Jame.Ba

lala

2009-02-19T23:10:00.001+00:00

not done this in a while

might get back into it

who knows

Domain down

2008-11-05T23:55:00.001+00:00

After being grossly over priced on the new domain I have temporarily taken down the domain until everything has been sorted out.

Maybe something meaningful at some point later too haha.

Writing.com

2008-10-23T18:17:00.002+01:00

I know, 3 posts in one day you must be mad at me.
But no!
This is relevant!
A while ago I used to use my hand at authoring and tried to complete some work. All that eventually happened was I wrote a novella and half a novel. I abandoned the project after I reformatted and lost the other half of the book and got pissed off with it.
But since my interwebs is dead I have decided that my free time I might carry on writing. This is where it gets juicy for you! I am going to give you a link to my writing.com portfolio and you guys are going to bookmark it (If you want) and when and if I write anything new, you guys will be the first to know!
But so you are not just sat wondering of you like my style/ideas till i can be arsed to do something, on my portfolio is the novella and half novel I mentioned earlier!
So enjoy and I hope to hear some good feedback and I'll leave you all be now.

http://www.writing.com/main/view_item/user_id/huggybear_13

Domain

2008-10-23T15:45:00.001+01:00

The new domain now works, so enjoy :)

http://www.jamesba.co.uk/

Internet down

2008-10-23T12:22:00.004+01:00

My intertubes have been savagely broken by something and thus it is dead, I am trying to fix it and it doesn't seem to be going to well.

I purchased a domain for the blog http://www.jamesba.co.uk/ from 1and1.com for £1 a year which is banging really, but because of limitations on the interwebs here I can't log in to set it all up so you'll all just have to wait. At some point that link will work so don't just change it yet.

Working with feedburner has proved useful as for some reason it has increased traffic so i'll have to start putting more effort into posts. The website is still coming along nicely and won't be updated for a while due to the internet being down.

Cold

2008-10-20T18:32:00.004+01:00

Cold, cold, cold, cold and cold.
Damn cold recently and that's just he start!
Weather is slowly turning to shit while my social life slightly gains in preference.
I finally purchased some new clothing, need some new trousers but they'll come along at some point.
Mother is still mad at me, which is fair, but i'd rather she didn't preach about it. Like if she has a bad day and yells at me it's fine, vise versa, I just fucking lamped a t-rex in the face.
haha
ahwell
School is going great and things are speedy along nicely.

The Voynich Manuscript.

2008-10-13T06:56:00.001+01:00

For those of you not familiar with the Voynich Manuscript, which I suspect is most of you - the Voynich Manuscript is a centuries-old book of an undecipherable language. Most historians agree that it was written between 1450 and 1520, because of the clothes that the figures drawn in the book wear. It contains eerie illustrations, particularly of plants that do not resemble those we have currently documented on Earth. There are also diagrams that appear to be astronomical in nature, inlcuding our solar system and what appears to be a galaxy, which would have required a telescope far more advanced than those of the period it was supposedly written in. Interestingly, there are also diagrams of what appear to be cells drawn when viewed under a microscope. If it was indeed written in 1450 - 1520, this would have been nearly 200 years before cells were supposedly first viewed underneath a microscope.

Besides the illustrations, the text is baffling - not one word has been deciphered. Some handwriting experts who've examined the writing agree that the author's words flowed smoothly onto the page, and therefore he knew what he was writing - it's not gibberish. It also follows Zipf's law, which is a law observed in all modern language where the most frequent word will occur approximately twice as often as the second most frequent word, which occurs twice as often as the fourth most frequent word, and so on, further disproving the idea that the book is a hoax.

Not much is known about the history of the book, especially it's early history - we know only that the earliest owner was a man named Georg Baresch who lived in the early 17th century. Over the year, it went from owner to owner and today it is currently in the possession of Yale University.

Download the book (pdf)

Girl trouble.

2008-10-10T21:22:00.002+01:00

It's strange, for the last week or so I've been inclined to find a girlfriend. It's weird, i was content being alone but now I just want someone.
I'm rying to look over some candidates and some look to be alright, I just need to0 look into it further.
This probably didn't need a blog post but I hadn't posted one in a few days.

Other news is 6th form is going great, got an A* on my irst assignment thingy and it's all good. I promise next post will be meaningful :).

