Pretext

This article will pretty much be my opinion, thinly disgused as a subjective comparison between watching films and TV shows, either on DVD, or by downloading them via Bittorrent and the likes.

I am totally ignoring the legality of this comparison. I am only going to cover what should be the most important factor: Convenience for the viewer.

As part of my directory clean up I have reinstalled some of my old subdomains, but for the neverfear.org project!

wol.neverfear.org is a web based Wake-on-LAN client. Great for using your cell phone to wake up your computer. After a busy day at the office to save time, or perhaps you are being a Girl back and you have your computer set up to play mood music on wake ;-) (not so unrealistic, I've done these sorts of things!). Whatever you need it for, here it is.

paste.nulldigital.net is current under spam bot attack so I've disabled the paste list function, however still a nice little tool, mostly because when anything is pasted it signals our IRC bot to let people know!

Ok earlier on IRC a discussion about editing MSN ads to show a custom message for use punters at LAN parties. So basically heres how I did it, be kind its my first post.

Here's how I started

First I launched wireshark and started to capture packets then I loaded up MSN Messenger.

This is the second part of the catchily named Regex-for-people-who-should-know-regex-but-do-not guide. If you are unfamiliar with the basics of regular expression syntax, then I recommend you first read part 1, or any of the many regular expressions primers available online.

What follows is a repost of my first article on nulldigital.net, on the 10th of May 2006. A long time ago, when I was all innocent! Good times. The original article as been modified slightly as I sounded like such a git back then. I know it's slightly simple for this site but since nulldigital.net is closing I want to repost the articles from there to neverfear.org. So lets get started..

Regular expressions are very useful. If you have to deal with text at all, you will find them indispensable. In programming, they can be used to verify user input (e.g check an email is valid), sanitize input (make sure the user only used allowed characters), remove sections of the string (remove all non-alpha-numeric characters). And not just for programming! You can use regular expressions in many text editors to edit the current file. You can use them in the grep command to find very specific lines, or in the sed "stream editor" to edit out bits of a file..

There is a lot of news around about Anonymous lately. I can't say I've ever paid them much attention. I thought what they were doing was mildly amusing. I never expected it would actually have a real world impact.

I fear I underestimated them. Today, a Scientology protest, organised and credited to Anonymous has made the front page news of NEWS.com.au with this story titled Scientology protests start across Australia, which documents protests in Perth, Melbourne, Sydney and Adelaide.

This article is a brief tutorial in how to make your own ascii internet TV station. I say brief, its pretty simple - that's why its brief.

The inspiration for such an article comes from having a telnet link posted in a channel to a server which was showing a World Cup game live via ascii and sockets. I pasted this around to a couple other people and some folk didn't understand how it worked, so I wanted to share some knowledge.

Incase some of you aren't following me, the link I was shown was

Introduction

The scenario is you are without Internet connectivity anywhere. You have found either an open wireless access pointed or perhaps you're staying in a hotel which permits rented Internet via services like

Spectrum Interactive (previously known as UKExplorer). You make the connection, whether its physically connecting the Ethernet cables, or instructing you're wireless adapter to lock onto the radio signal. You are prompted with some sort of authorisation page when you open a browser. You don't have access to it, so what do you do?

Perian?

Perian, the Quicktime "all-in-one" codec pack, which allows Quicktime Player (And Quicktime based applications, including Front Row) to play various extra formats, including DivX/Xvid, .mkv etc etc.

The problem

One problem - well, more of an annoyance than a problem.. With version v1.0, it started being released as a Preference Pane icon - I never have to change it's settings, so it doesn't need to be in the preferences..