RTÉ's 2013 Line Up

Things to look forward to on RTÉ in the New Year....

• The Angelus will now be on 6 times a day and will run for 5 minutes each time. RTE top brass had this to say on the decision: "It's cheap as shit, and fills out 30 minutes we don't have to find something else for." A three hour omnibus edition will appear on Sunday afternoons on RTE 2, for those that missed any during the week.

• There will be no more episodes of "Reeling in the Years". Instead an "advanced automated system" has been put in place where nuggets of classic Irish television will be delivered, automagically, without need of human editing. It is promised to be nothing less than a New World Order of television programming technology, and will be sold to every television station across the globe! RTE insiders this is actually just reruns of old TV series like: CheckUp, The Pure Drop, Head2Toe, Glenroe, and Garda Patrol.

• The Liveline will get a facelift. Not the program, you understand, but Joe Duffy himself, who will have a minor nip/tuck operation done, which will be paid for from RTÉ's "emergency slush fund". "It's important to look well, when you're in the media", the radio host has said. He made no comment when asked if part of the plastic surgery was to give more sides of his mouth to speak out of.

• RTE news programming will be dropped, and live feeds from CNN and SkyNews will be played in their place. "It makes sense" the head of RTE news has said. "We were just reading out their scripts anyway. We might as well let them do the whole thing."

• Ryan Tubridy is set to leave RTÉ for foreign shores in the new year. He doesn't know it yet, but RTÉ have promised to get rid of him somehow.

RTE test promo footage...

• In fit of desperation for ratings, RTÉ is to bring back the daily "Afternoon Show", but with a new "exotic" female presenter and radical change in direction for the show. Dáthí Ó Sé, who will still be the male host, had this to say on the matter: "Bhuel, fuck me! Wha! Lovely shtuff! Haven't a clue what she's shayin' but shure, I've gotten away that for years. She's got shome child barin' build on her too, tis all I'll shay about the cailín. Mighty shtuff."

• After 20+ years, Fair City is to come to an end. RTE are unwilling to divulge too much of the plot line but they have said that the end will be an extravaganza of blood and bullets, with "no survivors"... Exclusive synopsis: Bob Charles finds himself living on the street once again, and HIV positive after a nocturnal encounter with Jo Fahey. He's on his way to the river when he spots a hidden haul of assault rifles that Zumo Bishop has been importing for the Carrigstown mafia. He arms himself and heads back into Carrigstown. Hilarity ensues!

• In the 4th quarter of the year, RTÉ have said that they will admit defeat and turn off all media transmissions. Staff will be given bricks and mortar to help entomb themselves in RTÉ's main building, where they will remain until the Sun aligns itself with Andromeda in the 23rd millennium, and great G Ryan, the Omnipotent, returns to enslave mankind.... that or when Irish debt is paid back, whichever is sooner. 

Crap from Twitter - 2012

Some things that I put up on Twitter over the past year- I'd like to say they are hidden treasures, but I'd be lying.


The Daily Mail said poor Mark Hamill was disgraceful looking, so I fixed him... [ https://twitter.com/Ygoblin/status/224441840777166849 ]

Here's a quick one for Alan Shatter. I really should have spent more time on it, considering I dont have a life #fgaf12 twitter.com/Ygoblin/status…
— Gammagoblin (@Ygoblin) March 31, 2012

Every parish should have a cardboard Pope. flickr.com/photos/catholi…
— Gammagoblin (@Ygoblin) April 30, 2012

Vintage cat is wary of two creepy children flickr.com/photos/swapato…
— Gammagoblin (@Ygoblin) July 16, 2012

The tweet associated with that Obama gif has seemingly vanished... I'm still waiting for my archive of tweets, which were promised by the Twitter co. to be ready before 2013. They have a few hours to go before I can call them liars.

Giselle: Act II (Cork - 2011) - Time-Lapse

Cork City Ballet 2011 - Hi-Res ( > 1080p)

[via]

Pi Grass: More Pi Processing

Click for larger...

