In the mid 80’s I found a cassette tape of Beatles music played by the James Last orchestra. While I sort of knew some of the music this was the first time I heard many of the songs and I preferred this orchestra version to the original!
The next time the Beatles would intrude on my life would be when I watch Red Storm for the first time in the early nineties.
I guess I have a thing for instrumental Beatles music. 🙂
A long time ago in 1987 a game called Barbarian made it’s way to the popular computers of the time. It featured brawny characters fighting to the death to rescue the scantily clad princess (or some such nonsense, game stories didn’t make much sense back then).
It was a great game with memorable music, fluid graphics, gruesome bloody moves and a goblin that would kick the head of your decapitated foe off the side of the arena. The gameplay got boring with time of course but and it was probably more infamous for the cover photo than anything else..
Anyway, after the short history lesson, I discovered that Andrea Baldiraghi announced the release of a new Masters of the Universe game on pico8. It’s inspired by Barbarian as Andrea says on the game homepage.
It has your favourite Masters of the Universe characters and even a rendition of the theme toon. In my first fight I managed to chop the head off Skeletor but the second devolved into a bloody fight to the end when I exhausted my opponent.
It’s embedded above, give it a go. Press Z to attack, X to defend and use the cursor keys to move!
If you go along to the Transport Infrastructure Ireland website right now you’ll find a map of Ireland with lots of green dots.
These are the locations of cameras recording the volume of traffic on the road. It’s been interesting looking at some of the roads around Cork during the last year. Here are a few charts of traffic on the N20 between Blarney and Cork.
The Covid-19 Lockdown bit in March. Schools closed on March 12th, pubs closed soon after. Most people who could were working from home. It made a big difference to daily traffic into Cork. From a high of 1200 vehicles in January to 400 in April.
How does this compare to last year? Here are the charts for July and August 2019.
It’s interesting to see those charts. The lockdown caused a huge drop in traffic as expected. Emissions from cars were down this year of course but agriculture remained the same so our impact on the environment didn’t change much. It’ll probably be worse as people use their cars rather than take public transport.
Out of curiosity I looked at the traffic volume going into Dingle from the Inch Strand side of the peninsula for July this year and last year. There wasn’t much of a change. 500 cars a day passed there in 2020 while only an extra 100 cars made the journey in 2019. They’ll be happy about that in Dingle!
Along with what seemed like a large portion of the country I stayed in Dingle recently. The town was packed. We stayed in a B&B on the edge of town and every day around noon the road outside was a traffic jam of cars snaking through the town. Most people wore masks in the shops but of course there were a few rat lickers too.
I did notice that a lot of people had several empty pint glasses on their tables, and while they may have eaten a €9 meal there was no sign of food. I spotted a happy young couple cross the road with plastic glasses of beer and sit down by the statue of Fungi. It was upsetting given what’s happening with Covid-19.
Now we’re in lockdown again. It’s not the same lockdown we experienced from March onwards but people became lax, and the virus made it’s way into factories. Multiple outbreaks in meat processing plants locked down 3 counties last week. Yesterday the news nationally wasn’t good:
And so the restrictions:
Which leads some to say the GAA should encourage weddings at their matches so 50 people can watch.
Still confused, here’s a clear explanation.
These graphs are not good are they?
Schools open soon. Hopefully we can reduce the community spread or we’ll be closing schools within a month.
Oh yes, watch out for Storm Ellen tonight. There’s a status red warning for Cork!
I can’t login to my Raspberry PI3. When I ssh into it the password is rejected. When I plugged a keyboard and HDMI cable in the login would fail silently at first and then after reboot it would tell me the password was wrong.
Fearing the worst, that the small machine had been hacked, I plugged it out and attempted to go into single user mode but even that didn’t work. I tried various cmdline.txt changes, I saw an odd message saying:
sh: can't access tty; job control turned off
That wasn’t the worst. I even managed to generate a kernel panic once!
When I was just about ready to give up I plugged in the HDMI cable again and saw a strange libcrypt error show up.
/sbin/sulogin error while loading shared libraries: libcrypt.so.1: cannot open shared object file: no such file or directory
A quick search for that message brings me to the one thread on the Internet about it.
Unfortunately, I don’t have another Linux machine handy to copy libc6 from but I do have a backup of the SD card and that worked. I made a backup with Disk Utility (yes, don’t sneer, I can use dd too) and after making a new backup I restored the old backup with Etcher.
