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What sucks, who sucks and you suck.
Tool pr0n
Handy items for every Real Man(tm)'s toolbox: Kamasa chubby ratchet screwdriver; six double-ended bits built into the handle, and small enough to go into your pocket. And it doesn't break after the first turn. This partly assuages the grief over my late, much lamented £2.50 Woolies ratchet set. (More... »
Peripathetic
Regular writing and photographing, amongst much else, are currently on hold - even more so than previously - due to pace of life and a corresponding lack of investment. In the meantime, we are currently pursuing a separate personal project with more regular bloggage elsewhere.... »
Now truly underground
Much as a death is always a sad occasion (sniff), BB is looking forward to hearing "Teenage Kicks" by the Undertones again (and again, and again...), just to remind ourselves how much we hated John Peel's latterly eclectic but uniformly dire taste in music. Of course, we don't get... »
Nostalgia for pub bores
Just added, the Nostalgic guide to Aber pubs, a lament for those drinking dens of yore and how they've been steadily eroded or ruined ("modernised"). "Had to leave to get back to Swansea in time, so couldn't go to see whether the pubs are the same too," said Telsa... »
Good news for the environment
BB would just like to congratulate all the main political parties taking part in the upcoming European and local elections. All of them have recently made significant contributions to environmental improvement, collectively making the biggest difference ever through party-political means. If anybody has more electoral leaflets that they would... »
Tuna and Waffles
At last, Big Bubbles (no troubles) is pleased to announce the publication of our first book, Tuna and Waffles by Ade Rixon. Available for a measly fiver or so from Lulu, it's a rollicking compendium of student humour culled from tattered ten year old copies of The Courier, and... »
Trumpet blowing
Two recent notable mentions for my photography that would otherwise pass unnoticed: Fourth place in the PhotographyBlog Autumn-themed monthly competition. PhotographyBlog also interviewed me as part of their gallery member spotlight series.... »
Remartyred
Lonely? Depressed? Filled with despair and feeling suicidal? You're probably best not downloading these Scarlet Martyrs MP3s then - now available once more following a long, and we're sure much-needed, absence.... »
Empty Spaces is being highlighted
Empty Spaces is being highlighted on GBlogs today, so we'd like to say "hellooo" to you all in a delightful Leslie Phillips voice. But really, following the unwritten rule of blogs (now written down: "all blogs not written by Anna Pickard are crap"), you should go here.... »
Spent
the other night discriminating against tent pegs on the basis of their sexual orientation: bent or straight. Then I swore at the pile of bent ones, which was bigger than the straight pile, and threw them out. No letters please. I used to bend tent pegs with my foot, which... »
Placeholder: migrating a ZFS root pool
Summary: I built a ZFS NAS using a pair of mirrored 1TB drives to comprise the root pool. Unfortunately, it turns out you really don't want to combine a large amount of NFS-served data with your root pool unless you have a separate ZFS Intent Log (ZIL), due to... »
The benefits of hacking
Coincidental to John Vincent's SysAdvent entry, Always Be Hacking, I just completed my first Sinatra web app. It wasn't a big app (36 lines, plus a tiny bit of HTML), nor a particularly important or impressive one (it searches a file for matching strings). But it turned out to... »
Creating a Solaris 8 Jumpstart image
If you have a Solaris 8 install disc which you want to upload to a Solaris 10 Jumpstart server with ZFS filesystems, you'll find that the setup_install_server script returns an error complaining "not a local filesystem, can't export ...". This is a quick workaround, as it does not appear... »
ZFS NAS-related miscellanea
Some useful links and tidbits picked up during my research.... »
Notes on OpenIndiana installs
Some quick notes based on three days of playing with various ISOs and installer images. I need to install a working instance (i.e. not a "Live CD installer") of OpenIndiana on a USB flash drive for my forthcoming NAS box; trickier than you might think. [Updated, 20110110]... »
Steven Wilson goes jazz
"I discovered this extraordinary period in music, particularly the first five years of the 1970s, and I think you can hear that in the record." Steven Wilson has given a very encouraging interview to promote his forthcoming solo album, Grace For Drowning, in which he talks up the influence... »
Now That's What I Call Ade's Music
Another piece that accompanied a home-brewed compilation. This one contained noteworthy personal faves that were intended to be accessible without appearing too mainstream.... »
Caught Nappin' in the 80s
The following piece accompanied a CD compilation I put together for a select (unlucky) group of (former) friends during those early, heady days of Napster. If you wish to play along at home, most of these tracks should be available for download somewhere, but note that the version of... »
Current raves
After a loooong absence... Silence, esOterica Try to overlook the fact that the lead singer looks like Igor. (MORE BASS GIRL! LESS SHOUTY FREAK! UG!) This is a cover of a Delerium/Sarah McLachlan trance track which is much less interesting. Money, It's Pure Evil, Bigelf Mascara and lots of... »
Prog out
With a little help from Classic Rock Announces Prog magazine (OK, that's not precisely the title but we like the acronym better), and carefully avoiding ITV in the evenings, we finally found some decent music.... »
The Digital EM is here?