Stuff

2008-10-08T09:35:00.004+01:00

Got a few things in the past couple of days.
A new phone, a new electric razor thing and a Peninsula Prospectus. The most notible being the 5.0 MP camera on the phone which is sly as fuck.
I decided on a hobby maybe.
I might start doing 3D modelling again using blender and perhaps vray of yafray to render things. I have had a brush up with blender once and it went well but a couple re formats later and I never got back to reinstalling it. It's pretty cool, it's like a all-in-one 3D modeler, game engine, animation tool and the like. And best of all it's FREE.

EP Realeased

2008-10-04T16:20:00.004+01:00

That's right, check it almost finished EP ready for your listenening pleasure.
You'll find the player to the right of this page all the time so don't worry about losing it.
It's got 4 of my tracks and some shitty watermark track.
Track listing:
1)T-Minus 12
2)1, 2 & 3 Steps
3)Mr Shneebles Day Off
4) Danger! Danger!

A little info:
Pushoverdrive is a my solo Drum & Bass project that I conduct with Fruity Loops 8, Cubase and sometimes Renoise. So hopefully njoy my tunes and check back for more, if there is more that is.

Need of a hobby,

2008-10-04T09:49:00.004+01:00

I need a new hobby pretty bad, I'm sleeping 85% of the time and if I'm not asleep I'm working or at school. So I need a new hobby. I thought about looking into construct more or thinking about taking up some sort of programming language to learn. But as it stands I'm still pretty bored, It's the weekend though so there might be some parties or something. HOPEFULLY.

While thinking about school I should probably just mention my HATRED for advanced Chemistry. It seriously is too hard for me but I'll persist anywho. It's not going to be an easy two years but fuck it. At the moment we're doing a bit about chemical bonding and after a little bit of research turns out we haven't even SEEN the tip of the ice burg.

It's all right though, i'll get through it. It's just working around the negatives and positives and calculating the kj/mol correctly. But I fear there is much more harder stuff awaiting.

Computer Geek

2008-09-28T09:37:00.003+01:00

There's this guy on youtube that has EVERY console/console game/pc/pc game and accessories for them ever made. He's a fucking genius.
These are the vids that show you most of his stuff.

PC center

2008-09-27T00:48:00.003+01:00

I fixed my computer, but I was used to vista so I connected my laptop to my spare monitor and dual screened with the laptop and kept my PC to my main monitor. I use the laptop as a server/media centre at the moment and the main as the work storage. It's cool and it works.
I'm getting an upgrade in a couple of months so it'll be awesome.

Website Update/ General.

2008-09-25T15:39:00.004+01:00

Having some trouble coding and designing the member/upload area. Simply because I don't have the time nor the patience. But what I do have proves useful yet buggy, the simple user area and forum are there because if I need to transfer work then that's where I would go.

The medlink UK thing is becoming a trouble due to my mother telling me it's either a driving license or the medlink trip. I don't need to go to the Nottingham trip but I also don't need a licence so I am not sure what to chose.

Debhamnems got back to me about applying for a job and ambushed me with a telephone interview moments after I had woken up so I didn't do aswell as I could've. Hopefully that went well and I get the job, if not i'm applying to work at the post office as a data imput guy. So I just it about a computer and enter postcodes.

Turns out I get a free bus from school to home every thursday so that is doubly awesome. Biology and psychology is alright but chemistry can suck my dick. I hate it so much but no matter what I'll need it more than I hate it.

Medlink UK

2008-09-24T18:34:00.003+01:00

This coming December is the Medlink UK 2009 open week at Nottingham teaching hospital and university. Me and a friend are up for going at the hefty price of £320 including accommodation and excluding travel and food. It's savage as fuck but the conferences and hands on experience will be priceless. I just wish I was told sooner because the money has to be paid by next month, so hopefully all goes well and i'll be on a trip to see what it's like in med school and maybe i'll see arlo!

Check it out for yourself.

Make a sig, win gold membership.

2008-09-21T22:32:00.006+01:00

Over at Facepunch there was a competition to design one of the mods a sig and the winner would win gold. I thought this was my chance, the comp started 3 days ago and I got to the thread late due to school and town. When I did get there it was still going and there was some sick competition. I must've spent the best part of 2 hours making the sig and when I went to post I was one minute late.Here was my contribution:
Today was good until this happened, I probably wouldn't have won but dammit I wanted to try.

