PIE.

There's been a lot here in the Mail about Trevor Chester club PIE, or Paedophile Information Exchange to give its full title.  I heard about some of this stuff when researching why we don't see 16 year olds in page 3 anymore, but thought it far fetched.  Incidentally whenever I heard of this before I always thought it was a police operation, i.e. they exchanged information on nonces rather like you exchanged football stickers in the playground, rather than a minority group protesting for a (much) lower age of consent. You know the sort of things sex offender gets out of jail and moves out of an area, police send details of offender to his local force saying this person is a nonce please keep tabs. I'm sure it doesn't work like that, unless thats what Keyop  CEOP does.

The story here gives you the full info if you want read it, but if you don't want to visit the Mail Online and thats understandable I'll add a summary below.

Nonce group set up, and allied to Gay rights movement to campaign for legalising incest and lowering age on consent to 4 (yes 4).
Some Labour party MPs including Patricia Hodge and Harriet Harman buy into this as part of a greater human rights agenda rather than human wrongs.
They haven't apologised for belonging to 70's nonce group.
This all happened in the 1970's and is apparently news.
The guy who set up said group is called Keith Hose which is a really silly name.
That's it.

The NF actually opposed the first version of this group, making this the only time apart from The Sound Of Music where you could cheer for the Nazis. P.I.E has long since been disbanded and many of its members are in jail or at least convicted of sexual offences against children. Its old news, Like I say I read this in related articles in Wikipedia, and only the labour party angle is I suspect the main driving point of all this, along with Millichimps dad hating Britain and endless stories about cancer.

Incidentally for something you definitely won't read in the weirdly censorious Mail, here's the lighter side of Smut from Scientific American. SFW. I had to read that in the Independent and agree with it whole heartedly, even if I couldn't find the original article.

8 Legged Horses and lame ducks.

Hello everyone, I've been through a geeks hell this weekend and with precious little to cheer me up. My aunt had to go in for an operation so we were down at Suffolk for 4 days. She was fine but I had to fix up her old PC at the same time which wasn't.  For starters we brought down an old drive of mine thrown out at work different make but same capacity and of correct type.  Once I'd worked out that this needed to be the master and that installing wasn't such a pain its not as if its used every day just as a back up.  I also brought with me Linux Mint XFCE edition as my main OS as I could reinstall XP (which is what it originally came with) later.

For starters it all went smoothly until halfway through installation it decided to give up and abort. Doing some tests I found it was a crap CD rather than my formatted drive and we made an ISO of it re burnt it and took it out for round 2.  It installed OK and with a few moans worked really well, doing the ace thing Linux does and pick up hardware instantly, I think you know where we're going with this. Time for XP we'll have a dual boot set up like what my old PC has.  Download the correct version of Windows XP (32 Bit Home edition) and we'll install that. Except that it doesn't it would rather wipe my disk clean and install Windows like a cunt.  After a few reboots we have XP loaded in some horrible cramped  resolution because it doesn't recognise our flat screen monitor and is resorting to some generic monitor driver and despite trying to install a billion times through display and add hardware we did the decent  thing and set up Mint as a Dual boot.

I don't care if its outdated and being discontinued, we never got anything installed hardware wise so this copy of XP is not going online we will try and add Service Pack 3 next time I'm down as a fun project (i.e an exercise in torture) and update Mint of course.

8 Legged Horses.

We recently switched browsers as Firefox has become increasingly flaky due to accumulated browser add ons (think flashblock rather than bundled toolbar though we did once have Freecorder).  I've heard cool things about Palemoon a fork for Firefox but decided to use Sleipnir  instead. Its billed as having really beautiful text and it really does deliver on this as its awesome. As an added bonus its displaying my blogger page with its proper login and can use extensions from the Chrome store so I can add block and add on stuff.