One night in November, as I was drifting off to sleep, an image and thought came to mind. Inspired no doubt from mild hypnagogia, I saw a strip of grass, with each blade's height dictated by the numbers of Pi. Don't worry, I've not gone totally down the rabbit hole. Pi was just good number set to represent natural randomness.

So I woke myself up and started programming, and within a short amount of time I created the the "grass" image above in Processing [processing.org] using Pi as input. I was quite pleased with it, it looks pretty much like what I imagined. Kind of computery looking.


Click for larger...

Not happy with grass colours, I continued on, changing colours and other attributes.


Click for larger...

This is what I love about Processing. It's easy and quick to get ideas coded up. I'm hoping to really get into it in 2013. Processing doesn't seem to like 64bit WIndows8 all that much though. It works but crashes a lot. I'm sure I'll eventually get it sorted out, and if not, I'll just keep using it in Linux.

Best Video of 2012

This might be a snap judgement, given that I only came across it today and today is the last day of the year, but I feel it has all the qualities deserving of the grand prize.

It was either that or the Orphic Oxtra video, and I've played that to death. Since I can't resist a bit of Scandi-Balkan music, I'll stick it in anyway, and a live performance of "Kebab Diskó", from their current album of the same name [gogoyoko.com].

New Motherboard

Slow-sync flash.. for the arts!

For the past week, I have been going on about about how Daddy Christmas sent me down a big "Meccano set" to bolt together, in essence: a Gigabyte GA-F2A85X-UP4 motherboard [gigabyte.com] and AMD A10 5800K APU [amd.com]. I won't bother to review either because there are plenty of sites out there with reviews that actually know what they're talking about. I will just agree with what the general consensus is about the A10: not the best CPU in the world, not the best GPU in the world, not the most low-power microprocessor in the world, but probably the best jack-of-all-trades chip currently out there.

It's a step-up from what I was running before: a 7 year old Pentium D. While it wasn't always struggling to get the job done, it was in danger of burning the house down during the Summer months.

And now some thermal images, just because I could. On the left, an image when the machine is off but with the motherboard still drawing power, and on the right, the A10's 4-cores at "full load" ("full load" defined as: two 1080p videos playing and WinRar compressing some treasures).



The hottest parts were the power distribution unit, and the thingies and capacitors around the APU.



At the moment the exhaust temperature is 22 degrees, the old pentium D would be 6 or 7 degrees hotter. The room is noticeably chillier, so the new machine does have it's disadvantages I guess.

Upgrade to 64bit Windows8, from 32bit Dell OEM Windows XP

Part of Christmas this year was upgrading to Windows8: "the first operating system I've ever paid for" (well, paid separately for, at least). It turned out to be quite painless in the end but preparing for it had a lot of concerns to be overcome. I'll give a run down of what I think of the O/S in a later post, but for now, I thought it might be useful to explain I did, in case any other poor soul finds themselves in the same situation.

Dell use a special universal licence key for all Windows installations, which is tied to the BIOS found on their motherboards. Windows licencing was done this way as it made mass distribution much easier. For legal reasons, they have to supply each Windows PC with an individual OEM key, even if it is never needed by the user when re-installing Windows. This is the key you will use to upgrade to Windows8, if you are also upgrading your computer's hardware (motherboard), like I was.

• First, I had to build a slip-streamed version of Windows XP SP3 [nliteos.com], from the Windows XP I had already installed on my computer. I had to do this because the original Windows XP installation disc couldn't make sense of the modern components on my new motherboard and it would "blue screen" during installation.

• I then downloaded and installed the 64bit 90 day trial version of Windows8 from the Microsoft website [microsoft.comx].

• I used this trial OS to purchase and download the Windows8 update [microsoft.com]. I had to set the "Update Assistant" exe to "Windows XP" comparability mode, to stop it thinking I already had Windows8. It's important to use this O/S to download the installation files, as it will recognise you are running 64bit O/S and download the 64bit setup files.

