Feckoff.net

I’m in Germany for work again and it is roasting hot and very humid. This really puts the handful of nice days we had at home this summer to shame.
I came here once again via Zurich, which as usual is lovely but very expensive. Last time I was here was in February and the place was covered in snow. Quite a difference now!
The rental car this time around is a Renault Scenic, which has the most retarded hand brake system ever. It took me 5 minutes to even locate it! Its a little pull-out handle between the steering wheel and the door. Releasing the brake involves pulling the little handle out again and pressing a button on it before releasing it. This makes it much harder to do hill starts. Nice one, Renault. It also has the crappiest looking digital dash ever - the display looks like it came from a 1980s VCR.
My Garmin Nuvi has been worth its weight in gold though, considering the massive road works around the airport in Zurich, which screwed up the usual route I would have taken

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Pix.ie is a new Irish photo sharing site, much like flickr, but more generous. All accounts are free and you get 500MB per month worth of photos to upload. I’ve been trying it out over the last few days and I like it a lot. The people behind it are getting some feedback from users in this thread over at boards.ie.

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Microsoft in their infinite wisdom/greed (delete as applicable) decided to remove the ability to remotely control the home versions of Windows Vista via remote desktop, as opposed to Windows XP Media Centre which had this built in. This leaves Vista users with the choice of using crappier alternatives like VNC.

Fortunately some smart bastard has hacked Vista Home Premium to run RDP

Read about it and get the relevant files here. I’ve tried it on my own Home Premium machine and it works fine - I can RDP to it from my laptop running Ubuntu 7.04.

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Farts are nature’s comedy.

That particular golden nugget was gleaned from this thread on boards.ie.

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I found this quite useful. Ever since I installed Ubuntu 7.04, “Feisty Fawn” on my laptop a couple of months ago it was always bugging me that the fonts looked so utterly shitty on it. I actually went googling and found a solution tonight.
The flow of the instructions given on the ubuntu forums thread is a bit arseways, so here’s how to do it in a nutshell:

1. Add the repositories you need to get the relevant packages to Synaptic:
   From a terminal, run the following command to bring up Synaptic’s repository list in gedit:
   sudo gedit /etc/apt/sources.listNow add the following two lines to the end of this file:
   deb http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fonts
deb-src http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu feisty fontsSave it and close gedit.
2. Now you need to import the gpg keys that Synaptic needs to trust the new repository. Run the following command from the terminal:
   wget http://www.telemail.fi/mlind/ubuntu/937215FF.gpg -O- | sudo apt-key add -Don’t forget the - at the end of the line!
3. Now configure Ubuntu to use the new font smoothing technique. Again, run the following command from the terminal:
   sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig-configThe options I chose are the same as mentioned in the Ubuntu forums thread linked above - Native,Always,No.
4. Now get it to use the settings you just configured. From the terminal:
   sudo dpkg-reconfigure fontconfig

That’s it! To actually see the effect of this you will need to restart the x-server (i.e. the whole GUI). You could log out or reboot, but I just pressed ctrl+alt+backspace. Save any stuff you have open before doing this!

Looks much nicer now!
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Haven’t had one of these for a while, but Elton John really pulled out all the stops this week and made it.

Elton John is convinced the only way to save music is to shut the internet down.

The British pop superstar fears there’s “too much technology available” and claims that it is starving musical creativity.

I think boards.ie poster Hagar summed it up best in this thread

Haven’t you got enough money to keep you in stupid glasses and lube for the rest of your life? Greedy fat bastard.

I’m convinced the only way to save music is to shut Elton John down.
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The YouTube comments on this are both funny and completely retarded.

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