In the unlikely event that anyone did/does read this blog I can only apologise for the lack of posts since March... I do however this time have a valid excuse.

Unfortunately Mr Livid Geek Snr. passed away recently.

This was after a 5 year battle with Multiple myeloma... an innocent chest ache turned out to be a secondary cancer which spread quickly.
I would just like to thank all the Doctors (Dr Steve Schey particularly) and Nurses at King’s College Hospital who treated my dad with such care and who gave him 5 relatively normal years which was much more than expected initially. A very special thank you also goes to St Christopher's Hospice who helped us look after him at home for his final week and then in the hospice for his last 36 hours... without them his suffering would have been unbearable not only for him but for his family too.
Another thank you goes to a man called Billy Jenkins (a man of many talents) who wrote and read the humanist service at my dads funeral… it was brilliant and had us all in fits of laughter and floods of tears. I think the majority of the 130 people who attended the service told me just how fantastic it was and how well it matched the man they knew.

My final thank you obviously goes to my dad who I will miss forever… RIP dad.

The Geek.

I stumbled across this fantastic site called Flickrvision that basically shows you random pictures which have just been uploaded into Fickr… the twist is that it also shows you where they are from directly on a map. Very cool. It has two map views:

Classic:
  and

3D

If you visit the site be careful though or you can find yourself loosing half an hour of your life seeing some fantastic (and often weird) pictures from all around this little planet of ours.

The Geek.

Now I have my own ‘always on server’ I was keen to find other uses for it besides hosting this blog. One that particularly interested me was having some way to stream my music so that I would always have my music collection available to me provided I had some kind of internet connection.

Well my friends I think I have found the ideal (well for me anyway) solution… I present to you Subsonic.

It’s truly brilliant. Go to the site it explains it all far better than i can. It’s free (I urge you to donate though… I did!) and does exactly what it says it will. I have 15gb of music and the performance is great although you do need to ensure that your music is in sensible artist/album folders.

It will transcode on the fly between several music formats, provides an inbuilt flash player and you can choose how much bandwidth you want to use for streaming music. It displays artwork and lyrics and has a few different skins. It automatically downloads podcasts… the works! I have tested it under IE, Firefox and Opera and it works in all of them. Not that you have to only stream your music to a browser… oh no it supports other media players too.

Genius! Sindre Mehus I salute you sir!

Seriously download it. Try it what have you got to loose?

The Geek

I read…a lot. Mostly fiction… nothing clever or highbrow mainly the sort of sci-fi or fantasy genre you would associate with a Geek. Review are obviously subjective and so my opinion of a book will vary wildly from the next mans and that's how it should be.

Anyway I thought I would share what I think about some of the books… I’ll be writing the reviews just after finishing them so they are still fresh in my mind. Now don’t be expecting long dull reviews they will be short sweet and just give you a brief idea of how much I enjoyed the book concerned. The first review is of a book called Old Man’s War  by John Scalzi which I finished yesterday.

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This mighty blog is being served up to the world by a very quiet pc cobbled together out of parts I had from a media centre pc  I built a couple of years ago (now defunct) and a very old desktop pc that had died many years ago and had been gathering dust in the loft since. I wanted to spend as little money on the project as possible but also wanted as near to silent a pc as I could as it was going to be residing in a bedroom.

So the old parts were as follows:
AMD Athlon X2 BE-2350
Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H
Scythe Ninja Mini CPU Cooler (running passively)
Samsung SpinPoint F1 640GB Hard Drive x2
Micro-ATX case
Enermax Cluster 90mm Case Fan x2
3.25 Floppy Disk Drive
Various Cables.
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If you are in the UK you will have read the story released today that the current UK government has decided to use its veto to stop the publication of minutes of key Cabinet meetings held in the run-up to the Iraq war in 2003. This is a disgrace on its own… but what is even worse and more worrying is the main (well only in reality) opposition party and likely the next government have agreed with the action.

What tiny shred of credibility this government may have had left has totally evaporated now and I think things don't particularly bode well for us when the conservatives get in to government (which all the polls currently indicate they will). How can there be a freedom of information act when the government decides to veto the first potentially embarrassing publication?

Now I am not naive and realise the public cannot reasonably expect to have access to all information and indeed I think the UK public largely realise this… however in this case everyone already knows what a disaster the Iraq war was… and equally we realise that our soldiers can’t just up and leave now they are there. So what harm can releasing these minutes actually do unless they are hiding something? I am not one for conspiracy theories but in this case I can’t see any other reason.

Anyhow I guess we won’t know for 30 years or so… but i wonder now that they have used the veto for the first time how many more times it will be used by both the current Labour government and the next Conservative administration. Jokers the lot of them and they wonder why nobody trust politicians in the UK anymore.

The Geek.

Do you want to be a pop star but can't think up a name for your band or first album… well this method was suggested to me and it produces brilliant results… could this be how record company creative departments really produce the goods!?

1 - Go to "wikipedia." Hit “random”
or click [Link]
The first random wikipedia article you get is the name of your band.

2 - Go to "Random quotations"
or click [Link]
The last four or five words of the very last quote of the page is the title of your first album.

3 - Go to flickr and click on “explore the last seven days”
or click [Link]
Third picture, no matter what it is, will be your album cover.

4 - Use Photoshop or similar to put it all together.

So with out further ado I present to you my first album cover… and I think you will agree it is actually quite plausible!

Give it a go and see what you come up with.

The Geek.

As you may or may not have noticed I am using BlogEngine.Net to serve up this blog and so far it has been pretty easy. I had a few issues when configuring VistaDB to work as its backend database but that was just because there has been a recent release of VistaDB (Version 3.4 Build 77) and the version number in the example Web.Config file was out of date. This was easily fixed by doing a couple of “replaces” in notepad. So you can follow the steps below which are a slightly edited version of the original readme provided in the BlogEngine setup:

1. If you don't already have VistaDB or VistaDB Express installed locally, download VistaDB Express from vistadb.net and install it locally.
2. Find VistaDB.NET20.dll on your PC and copy it to your blog's Bin folder.
3. Copy BlogEngine.vdb3 from the VistaDB folder to your App_Data folder.
4. Open the VistaDBWeb.Config file in notepad and perform a replace of 3.3.1.54 with 3.4.2.77 and then a replace of 3.3.1.53 with 3.3.1.54 . Then save the changes and close notepad.
5. Rename VistaDBWeb.Config to Web.config and copy it to your blog folder.  (This will overwrite your existing web.config file.  If this is not a new installation, make sure you have a backup.)
6. Surf out to your Blog and see the welcome post.
7. Login with the username admin and password admin.  Change the password.

Hope this helps someone… to be honest if you are familiar with dot net then the error you see if you don’t update the VistaDBWeb.config makes it obvious what the problem is but if you are new to dot net and/or BlogEngine then it may not be so obvious.

The Geek.

Well here it is my 2nd attempt at this blog stuff... this time I am hosting it myself.
Basically this is gonna be a place for me to rant, air my views, review stuff and generally do a bit of whatever I fancy. Hopefully someone else will read it and maybe even enjoy it... if not then who cares its as much a record for myself as anything else. So if you are reading this, welcome have a nose about and feel free to comment. Don't take anything written here too seriously I certainly wont be!

The Geek