• Once it was done downloading, I only got two options, "install now" and "install later". This was no good to me as I wanted to create a bootable medium. I discovered that if went to download the setup files again, it recognises that I already had them but then gave you the option to "create bootable media."

• I chose "create iso", it did it's thing and turned out an ISO file, and I burned that to a dvd-r.

• I then installed Windows XP (from the slipstream disc I earlier created) on my new machine and registered it using the licence key printed on the side of my old Dell computer.

• Immediately after XP was installed, I booted from the Windows8 disc I created, to install it. It's important that you don't delete XP or format the drive as Windows8 will look for licencing information during install time. The Windows8 installation was painless, and all I had to concern myself with was getting the licence key (that I received when I purchasing Windows8) correctly typed out.

When it's finished, you should find yourself the owner of a 64bit Windows8 O/S, upgraded from a 32bit version of Windows XP.

Motion Tracking Ballet Belly Dancing

The title of this post is a mouthful, but it really sums up what this is all about. A collection of video clips I made while experimenting with a plugin [flaXen's Advanced Stabilizer v2.1b] for VirtualDUB [virtualdub.org]. I didn't come up with anything profound but it seemed a shame just to delete the footage. Youtube has really obliterated the detail in the videos, which look quite memorising in their uncompressed form, but you still get the idea.



The source video material is from a DVD titled "Ballet for Belly Dancers" with a dancer known as Brianna. It's actually quite a nice production, blending ballet positions into belly dance routines, an idea of that will either make you scream, or pique your interest. If I had one criticism about the DVD, it's that things only really get going near the end, when the routines become a bit more complex, but as a training video, it's perfectly fine.
More information and purchasing details [cheekygirlsproductions.com]

Bullshit About Gunz

I should be writing about Santa Claus, jingle bells, and sexy carol singers, but here I am, typing away about firearms instead. All because some people refuse to educate themselves on the matter.

Pictured above, is a Sturmgewehr 44 (Storm Rifle 44), a German WW2 weapon that appeared on the battlefield late in the war. It is recognised as the world's very first "Assault Rifle" [wiki] and it was named as such by none other than Adolf Hitler himself. Hitler initially didn't like the idea of a gun that could act as both a rifle and machine gun, feeling that automatic-fire was too crude for a skilled rifleman, but he eventually gave the go ahead for mass production. Tragically, for the German troops, it was too late in the war for it to make any difference for them. Still, the firearm spawned a whole new genre of weapon that now dominates in all sorts of conflict zones (even in Syria today, insurgents can be seen using Sturmgewehrs, a testament to their lasting usability). In case it wasn't obvious from the Hitler anecdote above, the crucial factor in deciding what constitutes an "Assault Rifle" is the ability to switch between semi-auto, and fully automatic firing modes. This is important. If you dismiss everything else from this post, trust me on this definition.

In the wake of the James Holmes massacre, every gun-nut came out of the woodwork. I say gun-nut, and gun-nut usually means some American NRA member who masturbates with gun oil, but instead I mean the other type of gun-nut. The gun-nut that always manages to replace intelligence with irrational arsehole emotion. The freaks who get palpitations at the sight of a man carrying two lengths of copper pipe, coming out of a plumbing store. These gun-nuts usually make themselves apparent by the disproportional ratio of fear-mongering to gun-knowledge, coming out with with nonsense like: "Pump action Ak47s".

And now we have another tragic mass-killing in America, where some unhappy teen, who probably felt their life was ruined because [insert your own trivial reason here], has gone on a rampage in a school killing 20 children. And yes, of course. The gun-nuts are out in force again.

"ASSAULT RIFLES!!!1! HE WAS USING ASSAULT RIFLES" the moron millions scream. Michael Moore tweeted about how the gun could fire "30 rounds a pop". Sure Michael, 30 a "pop", whatever the hell that means. Just like with the James Holmes incident, and even the Anders Breivik case, the rifle used in this crime was NOT an "assault rifle", it was a semi-automatic rifle. What causes confusion with the simpleton commentators and untalented journos, is the fact that the weapons used have a similar look (black stock, tactical rail) to their assault rifle cousins. But if looking like an assault rifle makes it an assault rifle, then millions of assault rifles are available for toy-stores around the world. Indeed, this fact that we encourage children [boys] play with toy guns brings up an important aspect: gun culture and the cult of the gun.