Finally fans of Polish cartoons might like to see the Studio Miniatur Filmowich Youtube channel for eastern block cartoons they recently added some endearing Babushka doll cartoons (that one links to the fair episode) to their main channel.  You can sub with the link above if you're on Youtube.  I'm hoping that they'll have Hen A Pippa but I'm not holding my breath.

Where's my leaflet?

Does this look like they've just dropped a big ole A Bomb here to you.

Hello everyone, if you aren't familiar with the heaven paradox, then you are very lucky. You probably aren't a Fundamental Christian and therefore have a  functioning brain or at least an open mind which is great, really great.  It seems you can't walk down the street without bumping into a guy with some slickly produced (or not so slickly produced) leaflets, handing them out to all and sundry.  To be honest they all say the same thing just from different angels (sorry angles).  Believe in Jesus and accept him as your personal saviour and you'll end up at the above place regardless of race, though they still won't accept your dog.  Don't and you'll end up in hell tormented for all eternity. That's it in a nutshell.

There you'll never have to accept another badly produced leaflet from an over eager street preacher again, though I've never seen an atheist hand out leaflets explain that there is not a god and to stop worrying.

Except there are a few stumbling blocks with the above.  There is no heaven, we've never found a single trace of it, with all our modern telescopes.  Same with hell, although there are areas that aren't conducive to life they are generally not places anything lives let alone one you're sent to as punishment for all eternity.

I'm not sure what passages of the Bible that heaven and hell is described in apart from Revelations which is batshit insane.  They never even called it hell and it certainly isn't a lake of fire or any other nonsense.  Theists will have you that you have to take it on faith that both exist, when there is no evidence of either. For starters whats the ecology of an afterlife is their a food chain like on Earth, does anything up there eat angels or demons or God.

That's why I would rather believe in the laws of nature rather than than the laws of god.  I recommend the Blind Watchmaker by Richard Dawkins though written 20 years ago, its still relevant and though heavy going is going to do you good just like medicine, with the knowledge it imparts. Though you may have to emulate to get any of those biomorph programs to run.

On a side note, possibly due to my autism I've never seen myself as having a soul.  I've always pictured myself a like an automaton or robot: no control, no mind,  nothing to think about, a blank headed mule going through life as best as I can.  This is what makes this blog so hard sometimes, not that I have something to say but nothing, absolutely zero, to actually communicate just like life.

So I started this post with a question that I have never seen any atheist, humanist or agnostic hand out leaflets in the street.  I've seen hindus, sikhs, and muslims with tables full of stuff about the glorious Koran and the prophet muhammed and Allan, wet tip hen ax. But never anything about disbelief.  So I'll put my own maxim up.

There is no afterlife. Stop worrying and live free.

Chinese New Year.

we decided to take a trip uptown to Chinatown and see what the year of the Horse would bring, seeing as its Chinese new year. Also we would take in the Kings road to see what they had to offer in our first uptown junk tour of the new year.

First of all we had to get there, and we may do the whole thing via Oyster card in future as a one day travelcard is now £8.90 and oyster has a daily cap.  And there would be more unpleasantness in store for me.

Unthinkingly I didn't charge my camera so didn't get too many shots and almost none at all of the new year festivities. I'll post some of what I did at the end as it was worth it but you can curse my stupidity for most of this stuff.

Continuing on with my journey, I made it to Sloane Square station without much hassle, pro tip if you want to get back to the West End from here take the next stop to Victoria and change for the Victoria Line and go to  Green Park. You can either exit from there and walk or have the choice of Jubilee or Piccadilly Lines to take you to Bond Street or Leicester Square.

Kings Road then, mostly its unsufferably posh. They have a Waitrose and a Marks & Spencer and a load of boutique shops where if you have to ask the price you can't afford it. I had memories that they had an HMV but nobody makes CDs anymore so it went bust (more on this later).  They had a nice little art gallery specializing in dog prints and watercolours.  I suspect they had other stuff but they wanted £300 for a dog made out of what seems like a bent paper clip stuck on canvas, they had a nice shaggy dog painting but most of the stuff there I could do just as well.

