Obduction

Finally got around to playing Obduction, after having backed it on Kickstarter many moons ago. Obduction is a puzzle adventure from the original creators of Myst, and it’s mechanisms will be very familiar to anyone who has played any of the original games. [Read More]
Categories: Comment

King’s Quest 2015

Let me start with a disclaimer. I’ve played and finished all the King’s Quests (with varying degrees of assistance) with the exception of King’s Quest 8. When we bought out first PC, the first game we bought for it was King’s Quest 6. And that was played over and over... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Book Review – Fire In The Valley

As a child of the 80s, and a learner of the 90s, I grew up in an exciting era in personal computing. I literally cut my teeth on a ZX Spectrum, and then after learning how that worked inside and out, as a family we eventually upgraded to an Escom... [Read More]
Tags: book review
Categories: Comment

Productivity – IDEs vs Text Editors is Just The Tip

A few months ago, Rob Conery wrote a blog post discussing his career choices, his choice of .NET over PHP and his reasons for doing so. For many .NET developers, most of this will ring familiar, they were already VB6 or ASP developers, and .NET was the next logical choice.... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Poppies, Future Soldiers, and Remembrance

This week in a press release the Royal British legion published a photograph of four children bearing big smiles, holding giant poppies wearing bright yellow t-shirts. On one of the t-shirts were the words, “My Mum Dad are Veterans”, where the remaining three bore the phrase “Future Soldier”. Today I... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Folding UK Plugs

Anyone who has spent any time travelling with laptops in the UK will tell you there are two major bug bears – weight, and three pin plugs. Three pin plugs are a scourge upon the earth, their “safety” offset by the annoying bulk and tendency to prod, poke and tear... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Virgin Media Replies With Respect To Their T&Cs

For those unfamiliar, Virgin Media has a potentially very wide reaching clause in their T&Cs (Section D, Part 1, Line h). I wrote about it here. I was quite surprised by how much noise this generated, journalists (who could be affected over this) have been discussing it on Twitter. [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Lenovo X1 Carbon and Ubuntu 13.04

I’ve had the Lenovo X1 Carbon for a few months, and in all honesty, it’s the best laptop I’ve ever owned (including Macbooks). Under Windows, everything works flawlessly, and I’ve had no problems. In Ubuntu, almost everything works out of the box with 13.04, but there are a couple of... [Read More]
Categories: LifeTrack Comment

AppsLib – Rather Rude…

Back in 2009, I developed a version of “The Massive Dev Chart” for Android under license by the original owners of the IP, “Digital Truth”. Last year they released their own version of the application and politely asked me to withdraw mine, to which I agreed (these had been the... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Android Market, Copy Protection And the HTC Desire

There’s a fault with the HTC Desire in that it’s not showing copy protected paid apps in the Android Market. This is apparently due to HTC failing to the get the ROM signed by Google (or some similar such). If you’ve already got apps you’ve paid for on a previous... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Digital Economy and the Pains of Democracy

I’ve just finished watching this evenings debate, votes and reading of the DEB. I’ll admit that I had lost hope a few weeks ago of this bill being voted down, but some things became clear as I was watching this evenings proceedings. [Read More]
Categories: Comment

UK Libel Laws

For those that don’t follow Private Eye, there’s been extensive coverage of the mess that is the UK Libel process for … ohh, forver. It’s quite a scary situation. Pretty much anyone can now be sued in the UK for saying anything about anyone anywhere in the world. Marcus Brigstocke... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Static IPs in VMWare Fusion

It’s a simple problem, but one I keep forgetting how to resolve whenever I need to nuke a box. So in case anyone else needs to do it, here’s how to give a static IP to a guest OS in VMWare Fusion.
Categories: Comment

Euro Hotels London – Place to Avoid

<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fawlty_Towers" style="float: right;"> <img src="http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/thumb/d/d6/Fawlty_Towers_title_card.jpg/250px-Fawlty_Towers_title_card.jpg" /> <br />Fawlty Towers from Wikipedia </a> [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Fundamentalists Welcome

Our industry is passioned and opinionated. This is a statement of fact. Be it Emacs vs Vi, Linux vs Windows, iPod vs … errr[1], people often fall in love with tools, philosophies and companies. And this is fine. Within the industry we call them “holy wars”, since the genuine fundamentalists... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Android 1.6 – Brings Awesome Bar

The Android 1.6 API has now been released, and with it is coming one feature which outshines all others. The “Quick Search Bar” provides instant access to local phone and Google results in near real-time. [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Trucking Hell … In Bits

Back in January, I wrote about Trucking Hell, a entertaining book by “Bowen T Hunter” available through Lulu. It’s an entertaining book, if a little rough around the edges. [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Kian’s Rules For Freelancing

I occasionally make insightful, if somewhat obvious posts to the GeekUp community. One of my most linked to and pointed posts was in response to a common thread: “how to set up a freelancing business”. I formed “Kian’s Rules For Freelancing”, and present them here for your consideration. The old... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Conferences, Geek Events, etc.

I admit that I have been somewhat absent from community offerings for the past few months. The projects that I am currently working on have been a little hectic, with some appropriate last minute deadlines changes. [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Geek Girl Dinner – Manchester

Last night Cat took me to the Geek Girl Dinner in Manchester. What’s a Geek Girl Dinner? Well most tech events have a heavy male ratio and bias. Geek Girl Dinners (GGDs) aim to change that balance by only allowing boys to attend that are invited by the girls as... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

American Soda GEEK Discount

I’ve been in discussions with one of my fine clients American Soda securing a discount for our the needs of fellow geeks. They’re also hoping to sponsor some community events in the future, so if you’re running a BarCamp, local user group or some such give us a ping. [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Coffee – Red Roaster, Brighton

It’s a pre-requisite of almost all technical people – a good supply of coffee. I’ve noted in t’ North that our supply of high quality caffine has fallen off completely. Yes there are Neros, Starbucks and Costas, but these provide only mediocre caffine quality. Really high quality coffee can only... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Books For Bricks

Sometimes the world just decides to drop a large brick on you. Here at Tentacle Towers, we’ve had the work bag and laptop nicked one month from a Barcamp, followed by a break-in this month. [Read More]
Categories: Comment

Trucking Hell

Trucking Hell is the second book by “Bowen T Hunter” and has had something of a turbulent history, not unlike the author himself. The book was scheduled to be published through a real bona-fide publisher and everything. Unfortunately due to one thing and another it didn’t happen, so Hunter was... [Read More]
Categories: Comment

I'm Kian Ryan

TLDR; I sport, code, make stuff, and play adventure games.

Stay safe. Trans rights are human rights. NFTs are still a scam. Still get f-ed Putin. Imagine the *real world* good you could do with $44bn.

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