Neil Hopcroft

A digital misfit

Archive for March 2005

Those of a scientific bent might be interested in the Cambridge Science Festival (but you probably already know about it)… I’m wondering about: – Bending the Rules: Small is Different – How to be an Inventor – The Science of the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Neuropsychology and Conscious Vision – Victorian Steam Power […]

I woke up this morning to find a sticker saying “L4” on my chin, wondering if that was there while I was at the calling last night and everyone was too polite to say anything…?

Looks like this mornings soldering has paid off – I’ve now got what appears to be a functional PIC microprocessor programming board. Sure, this isn’t much of an acheivement for most people, but I haven’t soldered for ten years, I was surprised how easy it was….gotta install the software now and actually *do* some programming. […]

Plumbing heights

Today I was supposed to be staying in waiting for the plumber, then the courier taking away my broken graphics card. So I figured I’d catch up on some soldering I’d been meaning to do while they were wrenching apart my bathroom. Turns out the overflow isn’t a big deal, since its got an internal […]

Defecting

I just ordered a MiniMac… Edit: and I got to be “Dear Not specified Neil Hopcroft,” …you’d’ve thought they’d’ve learned after the “Not specified Richard Kettlewell” experience….

Mmmmm Pi

“And yes, the trojan will most likely also work under Linux, but it won’t do really anything there as it tries to download and execute Win32 EXE trojan.” Presumably it wouldn’t take much to run this under WINE, should the initial attempt to launch it failed. I wonder how much of a problem that could […]

“‘Tagging for terror’ under the new Prevention of Terrorism Act got off to an inauspicious start over the weekend, with one control order detainee left without money, food or phone for 17 hours, police being forced to break down the door of one flat, and detainees claiming to be baffled by what their control orders […]

Johnny was right when he said no future

Something I love about things like using jump leads – you get to experiment with some real inginuity, especially if the car you’re jumping is parked face first into a bush, there just isn’t enough engineering in this world, everything got too easy once it became software upgradable, we all got lazy.

Walking back across the Jane Coston Bridge (“A perfect location for protest banners”, but I didn’t tell you that) I caught sight of the vast expanse of roofs (rooves?) of my housing estate. Good god its ugly, a sea of red nothingness, just the same for what seems like miles. I feel ashamed to live […]