Putting aside all thoughts of dogs, we decided to check out a small mall on the other side of the street, and came across what seems to be a ghetto for the regular high street.  It didn't have a Poundland but it did have a massive branch of the YMCA charity shop (over two floors people) and a mobile phone accessory shop. we got a book in YMCA which is possibly the most inaccurate work on exotic flowers, not only weirdly translated from Italian, but having different pictures on occasion the globe thistle Echinops is represented by a photo of a Chrysanthemum.

Confident that I had seen enough of the Kings road and its utter cunts in sports cars (too noisy), I decided to explore the west end.

Making my way through to Piccadilly we found that the Japan Centre had moved from Regents Street to a place on Shaftsbury avenue.  It seems much smaller now and is entirely upstairs.  Their magazine choice seems smaller too, no Famitsu to pick up but they did have some pricey artbooks on Persona 4 Animation.
we got a nice blueberry Capri Sun jelly drink that was like drinking the jam bit from a Muller Fruit Corner.

Anyway we made our way to the Trocadero and was amazed that they had a small arcade there in the basement.  Its not a patch on the old Leisure Casino (now fruit machine only) but it rivals the original Troc for arcade games.  I.E. it has a load of big showy ride style arcade cabs like Deadstone pirates and Time Crisis, if you like that sort of thing then go ahead. There was some good stuff there, they had a few coin pushers such as X Quacker where I won a manky keyring, and Willie Wheels a driving game aimed at under 5's judging by the size of the cab.

The time I made my way out it was time to hit China town and see what they had to offer by way of entertainment and I wasn't disappointed.  They had the streets closed off and lion dancers complete with drum group at the back and by that time my camera decided to die on me so from this point on there are no photos.

It was crowded and noisy what with the drums, but the lion dancing was amazing as they snaked their way down through the streets and up to the various stores. They had a black lion as well as a yellow lion dancing and the percussion was rather cool.  Seeing enough I decided to look down Oxford street and go through the massively respectable Old Compton Street (the Gay part of town is always well presented) home.

Could have seen Michael Rosen talk about the holocaust at the socialist bookshop but to be honest I'd rather see a nice YTP of him instead. He's got a twitter account here if you want to talk to him, keep it civil and not quote bits of old poops especially stuff like Babyshitter.  Oh yeah HMV is closed, that massive flagship store on Oxford street is now boarded up and looks rather forlorn, no one bought their CDs at massive mark up so now all we have is the Charity shops keeping physical media alive. With that in mind and a short trip to Phonica for a nice compilation on CD we decided to call it a day and go home.

  photos to follow.

Willie Wheels, Incidentally that steering wheel is knee high.

Setting up for lion dancing.

LCD Malfunction at the troc.

Clearing out my cupboard.

Been as the title says clearing out my cupboard, rearranging deckchairs as you will, stuff found includes a long forgotten and hilariously Engrishy pron mag, some old coursework books that are bound for recycling and more magazines than you can shake a stick at.

Most of the mags apart from the pron were either Fortean Times going way back to the 90's, Edge including a few early ones, Retrogamer and Carriers Kitchen featuring camp chef Robert Carrier.

I remember collecting these back in the day and have most of them either (not kidding IIRC its only some issues in the 50's and 60's that I'm missing).  They were a special occasion cookery partwork from the 1980's and a product of their time, devoting areas to certain ingredients, regions and wine and other booze. Nowadays, partworks are all about building a replica Yamamoto battleship or Winston Churchill out of pasta in 108 weekly installments.

The first installment is always at a special price of £1.99 and comes with churchills cigar / or a bit of keel, regular issues are of course much much more, but by the time you've built anything substantial it will of course long since disappeared.  They're normally done by De Agostini but back in the day Marshall Cavendish were the kings of the partwork.

