Archive for the 'Random' category

SSH without a password

10th July, 2010 3:36 pm

I always for­get this, so I’m put­ting it here in case I need to refer to it in future:

cat ~/.ssh/id_dsa.pub | ssh remote_host 'cat >> .ssh/authorized_keys'

Pop Off the Penguin

10th January, 2010 6:24 pm

So I came across an anim­a­tion I made when I was explor­ing Adobe Premier a few years ago. It’s about a pen­guin who sets off from Penguin Planet to col­on­ise Earth, and a “bad guy” pen­guin who tries to stop him. So sit back and enjoy the mediocrity that is Pop Off the Penguin, epis­ode 1.

There was an epis­ode 2, and I’d star­ted work on a third, but these seem to be lost to time and I don’t expect to see them again.  :-(

What's my IP address?

5th January, 2010 10:02 pm

Do you often sit around won­der­ing what your IP address is? You totally do, don’t you? Don’t lie. Well, won­der no longer, and head on down to http://ip.mmizzi.com/.

My toilet is revolting

3rd January, 2010 8:03 am

Toilets have simple jobs. They sit around all day, then when some­body needs to they come and defec­ate in them, and the toi­let swal­lows it up. As jobs go, it’s hardly the most excit­ing, but surely more inter­est­ing than that of a basin or kettle.

Sometimes, the toilet’s job just isn’t enough excite­ment for a toi­let, and it decides to revolt. In the case of my toi­let yes­ter­day, it decided to express its rebel­lion by slowly filling its bowl up to and bey­ond the point where the water over­flows onto the floor. What a fuck­ing bastard.

Nokia E75 bluetooth

27th December, 2009 6:42 pm

So the oth­er­wise awe­some E75 has some bluetooth issues. It seems it doesn’t want to con­nect to car kits.

One solu­tion men­tioned on the for­ums is to delete a bunch of saved SMS mes­sages. It sounds silly, but for me at least it seems to have worked. I had some 2,000 mes­sages in my inbox plus 200 sent mes­sages. I deleted them all but the last 10 or so in the inbox and sud­denly my phone con­nects to my shiny new MEX BT2750!

Ooh, pretty

22nd December, 2009 12:03 am

Hey look, the whole site’s a little bit less ugly.

Publisher files on Linux

6th December, 2009 6:51 pm

Just put­ting this here for future ref­er­ence, or in case any­body else finds it useful.

It seems impossible to open MS Publisher files on Linux (and I guess on Windows too if you don’t have Publisher), but convert.neevia.com will con­veni­ently turn them into PDFs for free! Yay!

Ultrasound

30th November, 2009 7:56 pm

Had an ultra­sound on Friday, turns out the baby’s a girl, so now it looks like we don’t need to worry about boys’ names.

So check out these, the first pho­tos of Amelia Rose Mizzi, due to be born on April 21 next year.

06 face profile 05 thigh 07 face 3d

Click here for more.

Baby names

27th October, 2009 4:30 pm

So my wife’s preg­nant. Now that the mind-numbing hor­ror has gone, and before the dreaded num­ber threes start, there’s the epic task of not only pick­ing but also agree­ing on pos­sible names.

We agreed on a girl’s name pretty quickly — I’m not going to tell you what it is because if you steal it we’ll be back at square one — but a good boy’s name that we both agree on has so far proved elusive.

The con­ver­sa­tions usu­ally go some­thing like this: I’ll come up with a per­fectly good, strong, mean­ing­ful name, and she’ll screw her nose up in a way that says “my ini­tial reac­tion is ‘no’ and I refuse to con­sider it fur­ther”. Then she’ll come up with some cliché, deliberately-badly-spelt-because-it-makes-it-seem-more-“exotic” name, to which I’ll screw my nose up in a way that says “I think it’s funny that I’m imit­at­ing your man­ner­isms but I’m acutely aware that it actu­ally just makes me look like a twat”.

Usually we’ll get through one or two more of these back-and-forths before we run out of ideas and I start sug­gest­ing some­thing silly like Smeagle or Chewbacca.

Smeagle

But ser­i­ously, who wouldn’t want to name their kid after this.

Yawn

16th October, 2009 11:37 am

Yaaaaaawn.

Sleepwalking fail

7th October, 2009 4:34 pm

I know it’s pretty old, but this still cracks me up:

Menthols

20th September, 2009 10:47 pm

The prob­lem with menthols, right, is that when you smoke them they leave you want­ing a cigarette.

Ghost caught on video

12th August, 2009 5:37 pm

Hey so I was mess­ing about with this motion cap­ture soft­ware and left it run­ning overnight. I came back in the morn­ing to take a look and saw this.

It’s clearly a ghost — there’s no chance at all that it’s a moth that happened to wander past the infrared lamp. Nope. It’s def­in­itely a ghost.

Check it out:

Just don't call me late for dinner

4th August, 2009 4:37 pm

So I was out some­where the other day, and in the course of con­ver­sa­tion this guy says “I don’t mind what they call me, as long as they don’t call me late for din­ner”, and every­body laughed as though it was the fun­ni­est thing in the world.

My ques­tion is thus: What the hell makes this so funny? It barely even makes sense. Do people laugh at it just because other people are laugh­ing at it? And if so, why are the other people laugh­ing at it? Is there some insanely funny joke here that I’m com­pletely missing?

Please someone — any­one — explain this to me, that I may once again sleep soundly at night.

Corn chips are better than chocolate

16th July, 2009 8:26 am

Corn chips are totally bet­ter than chocol­ate. I mean, ser­i­ously. Just look at this picture:

Mmmm... Corn chips...
This tasty tasty photo is by jonath­an­poh.

Doesn’t that make you want corn chips? Now, ima­gine that bas­ket was full of chocol­ate, instead of corn chips. You’d be all like “eww, chocol­ate and salsa? That’s pretty weird”.

Thus it’s proven without a doubt. Corn chips are bet­ter than chocol­ate, so Commander Pants can pull her head in.