Apologies for the flash; after exams I hope to HTML5-ify this site.
A bit of off-the-cuff iPhone photography about the house. I decided to try (and procrastinate by) playing around with Aperture’s Monochrome Mixer. This is the first time I’ve ever done black and white, and there’s something not quite right about it. Alas, procrastination only allows me to go so far, and then it’s back to the books.
A few months ago, Cassie was playing around my room whilst I was trying to get some work done. I left her to her own devices, because I knew that after a short while, she’d settle down and just nap on the end of my bed. Indeed, after a while, she went quiet and out of the corner of my eye, I could see her on my bed. What I couldn’t see was the fact that she’d taken my alarm clock and decided to play with it. This was the result.
Cassie isn’t allowed on the ground floor, as we (pretty much permanently) have loads of building work going on. Whenever she hears the front door open, she likes to poke her head through the balcony bannister to take a look at who it is. In the top right of the photo is my dad, who has just come in and is on his way up the stairs to say hello back.
I frequently work in coffee shops, and if I happen to have forgotten to bring my Vodafone USB modem I use the free WiFi, which is run by BT Openzone. Now, I like to use OpenDNS, particularly when I’m not at home. It’s significanly faster than both the BT Openzone servers and the Vodafone ones, so it really does make a difference whilst browsing.
The only problem is that in order to login to BT Openzone, you have to visit the domains www.btopenzone.com and my.btopenzone.com which, if you’re connecting from a BT Openzone hotspot, have different A records compared to what everyone else thinks they resolve to. This is distributed through the nameservers they supply to you via DHCP when you connect to the wireless network. So connecting used to be a rigmarole of removing my custom nameservers, connecting, and then putting them back. This takes quite a while on a slow laptop (plus requires authentication three times). The solution to this turns out to be rather simple: just put the special A records in /etc/hosts. I’m unlikely to want to connect to those domains outside of their WiFi. To save you from having to query the DNS servers, here’s what you need to append to your hosts file:
192.168.23.21 www.btopenzone.com
192.168.23.22 my.btopenzone.com
Connection should be pretty seamless with OpenDNS servers permanently residing in /etc/resolv.conf.