It never fails to surprise me that those most vocal about banning guns are the same "liberals" who get enraged by any notion of censorship. "No way man, computer games don't make no one go mad, man". "I fuckin love seeing da kidz getting shot-up on the big screen". They see it as being unfair that it's their "hobby" and not someone elses, that is brought into the firing line. Whether there is any merit in mentioning violent games and films when discussing mass-killings, there is a troubling reality that cultural fantasy seems to play a big part in these actions. When Anders Breivik bought his Mini 14 semi-auto rifle, he did so because, as he said in his own words: "It is the most 'army like' rifle allowed in Norway". Given the amount of photos of him posing with his weapons, it's clear that image was important to Breivik, killing wasn't good enough, he had to look the part. The same goes for a lot of these modern killers, including James Holmes, who was dressed from head to toe in black body armour, more for fashion than function.

After the recent incident in the Sandy Hook school, US' President Obama went on to give a speech filled with stilted tears. What an atrocious move. It was the cherry on the cake of the increasing sensationalising of mass killers. The media just can't seem to ejaculate enough coverage of these incidents. They are doing their best to turn murderers into infamous anti-heroes. On one channel you have meek and unhappy teens being giving three X's by the judges on the X Factor, never to be heard of again, but on the next channel, you have wall-to-wall coverage of the latest gun-killer. Pictures and details, all up there; the persons entire life, for everyone to see. And now, not only will mass-murder make you famous, reaching the entire world, but you can also directly affect the President of America. A really ill thought move by the president, more so, if the tears were actually just theatrics.

I have always thought that American gun laws are crazy. Keep gun ownership legal, if you like, but selling them over-the-counter like power tools just doesn't make for a "safer America". Americans can scream back and forth about the semantics of the Second Amendment, but guns will never be used to "take back the country". That notion is as dead as Washington himself. If owning a gun makes you think that you are "free" then god help you. You better pack an extra few tins of beans in you prepper' bag, cos freedom's going to be gone for a while. Any future "tough" gun laws must not include "Grandfathering" of existing guns. If you're going to introduce laws, do it right. Anything else is just optics, and will fail like the laws of the past.

No one should be surprised that people kill people. Murder is natural for humans. I just wonder about all these recent cases though. It's as if something has changed, or something more is going on. That's why I think it's more important that we root out the real cause of all this "nu" violence, and not just go around putting up a façade of fixing the problem by simply taking away an object that facilitates murder. Harold Shipman didn't need a gun to kill over 250 people, nor will the future "xFactor" mass-killer. Removing guns is damage limitation, not damage prevention. Don't dress it up as such.

And as They Wallowed Amidst the Remains, a Vision did Upon Them Come

Watching You, Watching Me

[compiled from various places on the internet, over the past 12 months]

End of the World: Civil Defence / Гражданская оборона

Very dramatic!

Boom! It's the end of the world! etc. "The four Mayans of the apocalypse are coming!" etc. If there is one thing we can learn from today, it's that the word is "Maya" not "Mayans". The day isn't over yet, so I'm still clutching my iodine tablets [gammagoblin] just in case!

It's been a bit of a damp squib, hasn't it. Israel didn't even ramp up talk of Iranian nuclear weapons, in honour of the day that's in it. Very disappointing. If we were still [officially] in the Cold War however, we'd be full with talk of the Doomsday devices that every side side had built. So with that in mind, let's have a quick look at two "Civil Defense" guides of the era.



Britain produced a Civil Defence guide ("Protect and Survive") which was filled with nice line drawings describing how to organise your surrounds, in the event of a nuclear attack. It was a minimal style, printed with just a few colours, and was similar to the safety leaflets seen in airplanes [archive.org].


