Technology, Books and Other Neat Stuff

It's hard to pin down ambient music.

There's the Eno axis, coming out of experimental modern music. Then there's the electronica axis, fuelled by the early synthesiser pioneers and reaching out around the dark side of the Moog. Some of the finniest practitioners of electronic ambience are Boards of Canada, with a liquid lyricism to their instrumental soundscapes that's hard to describe.

So here's something rather wonderful of theirs, the video to Dayvan Cowboy.



Part of it is film from one of the more audacious experiments of the space age, a freefall parachute jump from a balloon high in the stratosphere.

Thanks to Jim Burns over on Facebook for pointing this out!

There are a lot of web comics out there. My webcomics bookmarks, from Achewood to Yet Another Fantasy Gamer Comic, run longer than my screen on my desktop (let alone that of the bedside netbook I read most of my comics on)...

So I was very pleased to find the Darkgate Comic Slurper, which brings pretty much everything I read (and a lot I don't) into one configurable page. All you need to do is go through the site's comprehensive list, choose the comics you want to read, and they're all brought together in one place. All you need to do is scroll down. And if you read as many comics as a I do, that can be a long scroll. But it certainly beats click on each bookmark, one at a time.

One thing to note, as the Slurper is cookie based, suing a cookie to store your subscription information, subscriptions don't transfer between pages. That's of course if you read your comics in a browser (my preferred approach). There is an alternative route - once you've generated your comics list, all you need to do is generate a Comic Slurper RSS feed and subscribe to it in your favourite RSS client - and updates arrive as the comics update.

Definitely a Very Very Useful Site.

I used to be a sysadmin. One of that brave and dedicated crew that keep the Internet running, through thick and thin, the modern postman.

"Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds"

And I see that xkcd agrees...



Uptime...

My network may be smaller these days, but I still regularly check my router stats...



Looking good...