Forged Defiance

Alright, the title is a bit of a misnomer; this seagull was captured just above the waters of the River Thames.

Now I know what I said before about not liking taking nature photos so much, but these are the kinds of photos I like.

They’re dynamic; they capture scenes that we are unable to see with the naked eye.  These really fast exposure shots can quite often look really good in my opinion and, if you’re lucky, you can immortalise an instant forever.

I probably also enjoy taking these kinds of photos because of the difficulty involved.  In general the more difficult it is to get a shot, the more fun I have!

Is it the same with you?

Just a quick little thing I noticed, although everyone else probably knows it by now.

To launch an elevated command prompt (i.e. a prompt with admin privileges, required to do various things if UAC is enabled on Vista), simply open the Start Menu (Windows key), type “cmd” without quotes, and press Control+Shift+Return.

This will bring up a UAC prompt asking you to elevate the process.  Select Continue (Alt+C). Done!

This does work for some other applications.  But in my experience it’s hit and miss!  Strange.

This technique may also work in Windows 7, but I haven’t been able to test it myself.

A couple of days ago I came across this interesting quirk, and I had to do a double-take before I realised what had happened.

Basically, I recently got a NAS and decided that I wanted my router to save its bandwidth usage statistics on it.  That way whenever I perform an upgrade to the firmware on the router I won’t erase all the stats.  This part is easy, as the firmware has the functionality for this.  (The firmware I keep mentioning is the Tomato firmware.  I highly recommend it if you happen to have a compatible Linux router!)

Now, after I set it all up, I went on to the network shares to see if the statistics were being saved properly.  What I saw I didn’t exactly expect:

Now, nothing may look wrong at first glance. But take another look at the screenshot, particularly the column titled “Modified”.

Got it yet? You have? That’s great! You haven’t? You’re probably just not as finnicky as I am, don’t worry.

Anyway, enough suspense: the thing that caught me out was that the modified time for the statistics file was “tomorrow”.

“So what?” I hear you cry!  “You probably just had the NAS set to the wrong timezone.”

Alright, I’ll give you that — I had set it to the wrong timezone.  However, that isn’t the strangest thing!

The strange part is the fact that Windows has provisions for files that have creation/modify/access times in the future.

When you have a file that you have modifed today, it says “Today”.  Nice.  If you then leave the file for 24 hours, Windows will say the file was modified “Yesterday”.  Again, a nice touch.

But now Windows, in its all-powerful, all-knowing ways, can tell me when a file will be modified, before it’s even happened!

At least, that’s the impression it gives me when I think of a developer including “tomorrow” on the list of English relative dates.

And before you complain that I wasn’t using Windows Explorer but rather a replacement called Directory Opus, here’s a screen from Explorer demonstrating the same behaviour, but slightly more hidden:

So there you have it: Some crazy behaviour and me thoroughly confused.  With DOpus and Explorer both “predicting” the future for me, I’m beginning to wonder just how much control I have over these computers…

Like the first photo I uploaded to this site, Boldly Growing, this was taken at Mottisfont Abbey National Trust garden.  However instead of out in the gorgeous gardens, I was inside a rather ‘cosy' (read: cramped) used-book shop located on the site.

I happened to spy this rather odd looking insect having a rest from its fatigue (read: injury), and also that it was resting on the front of a set of scores that were being sold.

So I tried to make it look as artistic (read: stock) as possible.

What do you think?

Also the scores are copyrighted 1900.  Nice.

Having trouble selecting the slug you want in WordPress?  If you’re like I was just a moment ago, you’ll try changing the slug on one of your categories to something different that you prefer, only to have WordPress change it back to whatever it was previously.  What gives?

Turns out the solution might be simpler than you think — check your Post Tags for a tag with the same slug!

Slugs are shared between tags and categories, so if you use a particular slug with a tag, you cannot use the same one with a category, and vice versa.

Keep that in mind the next time you get all OCD about slugs!

Here’s a picture I took a little while back of my aunt’s dog, George.  He’s a lively bugger (my aunt’s finger getting broken is proof), but this photo captures the moment where I actually managed to get up close to him without him trying to take my head off.

And I was lying down.

Good one.

Did you know I’m really not into this “nature” stuff very much?  It’s just that there’s so much of it around I can’t really avoid it…

Take this for example.  Captured near the coast in North Devon, this rather saucy number demonstrates that creatures really will do it anywhere, even on camera.

What impressed me most is that they could fly whilst back to back like this!  Crazy.

I feel kind of silly for falling foul of this, but I guess it’s just a case of going against what you’re used to.

I was looking for a way to check on my MMS settings on Android.  On just about every other phone I’ve used it’s been a submenu of the messaging application, so that’s where I went — except I couldn’t find anything pertaining to access point settings!  I mean, if one phone does it one way, all phones do it that way, right?  Right?

Wrong.  Turns out Android hides the settings in — guess what — its Settings menus!  That’s good, because it’s centralised.  It makes sense when you think about it.  Honest.

Anyway, to find these elusive settings, just follow these instructions:

1. Go to the Home screen.
2. Press Menu.
3. Select Settings.
4. Select Wireless controls.
5. Select Mobile network settings.
6. Select Access Point Names.
7. Finally, select an access point to edit, or press Menu to create a new APN or reset to the defaults that shipped with the phone.

Have fun with changing access point settings!  Mmm.

I have a weird attraction to this photo…  It’s probably because instead of the bee bee-ing posed on the plant as you would normally see in a photo such as this, it’s heading straight past me!

If that bee were better bee-haved I might have gotten a picture of it on the plant.  Wait, I have taken pictures of bees on plants!  I bee-lieve I’ll upload one sometime.

I’ll stop now.

That’s the name of the cat.

Seriously!

She’s the cat of one of our neighbours, but sometimes she comes over to pose and play.  Quite the model, huh?

She always looks grumpy to me, though…