"Mine is the last voice that you will ever hear..."

The Soviet equivalent "Гражданская оборона" was much more colourful and extensive in information given, although perhaps not designed to be as deployed as widely as Protect and Survive.


How America will deploy their nuclear weapons. Note the Space Shuttle. 

High resolution scans of this can be found at [bunker-datacenter.com], a former Soviet bunker located in Ukraine, now turned into a commercial data center. Apparently, it's run by women who walk about with their tops left open. The live webcam feed only ever shows fully clothed men however. Very strange...

Youtube Favourite Videos

A few weeks ago, I passed the 1000 favourite videos mark, on my Youtube account. I had decided I was going to start backing up videos when I reached that number, as videos tend to disappear quickly from Youtube, but due to laziness (and I guess, legal reasons) I never bothered.

I like looking back through my favourite videos from time to time. Often a favourite video is just something I "bookmarked" to watch at a later point, and it got left in there. Most are videos I do actually like however. The video above is my very first "favourite video", which was over 4 years ago now. I still like the humorous "it's a tarp" shock value, and it's proof that you should sometimes watch a video to it's end.

50 Cal

Without comment...

War on RSS

Adam Curry holds-up a poster advocating the use of RSS - October 2011 [flickr]

RSS is dying. I'm not sure if I'm being hyperbolic. RSS once triumphed as the great liberator of content, but it is now slowly being replaced. The likes of Google and Facebook insist that they know what you like, more than even you do, and they will deliver it up for you automagically. The wicked days of  PUSH* seem to be upon us once again.

It's a terrible reality that most internet users don't seem to know what RSS is or what it can be used for. I still see a lot of traffic here from people typing in the URL stem, and I get the odd comment like: "I keep forgetting to visit". I have a big RSS subscribe button there over on the right but I wonder if some people think it's some kind of cult that I'm trying to indoctrinate them into. Ordinarily I would have recommended that people check it out and use the feed in an RSS reader of their choice, but I can't even do that now because there are too many doubts about the future of Feedburner, and whether Google is going to give it the chop. And there are fresh concerns over the faith of the Google "Reader" service too [google+]. I have had to diversify my blog's propagation methods, and the one thing I hate doing is self-promotion. It's like extracting teeth, in the nude.

Twitter have effectively killed off all RSS feeds to their service, and the ones that remain are hidden away. Facebook had RSS feeds for about 30 seconds, while Mark Zuckerberg had his back turned. Google has yet to do anything RSS related with Google+ and it seems unlikely that they ever will. It's all about control. He who controls the information, controls the world. Why let a user extract a stream of data when you can force them to use your product, and shape it however you like. Backwards internet; we have all gone back in time.

I recently blogged [google+] that I find myself viewing some RSS feeds in real time, like a Twitter stream, and discard what I've missed. This is something I've had to do because I've subscribed to almighty feeds of content; hundreds of daily entries. Saying that I now view some feeds like like Twitter or Google+ or other "timeline" services isn't a negative; it's another feature of RSS, you can view it how you like. Try keeping track of important content delivered via Twitter. You'll get whatever is trending, but the rest is lost, be it good, bad or indifferent.

So here is the current situation with subscribing to a feed here. You can go with the Feedburner RSS feed: Blogger has it's own integrated feed if Feedburner goes offline. Existing subscribers won't know of the change of course, but I can switch over to that if I have to.

 http://feeds.feedburner.com/RiemannsCut

As Blogger is so well integrated with Google+, I've set up a Google+ Page which gets updated whenever I publish a post here. I've deliberately kept this separate from my main Google+ feed.

 https://plus.google.com/u/0/112163286777452742450/posts

And be sure to read up on RSS and other internet syndication protocols [wiki] and check out Google Reader before they pull the plug on it [google.com/reader].