Website up!

2008-09-21T19:25:00.003+01:00

As a mixture of php and html this little site is ready for some use. Not yet optimised with the uploading but sure enough it works. Some updates and tweaks will be sorted tonight and a custom domain by next week. It's on a free webhost a good one at that. It has FTP support and alot of great features. A friend of mine pointed out this great FTP uploader and I reccommend it to anyone.
This site was created with Adobe Fireworks and Dreamweaver both excellent programs.

Well heres the link and any feedback is appreiciated.
http://huggybear13.free-site-host.com/

Website Biz

2008-09-21T13:21:00.004+01:00

To easily transfer work to and from school i decided to host my own website, I was deciding on a theme when I thought why not just use the blog as a theme. That way I could probably do a lot more with the blog than previously before.
It uses the free domain jamesba.ath.cx and I host it. I got the free domain from DynDNS, a nice little site, check it out. It's currently not up because I have to wait for the guy downstairs to come home so I can log in to the router and forward the right ports.

The underconstruction pop up is actually a pop up and not an eye sore like the picture.

Swarmplayer

2008-09-20T21:00:00.000+01:00

If anyone downloads torrents for TV shows then the downloading experience got a little bit more sweet.
Swarmplayer in conjunction with EZTV has created a modified VLC index to play a torrent as it downloads. This ofcourse only applies to torrents with the .tstream extention. Currently in it's alpha stage it is very buggy, but this breakthrough in PVP technology could change the face of the way we download torrents indefinatly.

(This picture illustrates how to download a .tstream file from EZTV. (Click to enlarge))

Google reader, Google chrome and Google Andriod.

2008-09-20T19:48:00.000+01:00

I think it's time I got to mentioning the slow but sure google world takeover. Slowly google has been building and releasing different apps these include:

(If you are a user of blogger you are probably familiar with google reader.)
Google reader (for those not acquainted) is googles own browser based feed reader for the general user. It looks similar to iGoogle it displays all your feeds in the left menu tile and the content in the right. It's pretty genius and I'm not sure how I coped with my feeds before it came out.
But as they say a picture is a million words.

Google chrome is google's contender to the mortal combat that is the browser wars. Even though it is currently in its beta phase it still seems pretty solid, even after it refused to import my firefox bookmarks. It's smooth, fast and uses the latest Java of its time. It's biggest contender being firefox i'm not sure how it will pan out also safari boasts it's new squirrelfish Java webkit. Both could potentially be fatal to the google platform but a lot of die hard fans might just use it regardless.

Google android, after taking it's internet limits to near capacity they must of thought that their next task would be to create an open source mobile phone platform.
What is Google Android?
Google Android is the worlds first complete, open, and free mobile platform. Google Android is being developed by a group of 30 technology and mobile companies, also known as, The Open Handset Alliance.

Open? What does that mean?
Open as in open source. This means you can make tons of applications and services. Now I know this may sound like the iPhone, but it is completely open source, the iPhone isn't.

You can build applications and services on top of the default ones that already exist in your phone, you can even replace those default services with custom ones.

What phone will Android work with?
As far as I know right now, this is all hush hush, but it is confirmed that Android will work with touchscreens and 3g phones.

Sounds cool, what applications are there so far?
Well, since Google already released the SDK, there are many award winning applications already developed. (With the release of the SDK, Google provided an emulator of the phone that works exactly like the normal phone would, so you can test out your apps).

Since there are too many to list, just check out the award winning ones on this page. http://code.google.com/android/adc_gallery/
Sourced from here.

The boy who sees without eyes

2008-09-20T11:27:00.000+01:00

There's a show that runs on TV sometimes called extraordinary people, you may or may not have heard of it but it is amazing. Well I forgot about this show until today when I was looking for videos on Clive Wearing for psychology. In youtubes recommended for you box popped up this little 5 part story of Ben. Ben Underwood lost his eyes to cancer when he was a toddler but something crazy happened, he began to see with echo location. Well here's the videos:

Great open source software.

2008-09-19T21:28:00.001+01:00

I try my hardest to not spend any money and get the most out of something, some people call this being cheap but I like to think of it as being cost efficient. Most people know of a free alternative to something but not a lot know that there is probably an open source equivalent to anything.
My list will illustrate some of the best open source things to get your work done or waste your time with.

