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Safe European Home - The Clash My Corona - The Knack Germ Free Adolescence - X-Ray Spex Don’t Stand So Close To Me - The Police Soul In Isolation - The Chameleons Ghost Town - The Specials Clampdown - The Clash You’re A Germ - Wolf Alice Eat Yourself Fitter - The Fall All By Myself - Eric Carmen Waiting For The Man (with a vaccine) - Velvet Underground Paranoid - Black Sabbath Panic - The Smiths I Predict A Riot - Kaiser Chiefs Anarchy In The UK - Sex Pistols It’s The End of The World (as we know it) - R....

We all love pub quizzes and like TV quiz shows. I think it’s partly because we are curious to see whether we can answer the questions and sometimes, to occasionally, laugh at some of the bizarre answers offered by contestants under time pressure. One of my favourites recently was a lady who was asked:- ‘Hydrocarbons are made up of carbon and which other element ?’ ‘Carbon dioxide’ I loved this answer because she replied, in part, with ‘Carbon’ which would have meant that hydrocarbons comprised of carbon, and well, more carbon....

7:54am on a quiet Monday morning. Quiet because it’s New Year’s Eve. I have just put £15 into a hire car prior to returning the vehicle. There’s just one gentleman is in front of me paying. He has a fuel card so he’s asked for his registration. He can’t remember this so looks out to the forecourt to check. Maybe this is a hire car too although that seems unlikely as it’s an ancient, brown, battered Volvo estate....

It all started innocuously enough with this post from Alex Shroeder https://octodon.social/@kensanata/101052266709264418 Writing tools. Emacs Wiki What about you? I spontaneously replied. Emacs Orgmode Nikola This reminded me that since, I had recently migrated my desktop from Arch Linux to Fedora 29, I needed to reinstall Nikola and check that the blog I never use still could be built successfully. Oh - how exciting. Nikola has recently released version [8.0.1] Nikola-8 and I was on the previous version - 7....

This is the famous ‘Hello world’ program written in Python in colour using Markdown. #!/usr/bin/env python import sys def hello(name='world'): greeting = "hello " + name print(greeting) if __name__ == "__main__": hello(*sys.argv[1:]) This took me a long time to get working.

Although hosting on GitHub pages is an excellent option, I decided to move this blog to Amazon S3, mainly because I have used S3 before. Also GitHub pages only supports a limited set of Jekyll plugins and I wanted more flexibility to add any plugin and (potentially) run a different version of Jekyll. I also took the opportunity to switch the theme to the rather minimalistic but stylish Poole and installed the useful s3website utility to automatically synchronise the static site to Amazon S3....

Welcome…to the atrocity exhibition. Fittingly, this site is powered by Jekyll and Github pages, but the precise details will probably take a series of 1,739 posts.

‘Is she a werewolf ? ‘No’. ‘Does she have the ability to spontaneously transform into a fierce animal ?’ ‘No’. ‘Is she a robot ?’ ‘No’. ‘Is she a very early version of a robot that is running version 1.0.1 (alpha) of the software that meant she lost to that human-robot hybrid ?’ ‘No’ ‘Is she a normal human but just set 200 years in a post-apocalyptic world where water, fuel and sunlight are at a premium ?...

Diamond Geezer recently posted his annual analysis of how many blogrolls he appears in. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the number is steadily declining and he finds it harder to find new blogs to add to his list. I thought it might be interesting to look at the blogging platforms used by the 98 blogs listed. Here are the results: Blogger 60 WordPress.com 11 WordPress.org 11 Typepad 4 MovableType 3 Livejournal 2 Canalblog 1 Drupal 1 ExpressionEngine 1 Nucleus CMS 1 Serendipity 1 Guardian (journo) 1 Custom 1 The dominance of Blogger/Blogspot didn’t surprise me that much....

My site has 966 posts and 70 categories. By default, Octopress re-generates the entire site - every single post, all the category pages, the archive pages On my Acer Aspire One (Intel Atom 1.66GHz) netbook, the regeneration takes around 10 minutes. There are a couple of options that can significantly reduce this time and make the write/preview/edit iterative process more tolerable. Firstly, you can use ‘rake isolate’ to move all other posts into a ‘stash’ directory and simply process the newly created post....