There were a few that I keep seeing over the years including Input (a 1980s series for computer users), Supercook a culinary encyclopedia and range of sugarcraft items, and How To Fix it, a partwork based on DIY.  None of these were ever completed by anyone and remaining parts and stuff clogged up cupboards, lofts, garages and under the bed before being sold off at a bootsale, charity shop or binned.

Cyber Patrol.

This is a sort of round up, I've spent the best part of an hour updating an old PC with Windows updates. As you can tell it runs XP and was a refugee from work.  It was pretty much infected with a pretty nasty piece of malware called CyberPatrol a net monitoring software on serious drugs.  When I first had it you couldn't really do anything with the PC as it was part of the start up sequence and blocked nearly all internet access and install of stuff. We managed to get administrator access and install a few programs including Revo Uninstaller which manage to banish most of it, though when I did go online it still blocked updates.

For those unaware of this program, its a sort of net nanny on drugs, if you really don't want your kids seeing something they shouldn't, I'm sure there are better products that do not block Windows updates, Antivirus updates and pages related to both of those topics as well as stuff to remove it by default.

We were lucky in that I added Linux Mint as a dual boot and could use that to surf the net with (windows programs do not bother linux) and look for solutions.  This is the most comprehensive uninstall instructions I've found so far.  Indeed when I did look at my registry there was stuff left behind including stubborn Norton antivirus traces and a few bits and pieces of Cyber Patrol lurking in HKEY  Software.  I don't know if it worked or not as its not connected up to my router since I made it automatically update windows, but if its free of that pox then I'll chalk that up as a success.

Finally I'll leave you with this grabbed from useless phones camera as its the first flower of the new year.

Aloinopsis Schoonesii

Edit It wasn't it still blocks certain things like windows update and the likes good job I have Linux Mint and its an old machine.  I'm guessing reinstalling windows might do some good here so back up (I have nothing) and bite the bullet.

Bodge Job.

Not a great week to be honest and I'll tell you why in just a minute, but for now I'll link a to a nice little cross platform music player.  Clementine is something I'd heard of before mainly in a whats a decent alternative to I Tunes kinda way, but never really gave it much thought as I happily use Foobar 2000 for music needs.  Until that is I required it to do one specific job, to stream radio.  I suspect you can do it via Foobar 2000 but to be honest I used VLC to play that particular need, except it will not accept the feed from Intergalactic FM.

Clementine happily will play stuff like that as well as import a whole folder full of gear and play that too (which if I'm honest I don't really like, I play stuff from real media most of the time as well as well as the odd file format).  To do that you need to click on playlist and add stream and copy and paste your URL of stuff, it works and handles it very well.  If I only use that bit and import stuff from my Blackbastard   I'll consider it well made.  You can get Clementine Here oh and if you do install it please click on the extras to add kittens and the almighty hypnotoad to your player.

What a day.

We have added a new keyboard to my old PC.  Its an nice wireless model which replaces a Pakard Bell activeboard that came from a PC I had for over 10 years and is now toast.  Its nice and all but what I really wanted was something I found thrown out at work.  Its a QSenn Keyboard that is both Chinese and "Enlish" and was sadly knackered.  We had the idea to take my perfectly working keyboard apart and transfer the keys across making a sort of hybrid engrish / Chinese keyboard.

It'll be easy just pry off all the keys and put them on the active board...

Problem one, both keyboards are different sizes and certain keys do not fit.  Well I'll just add certain keys, no problemo...  It looked the part, all black with splashes of grey sort of like an old soviet computer, but the keys were wobbly and didn't stay together well.

Problem two, putting it back together. Happy with my hybrid monster, I decided to put it back together and add the various bits of circuit back together, oh dear we really should have taken photos, first of all we ignored all the special keys and circuit and when it was put it back, it didn't work.  Going back and adding the special bits was a right bastard and in the end it wasn't worth it as it got stopped at the bios screen moaning that you should add a keyboard to proceed.  In conclusion I say it was a total bust even, if it looked nice with its gloriously wobbly keys.