* the mechanics of PUSH are still in use today but back in the 1990's some people believed that a new paradigm of internet use was going to take over, and the internet browser as we knew it would cease to exist. It was contemplated that PUSH clients would catch on, and internet consumption would be more like television rather than the web browsing which we are familiar with today. You would select what your interests were and content would be pushed to your desktop. No browsing around for stuff. Horrific, and yet, here we are again.

A copy of "Delivering PUSH" (1998 edition), by Ethan Cerami, is held deep within the Gammagoblin library of legacy and archaic, computer technology books.

The Wrong Germany Won

Heil Honecker! "Vorwärts immer, rückwärts nimmer!" Und immer twirling, twirling, twirling towards freiheit! Entschuldigung, mein Dachboden ist schwanger mit Stasi.

Skulls, Brains, Benders

There's been a few "skull" posts on here over the past year. I don't have a fascination with them or anything, but they are fascinating. It's that type of double-talk that keeps people on their toes around me. It must be how people feel around that Swedish woman, who went on trial for "inappropriate behaviour" with human bones [thelocal.se].

The skull keeps you in your place, literally. A little exercise you can do to reaffirm your place in the universe (and this isn't some sort of Oprah "The Secret" shit here) is to place a hand on either-side of your head and realise that you, your being, your person, is right there between your hands. You are no more than that small-football sized thing. Everything else is just monkey limbs, flailing around the place.

Anyway, this isn't what I wanted to talk about at all; no sir. What I wanted to mention is a person, whom I only heard of once, many years ago, but I managed to keep his name in my skull. A man named Frank Bender [wiki].

Bender was a forensic artist who worked for the Philadelphia police force, reconstructing faces from unidentified skulls. I say was because, as I discovered when researching this blog post, he passed-away last year [dianedimond.net]. I can't recall the exact year I first heard of him, but it was sometime in the early 1990's. I also can't recall where I heard it. I know it was on some American tv show, but I can't remember where I watched it. For some reason I feel as if I watched it in a barbers, waiting for a haircut, but this could be just my brain having a shit-attack. It's not important anyway.

What fascinated me about the man and his work, was his ability to reconstruct the face, imposing features and characteristics that didn't just revolve around measuring the metrics of the skull. He would often correctly identify hair and eye colour based on some intangible sense he had. He also made astute choices, based on his own deductions, such as the case of John List, where Bender's choice of glasses (which he felt suited the man) led to List's arrest [wiki]. The case that really stuck in my mind though was the face of a young African-American woman, Rosella Atkins, that he reconstructed in the mid 1980's. Her family would go on to say that while her face wasn't very similar, it was the expression and skyward stare that was unmistakably Rosella [trutv.com].

The reason I remember his name is all down to his surname: Bender. It must have been around the time that the Tom Hanks film, "Philadelphia" was showing in cinemas, as it was the notion of a "Bender in Philadelphia" that turned out to be my mnemonic. Yes, well, not very PC, that's how I remembered it. What sparked off this reflection on Bender, was reading the article contained in an earlier post, about an artist making a 3D print of his own skull, from an CaT scan [gg].

I think it's interesting that I started off this post by saying everything you are is within your skull, and then went on to talk about Frank Bender tapping into the ether of the great unknown, to magically include features he couldn't possibly know. Anyway, that was a little story for you, do what you like with it.

Human Rights Day in North Korea

That great bastion of human rights, the Democratic Peoples Republic of Korea, is celebrating international Human Rights Day. As with a lot of things, they use it as an opportunity to take a pot-shot at America. I'm posting this because the announcer speaks an absolute classic line, three minutes in:

"In January, a motion-picture showed the members of the US Marine Corps, in Afghanistan, pissing on dead Taliban soldier for fun, to the astonishment of the world people."

Pissing. Not urinating, or even peeing. Pissing. I like it. Refreshingly straight-talking. As refreshing as taking a piss in the desert.

Disney Derps

via [ unknown ]

Think Different

A quick chop. Inspired by Darran's [flavors.me/darran] comment on a shared Mike Elgan Google+ post [Google+]