The last time I did an apt upgrade was just before a recent trip where I was depending on the RPI3 for my Plex music. Luckily the Plex server hadn’t restarted in that time and must have been using the old libc6!
Another tool that was useful here was ext4fuse which I installed through Homebrew. It’s even possible to mount an ext4 partition from an SD card image by first mounting the boot partition with Disk Utility, checking the device with df -h and then using the very next device number like this:
ext4fuse /dev/disk9s2 /Volumes/rpi -o allow_other
Read only access to the Raspberry PI/Linux part of the image! Strangely enough it doesn’t show in Finder but df shows it is mounted.
Now to make a new SD card backup before I update anything else with apt.
I might miss something that makes my blood boil or make me feel sad that the world is so messed up.
I’m better off giving this little guy a cuddle. �?
Thanks Reddit.
The Crowdsignal team at Automattic have been quietly working on a new poll block for the last few weeks. We finally made it public today on WordPress.org!
We set out with the task of creating a block that would allow the writer to quickly insert a poll in their posts using the block editor. More than that, it had to be simple to use. It also needed to be themed to match the look and feel of the website it would appear on.
We’ve created a block that does that. It also records the votes collected on the Crowdsignal website where you can analyse the results using reports Crowdsignal users have always used.
Search for “Crowdsignal Forms” on your plugins page to install it in the usual way.
A free Crowdsignal account is required to use the block. We made it really easy to connect your site to your Crowdsignal account. If you don’t have one then creating a new account is simple too.
The first 2,500 responses you collect are included in your free account, and further votes are recorded but free users are encouraged to upgrade if they want to do further analysis of all the data they collect.
Yesterday I was notified that I registered on WordPress.com for the first time fifteen years ago. I wasn’t going to mention it but Matt blogged a screenshot of his notification so it piqued my interest and curiosity.
I decided to look up what WordPress.com looked like back then, and it was a very simple message. There was no way to sign up. Nothing to hint at what it would eventually become. It wasn’t until later in the month when a registration form was added.
I took a quick look at what I was blogging about in July 2005. Wow, I used to post a lot didn’t I? See how easy it is to dive back into history? Try do that with Twitter and Facebook!
On the 26th I did blog about WordPress.com inviting people to sign up. Four reactions only but Matt’s post has more comments on it.
I was concerned about the price of petrol in 2005. I paid €1.05/lt on July 27th and Tesco announced they were going to increase prices to €1.20/lt. It hasn’t been that price in the last decade but it did hit a low point during the recent lockdown. I’ve been tracking fuel prices since around 2010 so I should make a blog post about that sometime. One thing it does reveal is working from home saves fuel. We refill the car once every 2 weeks usually.
Just last week I installed OpenRCT2 so I’m glad Youtube showed me this fabulous roller coaster synchronised with Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody!
From today people in Ireland (south of the border) can go up to 5km from home to exercise. The over 70s who have been cocooning at home are allowed out but warned to stay well away from anyone else.
How far is 5km? Go visit this site and allow it to use your location to find out!
On Friday it was announced the country would have five phases to go through towards opening up:
Find a PDF of it here.
Meanwhile G O’D and her cronies are back in the High Court protesting the lockdown.
The Phoenix Park, a huge park in Dublin, had to be closed because of a protest against the lockdown.
I guess they’re not as bad as the Right in the USA. At least they don’t have access to weapons in Ireland.
There are plans to pedestrianise streets and make one-way footpaths in Cork.
Pub owners want to open sooner than August. How the hell will drunk people socially distance?
During the Irish Famine in the 1840s the Choctaw tribe in North America sent money to help feed starving people in Ireland.
The Navajo Nation is now looking for help and Irish people are putting their hands in their pockets and reaching out!
Do you remember the ILOVEYOU virus? I do and 20 years ago it infected 45 million computers and it originated somewhere surprising. Geoff White tells all!
Are you distracted? Of course you are. Me too. Go listen to the latest Distributed podcast. Matt interviews neuroscientist Dr. Adam Gazzaley and it is well worth a listen.
I went for a cycle the other night and for some reason Sophie Ellis Bextor’s “Stay At Home” was running through my brain the whole time. Probably the sight of Garda checkpoints. Good to see them.
We’re all locked down. Blarney Photography Club can’t meet any more but tonight we had a great presentation by Zoom. I thought it worked really well!
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