Her Most Regal Majesty, the Queen of Snark

I am considering selling my Nook Simple Touch eReader (which is in excellent condition and less than 4 months old) to fund the purchase of one with a backlight. Would anyone in Oxford be interested in purchasing for it for £25? Will deliver to a mutually convenient location within the ring road.

As previously announced I will be holding a birthday party at my place on Sat 10th Aug. There will be a BBQ which will start at 6, but people are welcome from 5. Hope to see people there. If someone knows me, they're welcome to come. Partners welcome too.

Contact details should be accessible from a link at the top of my LJ to people who know me. If you need them, you can email me at sesquipedality@gmail.com.

It occurs to me that me continuing enjoyment of Young Adult literature well into adulthood (and arguably senility) is because it's a rare market segment where women getting to have an adventure is totally accepted and normal.

Costa coffee have possibly the worst loyalty card system of all the coffee shops. You get 5p worth of store credit back for each £1 you spend, so essentially 1 free coffee for each 20 or so cups that you buy, which is about twice the number required by anyone else. Admittedly you can spend the credit on anything, but it's still not that great. However, they recently started selling their coffee for home Tassimo machines, and as a promotion offered me a machine which retails at £120 (market price £80-£100) for £30.

I've never been a huge fan of the idea of pod coffee machines. The pods vary between 20p each for standard coffee, to 65p for a latte, so they are pretty pricey. Last year, my second Gaggia espresso machine died and I can't afford to replace it, so regarded as a mechanism for cutting down my coffee shop spend, even at 65p a cup, the £30 cost of entry suddenly made the whole thing a lot more appealing.

The best thing about the Tassimo is that it's the easiest, cleanest coffee machine I've ever owned. You put the pod in, press the button, and you're done. The least good thing about it is that you're stuck with whatever pods Kraft feel like producing, and it's a closed system, so there's no competition on price. Buy the T-Discs from Amazon or the local Tescos, you will pay the same for them. While there are a number of latte style drinks provided, they use Kraft's UHT condensed creamer, which, although pretty acceptable for that sort of thing, is only available with sugar, and, well, still isn't as nice as ordinary milk. I can heat milk in the microwave, but none of the local stores sell a stand alone "espresso" pod, which makes life difficult (at least for first world values of difficult).

Here comes the nerdery. I just wanted to write this down somewhere before I forgot it. If you do not care about Tassimo coffee machines and how to hack them to get around some annoying restrictions, then you won't be interested in the rest of this post.

The interesting thing about Tassimo is that the brew program is dictated by bar codes printed on the top of the pods. There is a bar code reader inside the machine, which translates the bar code into temperature and pressure settings. It's all documented at http://blog.chapmanconsulting.ca/wiki/Tassimo%20Hacking.ashx.

I have a label printer (a brother QL-560LE) which prints sticky labels, and can print bar codes on it. Sure enough, a little experimentation shows that the bar codes on the pods are I-2/5 standard with a checksum bit, and that setting the printer software to generate them at medium size with a 2:1 aspect ratio produces a 34mm wide bar code, which appears to be the right width and can be read by the Tassimo machine.


Armed with this knowledge, I was able to scan the lid of a Costa Cappuccino coffee cartridge (i.e. one designed to produce espresso style coffee to be mixed with the creamer) using my phone. The code for this cartridge is 063050. The label printer was very happy to produce a 60mm odd high (the width of the printer) sticker with this bar code on (and a small text label to say which bar code it is). This can then be trimmed with scissors and stuck on to any cartridge. Sure enough I can now brew "espresso" using any base coffee cartridge, and make it into latte with the use of microwaved milk. It tastes, if not as good as the best cup of coffee I've made with an espresso machine, far far better than the worst one.

(The file for the P-Touch labeling software can be found here.)

Well, I have finished The Walking Dead. Like Shaun of the Dead it succeeds because it decides to use zombies to tell a story about human beings, which is pretty much the only way I can end up not being bored to (un)death by zombies. It's a good story, but I question all those "game of the year" awards. It's more of a choose your own adventure film than a game, really. It's worthwhile without a doubt, but I'm not sure I'd say it does anything particularly innovative and interesting with interaction.

The one thing I did like game wise is the way that the save system is set up to encourage you to live with your mistakes. If you don't manage to do something in time, then it's hard to go back and do it again, and I felt this did add to the storytelling, making the protagonist into a flawed hero quite nicely. What was less good was that when I screwed up, it was usually due to issues with the rather clumsy controls, or the standard "no, I meant be sarcastically reassuring, not berate the guy like a total dick" dialogue dilemmas.

