Friday 26 December 2008

I pay my TV license

Therefore, I'll want to listen to 5 Live tomorrow lunch time, when I'm in France, but United play Stoke.

This is more a little for me, but could be useful for other expats :)

1. Create a Socks5 proxy:
ssh -D 9999 your.remote.host

2. Build the tsocks library

3. Create a tsocks.conf file:
server = 127.0.0.1
server_port = 9999
server_type = 5

4. Launch a (simple) player with proxy support:
TSOCKS_CONF_FILE=`pwd`/tsocks.conf LD_PRELOAD=`pwd`/libtsocks.so.1.8 mplayer -playlist http://www.bbc.co.uk/fivelive/live/live.asx

Voila. See also Bug 505456.

Tuesday 2 December 2008

Serves you right

On Friday evening, for the GNOME London beer do (version 2.0 apparently), we went past the offices for the Express, a paper as high as the Daily Mail on the puke-tastic scale of yobbish prejudice.

A couple of weeks ago (seems like months now), Jonathan Ross and Russell Brand played a prank on someone in a BBC Radio 2 show that very few people listen to in the first place: 2 complaints. In comes media circus, the Fleet St. buddies in pole, and there the number of complaints rises. My despair rises.

Grauniad blogger and journalist Charlie Brooker vents his screenburn frustration at that lot, and I shake my head every day at their covers. You'll soon know about the dead girl corner, and the «free shit» banner. Just don't read their website, an immigrant plumber might get onto your computer.