)
Hugs (+ 1 more)
Dratted Lammie Humpers
Spine Science
Spine SCIENCE!
Spience?
Marshall Enterprises
Auriel on a drugs binge (+ 1 more)
Auriel on Drugs Binge
My current desktop
CUTT 3YGB (+ 81 more)Today, I got an iPhone.
This sounds deceptively simple, but really wasn’t, so here’s how it went. I had an 18 month contract with 02, ready to run out in September. But last month they phoned me up, and when I said I was waiting for the new iPhone, they recommended I switched to the Monthly Sim Only “Simplicity” contract, shaving three months off my contract (since Simplicity is a rolling monthly agreement) meaning I’d be able to get a new contract come
[More...]Long term readers of Aquarionics will remember my various abortive attempts to publish anything with any regularity at all.
Actually, so will short term readers, thinking about it. But I’m not refering to this “journal” thing, as much as LoneCat and my “NSD” thing from a while back, the various short stories and, most recently, Pareidol, a webcomic-type-thing produced with manikins, models, and a Blue-Peter sticky-b
[More...]Most of what I’m doing right now is working, and due to the nature of my working, it’s dull. I’m mostly writing unit tests. And because it’s work, it’s occasionally awesome and fun, challanging and occasionally frustrating. We are, however, looking for PHP dev to work in our Kings Cross office, so if you know any PHP devs looking for a new job, fire an email at nicholas care of trutap dot net. I do hope to be ab
[More...]Things that have amused me today:
Follow the profile. It appears that Disney/Muppet Studios
[More...]This is a short film about two people discussing the meta-connections between all the films of Quentin Tarrentino.
It’s called Tarrentino|s Mind
[More...]This is a rap about particle physics and CERN's Large Hadron Collider and what it's for.
[More...]Leaving windows open always gets me into trouble, one way or the other.
I overheat easily, and so I tend to leave the windows of my flat open wherever possible. This is good, but it does mean I occasionally suffer from bugs coming in overnight and biting me in the arse. Somehow – and for the first time in my life – I’m having problems with mosquito bites, after leaving a window open let them in while I wasn’t paying attention.
Can you see the metapho
[More...][More...]SAN DIEGO—On day two of the 2008 San Diego SorCon, the biggest Aaron Sorkin convention in the world, screenwriter and producer Aaron Sorkin revealed plans for his next project, an animated continuation of his most popular franchise, The West Wing.
Trutap Coffee
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0005
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0009So, Starting with the first track to come up in a random shuffle of my iTunes library, I generated one of the "Genius" playlists from the new iTunes.
The dividing line between genius and insanity has never been so close. The results. These are the tunes that iTunes thinks belong together:
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0016A quote from Daniel James of Three Rings
[More...]DRM takes a big poo on your best customers—the ones who’ve given you money—whilst doing nothing practical to prevent others from ‘stealing’ your precious content juices. Worse, it makes these renegades feel nice and righteous about sticking it to ‘the man’. Stop trying
trac
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Fyr entribenatesLast weekend saw the end of British Summer time, and you could tell it in the weather. I was heading down to Brighton with Clare, to go to a meeting of people I knew over the Internet. I used to do this a lot, spending most of my weekends over university bouncing between Newcastle, London, Durham, Wales, Nottingham, Ayr, Portsmouth. I kind of wish I’d kept all the various train tickets I was going though at the time, especially when my student loan reminders come though.
Brig
[More...]I’ve spent a while playing Fallout 3 now. Most of yesterday, and a portion of today.
