Edinburgh Review

Travels

We’ve just spent the last few days up in Edinburgh – purportedly to go hot air ballooning but sadly the Scottish weather let us down. If you’re so inclined, some of the better pictures are up in the Gallery.

So therefore, I thought I’d do a little review of things to do and not to do in Edinburgh:

– Whisky Tour Skip straight past that bloody castle and the thousands of tourists and go and get sloshed. It’s worth paying for the extra tasting session in the bar at the end as well. Very informative, fun and most importantly, involves Scotch eau d’vie.

– Raj Restaurant on the Shore in Leith Avoid, avoid, avoid. Dreadful place which on the surface appears to be an excellent modern Indian; actually turns out to be an eye-watering backwater with surly, incompetent and forgetful staff.

– Smoke Stack (Broughton Street and also in Leith) Fab staff, quite meat centric but well worth a visit. Very high quality food at pretty reasonable prices.

– Sala gay cafe bar The tapas was excellent, cheap and the place was filled with pretty boyz. What more could you ask for?!

– Ardmor House hotel If you’re gonna stay anywhere, stay here. Small but well decorated, it’s in a quieter part of the city but only 15-20 minutes from Broughton Street and 30 to Princes Street. Breakfast is ace.

Superconductor fun

Tech

I bought a kit from wondermagnet.com that included a little slice of superconductor and a small gold plated Ne-Fe-B rare earth magnet. When you get the superconductor superconducting (by cooling it with liquid nitrogen) the magnet floats above it.
Watch and grin:
Download file
(Sorry about the quality by the way and the fact it’s in WMV format)

Die Polizei

Personal

Within an hour of me calling the police yesterday, two absolutely fabulous PCs came over to see me at work and took a statement from me. I felt really guilty – I would have gone and see them, but it transpires that homophobic abuse is taken exceptionally seriously (maybe as it should be these days) so they wanted to send people over.
Anywho, it’s now in the hands of a nice sounding DS and some clever people who are now investigating a case of mailicous communication. Quite how far they’ll get I’m not sure – I guess it does sort of depend on whether the ISP is able to furnish login details of the offending IP address.
More next week I expect…

A warm feeling inside

Tech

Noooooo! Not that!
No, this is even better – the satisfaction that comes with dealing with bandwidth leechers. These are the people who hotlink images from your site to their pages; mostly those who have avatars on bulletin boards and the like. Now, you can simply deny these people your images, saving you on bandwidth.
Of course, you could substitute the image the person’s posted for something rude – this doesn’t save your bandwidth (much) – but of course, this should be reserved for special people, especially right-wing cuntish kids in the USA who use you as examples of “homos what should be kiled” (sic).
So, two examples for all you apache & mod_rewrite users:
This will simply deny hotlinkers access to your images:

# Logging
RewriteLog /var/log/apache/rewrite.log
RewriteLogLevel 1
# Deny hotlinking
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !www\.yoursite\.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !google\. [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !search\?q=cache [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|bmp|BMP|png|PNG)$ – [F]

Remember to change yoursite to the URL of your own site, and the path to your log if you want to use that.
If you’re desired to change the image to something rude, do this:

# Fuck off little shit
RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} myspace\.com [NC]
RewriteRule .*\.(gif|GIF|jpg|JPG|bmp|BMP|png|PNG)$ http://www.mysite.com/cunt.gif [R,L]

Engrish

Food

Yesterday we bought some of these sweets from a Japanese store in Soho. They looked really nice, but taste absolutely awful and they look like little arses. So, all together, not a great purchase, but it’s the wording on the front that redeems them:
gummy.JPG

Who should I vote for?

Personal

Your expected outcome:
Liberal Democrat
Your actual outcome:

Labour 26
Conservative -51
Liberal Democrat 70
UK Independence Party -24
Green 29

You should vote: Liberal Democrat

The LibDems take a strong stand against tax cuts and a strong one in favour of public services: they would make long-term residential care for the elderly free across the UK, and scrap university tuition fees. They are in favour of a ban on smoking in public places, but would relax laws on cannabis. They propose to change vehicle taxation to be based on usage rather than ownership.

Take the test at Who Should You Vote For