Welcome to America – “hands up!”.

It happened a few hours ago at the airport. We were queueing with non-US passport holders to go through immigration. I tried not to think about what was happening. The people doing it to me looked a bit apologetic.  But not really enough.  They did not realise that many people had died over the centuries …
Continue reading Welcome to America – “hands up!”.

Ricoh r5u870 webcam

For debian (Ubuntu etc) packages go here: http://download.tuxfamily.org/arakhne/pool/universe/r/ricoh-webcam-r5u870/ Once you’ve installed the two files, check your home directory for a directory r5u87x and read the readme … 🙂 For rpm go to: http://rpm.pbone.net/index.php3/stat/4/idpl/11802631/dir/opensuse/com/r5u87x-loader-0.2.0-11.3.x86_64.rpm.html

What Is the Meaning Of Life? 1 or 0?

So, I’m in the middle of resurrecting my computer after it suffered a fatal bout of Windowsitis, and while letting off steam to my dad have some unexpected insights based on an IT metaphor. I was testing three operating systems (OpenSuse, Kubuntu, Vista) and a virtualisation tool.  It was glitching at the multiboot setup – …
Continue reading What Is the Meaning Of Life? 1 or 0?

Has economics reached its sell-by date?

A note by Richard and Stella, voicing frustrations many of us feel in the imploding Irish economy. How far will things have to disintegrate before we cop on that we cannot continue to do things in the same way? At the moment, issues of the economy are determining political decisions, and consequently, are affecting decisions …
Continue reading Has economics reached its sell-by date?

20% of plants risk extinction.

If that doesn’t sound bad, then its worse.  No plants = no animals. Normally we migt be shocked to hear that 20% of mammals face extinction, even though they tend to be less resilient than plants.  Hearing that 20% of plants are at risk is a loud warning – that kind of hole in the …
Continue reading 20% of plants risk extinction.

Banking, Budgets, Inflation, Food prices

Four degrees of separation?  I just browsed through three links that interested me and suddenly noticed that they drew the banking crisis and the food crisis (which is barely on many people’s radar) together. Here it is: US banking system ‘open to abuse’ One of the US’s top fraud investigators is warning that America’s policing …
Continue reading Banking, Budgets, Inflation, Food prices