I wasn't planning to buy a new camera any time soon. And then suddenly, I was looking at reviews and catalogues and product specs. Funny how that happens.... »
Tenby - a Flickr survey
As we're heading back to Tenby next weekend for a last wild fling before the end of summer, I thought I'd undertake a quick survey of Tenby images on Flickr to see how other people have photographed the place and whether I could learn something prior to my next... »
Thoughts on film
I developed five rolls of black and white film this weekend, mostly dating from 3-4 years ago except for one roll I finished off on Sunday. That cleared almost my entire backlog except for a roll of 120 from the Holga, plus several rolls still loaded in various cameras... »
Scan Magick
Enhancing scanned images with ImageMagick Having nailed down a faster b/w workflow for digital images, using Bibble, I've been considering something similar for scanned negatives. Obviously, the bulk of time is unavoidably expended on developing and scanning those negatives (which is why I now have four unprocessed rolls of film... »
Magnum on Magnum
Review of a new Magnum book in the Independent, featuring well-known Magnum photographers on other well-known Magnum photographers (Trent Parke is in there!).... »
Ten years
Ten years of Big-Bubbles (no troubles) bloggery or, as seems more accurate lately, one new blog entry every ten years! (Here's where we came in.) Thank you, loyal reade... oh, that's me.... »
Backs up
(Blows dust off category in blog.) I am slowly coming to the conclusion that if you built up a billion dollar company over ten years but never did any backups, and then a massive data loss wiped out the organisation, you still wouldn't have lost as much money as... »
Two sides
One of the great things about the Internet is that, while you can still read the newspaper online - for free - you can also read lots of other news sources, for free. This variety (and lack of obvious revenue stream) might change the news media industry in all... »
Magnum on Magnum
Review of a new Magnum book in the Independent, featuring well-known Magnum photographers on other well-known Magnum photographers (Trent Parke is in there!).... »
Evolution or regression?
Should have blogged this long ago; a classic photo.net post from 2003, Evolving into a photographer.... »
The Digital EM is here?
I wasn't planning to buy a new camera any time soon. And then suddenly, I was looking at reviews and catalogues and product specs. Funny how that happens.... »
What's wrong with the Samsung Galaxy S2
Overall, very little. I've had this phone for about six months now and I love it. Tablet? Nah, don't really need one. Either I'm mobile, in which case this is enough, or I'm able to sit down at a proper computer with a keyboard and a large screen.... »
Why rebooting won't solve your problem
It's the wrong system. It's the wrong data centre. The guy fixing it is almost done...nearly there...just edit this file...hey, who shut the system down?! It's a network issue. It's an application issue. It's a configuration issue. It's a memory leak, so it will solve your problem...temporarily. It's an... »
PULL TO OPEN
It was supposed to be a surprise outing for myself and my eldest Junior Research Assistant and, to be fair, I didn't click even when we drove on to the local industrial estate at Treforest. In fact, it was only as we rounded the corner to the anonymous blue... »
The long and winding road
...is (still) blocked by caravans and lorries. Back to Aber for the weekend. Some grey clouds, but patches of blue sky, the day slowly warming up and turning pleasant before squally showers blew in later that evening. By then, we were sat in the bay window of our room... »