Fallout was a turn-based RPG title with adventure elements and a more open plot than most comparative things around at the time. It is notable not only because it was quite good, but because it managed to create and maintain a unique style that it carries to this day, a seamless meshing of 1940s/50s visual and media style and tone with a modern level of technological p
[More...]For some unknown reason, possibly just the random whims and zephers of ideas that float across my mind, I have become more interested in US politics recently. This means my normal daily diet of The Daily Show (and occasionally Colbert Report if I have time) has been joined by occasional episodes of Countdown and other things. I like Countdown, the presentation appeals to me. I haven’t been watching it long enough to know how balanced it is – He’s pretty obviously liberal, bu
[More...]The mood in America has been likened to the one here in ‘97 when we managed to kick the conservatives out for the first time in about 20 years, which amuses me. However, the fact that ours failed to live up to that optimism doesn’t mean yours n
[More...]Gosh, Five days in and I’m already a day behind. I suck.
A book review, today. Or, rather, the circumstances behind the book review.
Every so often, I do something that I can foresee is going to be a bad idea, and yet do it anyway for some things just must be done. Kiss the girl, quit the job, drink the shot, fail the exam. All these things are important.
[More...]I should have posted this a while ago, but anyway.
This year I am not doing Nanowrimo. Writing an entire novel in november seems too much like hard work. I am doing something that will make me look equally silly, but will require significantly less work on my part.
Movember.
Movember is a sponsored mustashe growing thing, with the money going to prostate cancer research and treatment. A number of people at planet Trutap are taking part (and it was weird to go into t
[More...][The Kansas City Shuffle is] not something people hear about. Falls on deaf ears mostly. This particular one has been over twenty years in the making. No small matter. Requires a lot of planning. Involves a lot of people. People connected by the slightest of events. Like whispers in the night, in that place that never forgets, even when those people do. It starts with a horse.
So, I’ve just seen Lucky N
[More...]I missed this the first time around.
Did you know that when the West Wing writers were looking for a candidate to base Matt Santos on, they went for a young politician – not even a senator yet?
[More...]
In World War One
If you could hear, at every jolt, the blood
Come gargling from the froth-corrupted lungs,
Obscene as cancer, bitter as the cud
Of vile, incurable sores on innocent tongues,
My friend, you would not tell with such
Today, I went to the Future of Mobile conferency thing in Kensington. This happens to be the very first industry thing I’ve been to where the company I work for has had a major showing, and a major showing we made today. Not only with CEO Doug Richards going on a freeform odysssy of not only the future of mobile but its present also, up to Tom Hume of
[More...]The Open Rights group founding was interesting.
At a talk just over a couple of years ago, organised by NTK, someone suggested that an organisation to protect the rights of people in the UK would only cost a few hundred people a fiver a month, and that there must be enough that this would be possible.
Having fairly publicly put my money where my mouth was a year or so ago, live on Hashlugradio, I’ve
[More...]
Yesterday (I rule at this Daily Update thing) was the birthday of Benoît Mandelbrot, creator of the Mandelbrot set fractal,
possibly the single most recognisable fractal image there is.
So popular is it, in fact, that a Man
[More...](Viewers are reminded that the following article does not represent the views of anybody else at all by default, though they are welcome to agree if they like. This – obviously – includes anyone else who works for my soon-erstwhile employer. Keep your arms and legs inside the cart at all times)
As reported in Techcrunch UK yesterday:
[More...]Tr
I now own Left 4 Dead. It appears quite good, but I would like to play with people who I can rely more upon not to, for example, hare off into the distance alerting every zombie in the world to our location and then die and demand everyone heal him.
Left 4 Dead is a co-operative zombie-based shooty game. Very co-operative. You need to stick together or you will die. You need to not be a moron, or you will die. You need to both support and rely on your team mates. Or you will die.
[More...]If you’re still reading this, Merry Christmas.
Maybe next year it’ll get content again.
[More...]Paul and Storm – who used to be half of Da Vinci’s Notebook, and were awesome when I saw them in concert with Jonathan Coulton a few months ago – have a Thing. A Running Joke. They create themetunes for things as if they were written by Randy Newman. The joke is that they sound the same. Then the joke became that you could do this for a great deal of things without changing much. Then it became, as they put it, an exercise in musica
[More...]Data for this is generated by Lifestream, which is open source. No. There isn't an RSS feed.
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