To start I will get the known out of the way.
Open office

Open office is a free equivalent to microsoft office boasting word, powerpoint, access and excel, it even has it's own quirks of an image manipulation program and an advanced calculation program. Being a hefty 200mb download and about 400mb on disk it is still the better use because if you can't afford office yet you have hundreds of .doc or whatever from school. Open office can still read and manipulate office docs for use back in office, how cool is that.

Sumatra PDF

Some people may or may not be aquianted with a PDF file, these files are very genius. The most renown for a PDF veiwer is Adobe's Acrobat. Even though Acrobat is free it has a very load slow time and can be very clunky. Sumatra is a very versitile PDF viewer being light weight and easy to use. A must have.

Audacity

Audacity is an open source audio editor which is easy to use and very versatile in it's functions. I use this alot for production of music and podcasts/internet radio and the like. It's a wave length editor and multi media recorder.

Construct

Construct is an open source directX sprite powered game creator, create anything from a 2D side scroller to a Pseudo 3D FPS game. Using basically drag and drop commands and a paint.net style sprite creation this program is very fluid and easy to use. Side by side to game creation it can also make a variety of programs from media players to .dll's.

P aint.net/GIMP

Both of these are open source equivalents to photoshop.

Winamp

Winamp is a media player with a huge compatibility rate. It supports anything from MP3 to Ogg Vorbis and AAC. With a plugin catalogue comparable to that of firefox it can be turned into anything you want your media player to do. (I host an internet radio station using it). It can also manage external data like Ipods and other mp3 players.

VLC

VLC is the winamp of videos, it plays anything from AVI to MKV and 3GP. I have YET to find a video file not compatible with this player. It also has the same compatibility with music making this the best media player out there. The best part is that it is lightweight, almost half of that of say WMP and iTunes

Vista and hamachi.

2008-09-19T21:28:00.000+01:00

Since my computers been dead (graphics card is dead) I've been using my laptop connected to my primary monitor.
The strange thing about is that on the laptop is vista home premium. Now I've been using XP for a couple years and my laptop properly for about a week and since it has vista I thought fuck it, why not have a play. Because in about 3-4 years everyone will be on vista anyway because that's what technology does. (No one still uses 95 do hey ;)) So yeah, me and the guy down stairs have one thing in common. DOWNLOADING. Now this doesn't cause too much of a problem because we can acknowledge seeding/speeds/bandwidth and accommodate fine. But the minor issue is that what we download sometimes is the same thing. Well, I say sometimes but about 80% of the time we download the same thing. So that's on average 2gb of data...twice.
We've been trying to combat the problem and the agreement now is that if he downloads it before I do he will tell me and I'll use a USB to get it off him.

We'll call me lazy but this is 21st century yeah, so without having a direct network I have found a little jem Hamachi.

This is by no means new and I've known about it previously before but it was not until today where I actually got to using it.
Hamachi is a VPN service that easily sets up in 10 minutes, and enables secure remote access to your business network, anywhere there's an Internet connection.
It works with your existing firewall, and requires no additional configuration. Hamachi is the first networking application to deliver an unprecedented level of direct peer-to-peer connectivity. It is simple, secure, and cost-effective.
It comes in two sets; Basic and Pro (What doesn't these days) Pro comes with 3 licenses:
Month: $4.95
6 Month:$23.70
Year: $39.00
And basic is free for home, private and public use. Anything business related has to be purchased.
No this thing is IMMENSE anything from file sharing to emulated LAN activity it's great. easy too use and pretty awesome anyhow.

Vista, all I've heard about vista is bad things, it doesn't do this, it does do that. Granted it has a few annoying quirks like the insistence of permission for everything you do. But I can see why, I mean if you download something that uses a background installer for a virus or something vista will be like HEY SUMMITS TRYING TO INSTALL YOU WANNA LET IT and you'd be like naaaaah. So yeah, it has a sexy GUI and and runs quite smoothly on my laptop. This system hog bullshit is pretty annoying I mean have you tried running XP on a 95 optimised machine? It's the future, stuffs going to need better hardware.
I know this seems a little far past the bat to be defending vista when it's been out long enough for acceptance but I just deemed it necessary some input.