Linkblogging for 07/12/08
Those of you who use GNU/Linux might be interested in instalinux.com, a site that lets you roll your own distro using just point-and-click, based on several popular distros. Looks like it’ll be very handy for creating ISO images of custom Debian (or whatever) installs that only include the software you want.
Millennium Dome, Elephant has a superb post about liberty including the liberty *not* to go to work.
Jennie is quite rightly furious that her ISP, like mine, has been censoring access (to material which I have no especial desire to view) and lying about it (giving 404 errors instead of actually letting people know what’s been blocked and why). Pledgebank have a pledge up about this…
The Independent has a story headed “Landlords Demand Relief on Buy-To-Let Mortgages: The Homeowner Mortgage Support Scheme should be extended to cover those who are behind on buy-to-let repayments, say groups representing landlords.” To which I’d like to reply:
“Renters demand landlords fuck off. Residences belonging to landlords who can’t even do the one thing landlords are meant to do – take money from tenants, pay the mortgage and keep the change – should be taken from the landlords and given free of charge to the people living there who have, after all, been actually paying the mortgages even when the landlords haven’t, say groups representing tenants”
I’m not a fan of landlords…
And via Eddie Campbell, a rare coherent essay from Roger ‘Pop-Eye’ Scruton, Kitsch and the modern predicament . Unsurprisingly, I don’t agree with the implicit cultural politics here (that the Enlightenment was a bad thing) but I agree with the aesthetics of it…
Linkblogging for 07/09/08
As you will have noticed from the long post yesterday, my computer problems are now (pray God) over. The laptop I got just over a week ago broke within a few days, so I got another refurb as a replacement. In another case of fate playing silly buggers with me, this was the day after I made my post talking about how Free Software is now very usable for absolutely everyone and doesn’t give you the kind of problems that you had before, so *of course* the laptop turned out to have a soundcard that isn’t supported under GNU/Linux. I ended up having to recompile ALSA from source in order to get any sound on it at all and the headphones still don’t work and the sound is a bit tinny. So if you like Free Software, don’t buy a Toshiba Satellite.
On the other hand, whatever you like, you should buy the Davros boxset from Big Finish, especially if you’re one of those who come here for A Big Finish A Week. I just got mine in the post on Friday, and it’s fantastic. They’re currently on sale, which is why I’m linking them now, and so for forty quid you can get every post-Tom Baker Dalek TV show (Genesis of the Daleks, Destiny of the Daleks, Resurrection of the Daleks, Revelation of the Daleks and Remembrance of the Daleks), plus all their DVD special features (an entire disc of them in the case of Genesis) plus all three Big Finish Doctor Who audios featuring Davros, plus the four-part Big Finish non-Doctor series I, Davros, telling the life story of Davros before he met the Doctor, plus an exclusive Davros audio not on anything else and a documentary film about Davros.
For forty quid you get nearly ten hours of Doctor Who episodes, plus more than thirteen hours of audio adventure, plus God knows how much in terms of documentaries, deleted scenes, commentary and so on. If you ever got terrified as a five-year-old by Terry Molloy’s closed-over eyes and withered arm, this is for you. Highly recommended.
The Mindless Ones have yet another excellent post (I should just set up an RSS feed from them here, I link to them so often), this time amypoodle talking about Perry Bible Fellowship, the Mindless Ones’ own excellent single-panel feature Terminus and whether newspaper-strip type comics have to be funny.
It’s been a bad week for British comedy again, as not only did Geoffrey Perkins die, but also the great Ken Campbell, whose death I missed hearing about for a few days due to my lack of net access. I only saw Campbell live once, at a tribute to Robert Anton Wilson last year where he performed with Coldcut, Alan Moore and Bill Drummond. Again I’ll break my rule about embedding YouTube videos:
Campbell was one of those people whose influence vastly outweighed his public visibility, and comedy, theatre, science fiction and forteana would all be unrecognisable today without his work. Holly and I watched him on the Secret Policeman’s Ball DVD yesterday, ordering a midget (the great David Rappaport) to chain up a near-naked Sylvester McCoy, and I got a tiny bit tearful. But anyway – I was going to link to Mark Borkowski, who said all this rather better than I could.
Gavin Burrows talks interestingly about hipsters and geeks (there’s a reason I never use the g word myself, even though I’d fit by most people’s standards – like he says, it’s defined by consumption).
Sadly, No! point out exactly who John McCain classes as rich – and who he doesn’t.
All that talk about copyright extensions being ‘for the artists’? The average performer is likely to get 50 cents (euro) per year out of it.
And something I never thought I’d see actually happen – Cliff RIchard has effectively outed himself and is calling for the Church to recognise gay marriage. Of course, if he hadn’t spent much of his career campaigning with the likes of Mary Whitehouse for a return to the Middle Ages, maybe they already would…
Linkblogging for 02/09/08
I was hoping to write a review of That Lucky Old Sun today, but my pre-ordered CD/DVD hasn’t arrived yet (other internet orders made in the last two weeks that haven’t arrived – Leonard Cohen tickets, a Doctor Who box set, and a bottle of melatonin tablets, all from different online shops. I’m beginning to think the people in one of the upstairs flats may have something to do with this…)
Bots’wana Beast over at the Mindless Ones has reviewed Final Crisis: Superman Beyond 3D, in a review he was nice enough to compare with mine, but his is better. I’m hoping to touch more on the themes from that comic later this week, as there’s a lot to say there…
A very different comic link – yesterday Dial B For Blog held a day of celebration for Gaspar Saladino, a legendary comic letterer. That link takes you to a list of participating sites (especially check out Todd Klein’s always insightful posts) while this is the start of Dial B’s own 24-hour, one-post-every-two-hours, celebration of Saladino’s work.
Stephen Fry has (oddly, for a Mac person) done a video wishing happy birthday to GNU. While I’m not an absolutist in my support of free software (I do, after all, work for a proprietary software company, and I also use a very small number of non-free apps at home – Gnome Inform7 because it’s a wonderful piece of free-as-in-beer software and maybe the nicest programming language (albeit specialised) I’ve ever come across , Scilab because it’s a standard program I need for my research, and unrar for opening cbr files (all of those are ‘open source’ and freely available, but not free software by the FSF’s definition) ) I do think the GNU project and Richard Stallman aren’t given nearly enough credit for their achievements.
In particular, I’ve made certain to always refer to GNU/Linux in writing, since I discovered that several computing students I work with, all of whom run ‘Linux’ , had no idea who’d written the compilers and other software they used every day.
(I’d disagree with the video in its recommendation of gNewSense as a distro to use if you’re interested in Free Software though. It won’t work on many new systems because some video card makers and similar keep their designs secret, making it nearly impossible to write a totally free OS for new hardware. If you’re new to Free Software, I’d go for Debian GNU/Linux, which has the tiny minimal programs you’ll need to run your hardware but is otherwise totally free, or Ubuntu, which is easier to install but in my limited experience slightly less stable.)
Andrew Rilstone reviews the last two episodes of the most recent series of nuWho. I’m very glad he did so, because Grant Morrison’s comments on how the story with Davros has parallels with his own Final Crisis even though they were conceived independently almost persuaded me to watch it.
Brad Hicks has two fascinating posts about McCain picking Sarah Palin as his vice-presidential nomination.
And RIP Don LaFontaine (for those of you who don’t know the name, you do know his voice. He’s the man who did the voiceover for pretty much every film trailer of the last 30 years).
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