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Toby Inkster

Seaford Trip

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It was a sunny day today, so we took the train to nearby Seaford. The pictures are, clockwise from the largest photo, and with links to larger images: Seaford Head View towards Newhaven Seagulls on Seaford beach Crouch Gardens

Social Spam

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I've recently started receiving the occasional piece of junk mail from friends and colleages who have e-mail accounts at some of the larger webmail services (Hotmail, GMail, etc). The messages genuinely seem to come from their accounts, with proper message headers indicating that they were really sent via the webmail service, and sent to everyone … Continued

Fennel, Sausage and Bean Casserole

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This recipe is ideally made with plain pork sausages, or pork & leek. Try to avoid overly seasoned sausages. If peeling the tomatoes is too much bother, using half a tin of tomatoes would probably work fine. Ingredients 4 Sausages 2 × 440g tins of cannellini beans, drained ¼—¾ bulb of fennel 4 medium tomatoes … Continued

CSS to HTML Compiler

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I’ve searched around the ‘Net for something like this before, but without success, so decided to write my own. The basic idea is this: there are certain circumstances in which you need to write some styled HTML without access to the document’s header. For example, when composing HTML-formatted e-mails, which may be displayed in a … Continued

Ham vs Bacon vs Pork

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Many people are unsure of the difference between pork, bacon and ham. Pork is, quite obviously, the meat taken from a pig. But where do bacon and ham come in? Mrs Beeton’s Everyday Cooking supplies the answer: Bacon is obtained from a side of pork from which the head and feet have been removed. The … Continued

Gnocchi all’Amatriciana al Forno

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This is a very easy Italian-style meal of my own creation, combining gnocchi with a simplified sugo all'amatriciana. If you prefer, macaroni or another small, cut pasta could be used in place of gnocchi. Ingredients 500g pack of gnocchi 400g tin of tomatoes 6 rashers of pancetta, or 4 rashers of unsmoked streaky bacon 1 … Continued

Privacy

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Els despairs about some high-profile privacy and data protection gaffs in 2007 and asks can we still get some privacy in 2008?. Her use of the word “get” rather than “retain” is very telling — it’s not just a matter of retaining our current level of privacy, but of trying to claw back what we’ve … Continued

GPS & Cameras

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We are now starting to see the arrival of GPS chips in cameras. Why? Well, so that photos can be tagged with their latitude and longitude. Then when you upload your photos to a computer, they can be plonked onto a map — nifty little trick, and I’m sure people will come up with plenty … Continued

NetSol Cybersquatting

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Over the last couple of days I’ve read a few stories about Network Solutions pulling a Site Finder by stealing unregistered domain names on which people have run a whois query. They wait for people to whois query a domain (commonly done as a first step to registering a domain — to check that nobody … Continued

Mushroom and Tarragon Stuffed Chicken

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Ingredients 2 skinless chicken breast fillets 4 large mushrooms 1 baby leek, finely sliced 75g ricotta or Philadelphia cream cheese 40g butter or margerine 20g dried porcini mushrooms small handful of tarragon, roughly chopped 4 cloves of smoked garlic, or 2 cloves of garlic, finely chopped or crushed 2 tbsp mushroom ketchup (optional) salt & … Continued

X-Blog-Name

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OK, so the Trackback specification includes the ability for a pinging page to specify its article title and blog name when it sends a trackback ping. However, these fields are optional. When not present, typically the recipient of the ping will then make an HTTP request back to the pinger to determine the article title … Continued

Recipes

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I spent a while the other day re-arranging the old recipes on this site and moving them into the “blog” bit rather than the “articles” bit. Hopefully they’ll now be a bit easier to find. Sorry for breaking their URLs.

New BBC Home Page

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So the BBC has redesigned its home page. OK, so normally I’m against the “let’s be a portal” philosophy, but for the Beeb, I think it works. They produce such a colossal volume of content — and in areas that make sense for a portal site (news, weather, sports, listings info) — that they can … Continued

Click, click, click…

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OK, so I was minding my own business, cleaning the stove and suddenly it starts making this regular clicking sound. Click, click, click, click, click… like a bomb or something. I remove the rings above the gas hobs and every time there’s a click, a little spark flies out from the igniter. So I think … Continued

dhyana.pl/0.3

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Here’s my latest update to dhyana.pl… Change Log Added a title to the output image, which can be in a different font and colour from the rest of the text. Use Getopt to parse command line, and accept more options. Improved handling of certain dodgy WMV files, mostly thanks to Matt Pinkham. Improved use of … Continued

Sharing Music with Apple iTunes

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OK, so a few weeks ago my old G3 iBook broke down. Yesterday I took delivery of a brand new (well, eBay-sourced, but new for me) G4 iBook and was about to start synching my music collection from my Linux desktop when it struck me that that’s just a dumb idea. I’ve got a 54 … Continued

Attention Spammers!

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I get probably about 10 to 20 spam comments left on this blog every day. However, nobody ever sees them because, firstly, the most obvious spams are automatically filtered out using content scanning and IP blacklists, and secondly, the remaining messages are checked by a human moderator (i.e. me) before they appear on the site. … Continued

It’ll be in the Last Place You Look

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Oops! The HMG (trading as Her Majesty’s Revenue & Customs) has misplaced the personal data of about 40% of the UK’s population, including 15 million children. There is “no evidence that it has fallen into the wrong hands”, but there is no evidence that it has not. This is the same government that plans for … Continued