One of these people is sexier than the other

Myself and is_not_well at Hugh's place, after babysitting, before heading off to magenta_wings and thorn11's leaving party.


The party was good fun, and I was sad to wander home exhausted at 2am. Nice venue too - the Scottish Book Trust's offices. If you're on FB then you can probably see a photo of us there too.

Portal

A couple of people asked about the "Day in the life of a Portal Turret" video I posted yesterday. They hadn't even heard of Portal.

Watch this teaser trailer, which not only gets across the fun of the game, but also the quirky sense of humour which is what takes it from fun diversion to mindblowingly good.

You can download it for $20 - (about £10 in the UK) and you cannot possibly have anything better to do with your cash.

Technical Stuff #1 - syndicating RSS/Atom to Livejournal the easy way.

If you're using Firefox, and you've noticed the feed icon light up on the address bar sometimes (for instance here - it looks like this ) and wondered if there was any way to use this to automatically get Livejournal to subscribe to that feed, then wonder no more!

Using the advice here I was able to work out the following:
1) open a tab and type about:config in the address bar.
2) type ContentHandlers in the filter box.
3) Choose one of the feeds you don't use (Yahoo, for instance).
4) Replace the Title with "Livejournal"
5) Replace the uri with http://www.livejournal.com/syn?url=%s
6) Shut down Firefox and restart.
7) Done!

You can now click on the orange icon, choose " subscribe as live feed" and then select Livejournal from the dropdown list. It'll take you straight to the livejournal syndication page and you can then add the feed to your friends list (choosing a name for the feed if one doesn't already exist).

Technology #2 - pseduo-virtualisation

Well, actually, not virtualisation at all. But the same kind of effect.

What I wanted was to install 'something' on my USB stick so that I could have Firefox, Thunderbird and anything else I fancied installed on it, go to any PC and run them, with all my settings. And I didn't want to have to rely on special custom builds of them. I just wanted to take my environment with me.

And after arsing about a bit, I ended up with mojopac. Which does all sorts of hideous things under the hood to tap into any running XP system and run an alternate desktop on it. It's very clever, seems to work near-perfectly so far, and I just need to try it out on a machine that's not mine or Ed's to see how well it works in an unfamilliar environment.

I'd like to try getting a proper VM up and running - and I'll probably get to that at some point. But for now this will keep me going.

Oh - I've also got synchronisation of my Firefox bookmarks (via FoxMarks) and Thunderbird address book (via ScheduleWorld). Both of them seem like kludges - I should be able to tell it which FTP site to save/load them from. I like the idea of Kolab - store information in a folder on my IMAP account - but Kolab kept hanging on me, trying to synch calendar/task lists, despite me telling it not to. Maybe in version 1.0...