PS Quick time events are pretty lame in FPSes. I'm not sure Telltale is doing anyone any favours by infecting (do you see what I did there?) the adventure game genre with them.

In recent years, I have discovered that my vestigial sense of (spiritual) faith has atrophied to the point where I can no longer be said to believe in any deity. I have always felt uncomfortable with the terms agnostic and atheist, and have therefore tended, when necessary, to self-describe as humanist. Today I had a conversation in which I kind of straightened out some thoughts I have about religion, and I thought they might be worth sharing.

( Mumblings about religion. )

I have been fairly vocal about my dislike of the Veronica Mars movie kickstarter, and I did promise DanielWhoseLJNameIHaveForgotten that I would explain quite why I disliked it so much. I'm not sure I can articulate it very clearly, but basically it goes against what I regard as the current spirit of the kickstarter model - communities of like minded individuals forming together to get something done that would be hard to make happen within conventional models.

The problem with Veronica Mars is that it's simply selling a commodity. It's clear that the backers have no real ownership of the project. (Also true of many other kickstarters, but I prefer at least society to benefit from a kickstarter, even if I don't.) It is priced at the same level as a full retail release, despite the lower costs of marketing through Kickstarter. It was originally available only in the US, and is still unavailable in most countries in the world although this has got better throughout the campaign. This to me betrays the global nature of the Internet and attempts to enforce an outdated business model onto an international medium. It also sells "extra" and bit parts in the movie, thus taking work from struggling artists. Rewards are delivered electronically as DRM protected streams, so buyers have no guarantee they will not disappear when the film is no longer profitable. All this is going towards creating a slick safe conventional piece of Holywood product that it should be possible to make entirely within the conventional system.

Contrast this with Alex Cox's "Bill the Galactic Hero" Kickstarter. The pricing model is similarly excessive, but at least for your $25 you get a DRM free MOV file of the film to keep. He is making a black and white film of a minor 60s SF classic with a message that genuinely does deserve wider modern attention. He's shooting for $100000, which is a ridiculously small budget for a modern movie, shooting on analogue film, and relying on obsolete model shots for special effects. Holywood have no interest in this project and never will. The actors, while unpaid, are at least receiving a share of the profits, and are, like pretty much everyone else in the project, giving their time for love. And he has committed to editing the whole thing in an Open Source movie editing tool.

So the difference boils down to this - Cox is using Kickstarter to create niche art that would be impossible to fund within the conventional movie industry by connecting directly with the people who want that. Rob Thomas, by contrast, is taking pre-orders. The Veronica Mars film may well end up being enjoyable, but it is by and large business as usual. Alex Cox is also doing what he's done for most of his career - making movies despite the system, while pushing open technology and consumer friendly distribution. Kickstarter is a way for him to do that that cuts out the inefficient brokerage of the 20th Century studio model, and this is the kind of Kickstarter I really enjoy and am glad to fund.

Bill the Galactic Hero Kickstarter

So, I have finished Bioshock Infinite. I shall not spoiler it. However, the people who truly had their minds blown by the ending simply don't read enough SF - it's all fairly standard tropes, albeit in a very well presented package. Also, it dicks with the 4th wall in exactly the opposite way to Bioshock, which I thought was kind of cute.

I did not anticipate the final twist, but I feel this was largely due to an Agatha Christiesque withholding of the crucial information necessary to piece it together properly.

Had an utterly fab time at King's Musketeers this weekend, of which there may be more froth later.  However, it was pointed out to me that some found my performance surprising as I "always" play evil.  I was in a sort of retrospective mode, as this is the tenth anniversary of my first UK freeforms weekender, so I went back to work out if this was indeed the case.



I think what this tells me is that my evil characters are way more memorable than my good ones.  My favourites are probably (in chronological order) Greta Savos, Cassandra, Maud Gonne, Suzanne de Batz-Castelmore, which suggests I have no particular preference for good over evil.

Thoughts appreciated, particularly if you've played in these games.

My letting agents inspect 4 times a year, which seems excessive to me.  I have made my peace with this, as it forces me to tidy the place, which is a Good Thing.  Which is what I spent yesterday doing.  The inspection today took approximately 10 seconds - may have been as long as 15.  I don't really have an issue with this - I'm tidying for me, not for them - but it does make me curious as to the purpose of the inspections.  Is it to check I've not installed a fireman's pole or demolished a wall?  It's hard to see that anything less obvious than that would be picked up by it.

I conclude that the most likely reason for the inspections is to ensure that the property is thoroughly cleaned 4 times a year.