Are we really remembering them?

Yesterday, the Vicar at a Remembrance Sunday service opening words were:

"We gather here today to worship God our Lord"

Now that should be the first indicator that something is wrong.  I go to two or three services each year, being a long standing member of the Air Cadets, I have quite strong links with the annual Poppy Appeal etc, volunteering extra Saturdays to sell Poppy's and raise money for the Royal British Legion.

I am not religious in any way, probably one of the least religious people you could find.  If I wasn't in the cadets, then I probably wouldn't go to church, but I do go with cadets to various acts of remembrance, ATC Sunday, Remembrance Sunday etc.  I do this out of respect for the event in hand, the Church just happens to be the venue.

So why do we gather in Churches?  I guess because of convenience, Britain holding on to the fact that it used to be a Christian Nation, but is far from in now.  He said himself that in 20 years, statistically, no-one would be going to Church any more.  Anyone watching the news over the past few years would have a hard job proving the existence of any God!

Every year I find myself irritated by the Vicars taking the Remembrance service, they are always more bothered about God, than they are about the real reason everyone is there, to remember the dead, to honour the countless men and women who have given their lives for their country.  But the Vicar always talks more about God and what he did and how amazing he is, we sing about him, pray for him.  Less and less are The Fallen even mentioned.

The opening line of this post sums it up, the Vicar had the audacity to say that!  It was not the reason any of us were there at all, the more I think about what he said, the more outrageous it seems.

At another service yesterday, the Vicar said, when talking about The Fallen and God:

"It is more important to glorify God"

What is that even supposed to mean?  It is more important to suck up to "God" than remember our dead soldiers?

Most people probably switch of when listening to the ramblings in church, but actually taking note of what is being said brings out some truly bizarre statements.

I will of course continue going to Church on Remembrance Sunday, for the true reason of being there and I hope everyone else does the same.

Accidentally deleted your Android S2E partition?

Yes, I stupidly did this last night, when upgrading to a larger SD card. I was using Clonezilla to blast one memory card to the other, which failed on the ext4 S2E partition.

I re-ran Clonezilla on just that partition, but got sde1 mixed up with sdb1 and copied the corrupt partition over the good one! Duuuhhhh.

The phone would not boot of course and got stuck on the Cyanogenmod loading screen. Here is how I fixed it, which wasn't as painful as I first thought, but it was essential to have backups.

I run MyBackup Pro and Titanium Backup Pro on schedule every night, these apps are superb, and worth the low cost.

1. Reboot into recovery (hold down volume down button while turning on), restore factory defaults, install latest GApps, reboot.
2. Setup Gmail account on first boot (needed to download from Market).
3. Install Titanium backup, MyBackup and S2E from Market.
4. Setup S2E (so when apps are restored, they go to the correct place) and reboot.
5. Restore all apps from Titanium Backup Pro, reboot.
6. Restore all data from MyBackup Pro (SMS, call log, etc), reboot.
7. Restore widgets to home screens, these did not come back from MyBackup Pro.
8. Setup sync options on Google account, I sync Contacts, Emails and Calendar.
9. Clear Gmail data from Manage Applications, I had sync issues before doing this.
10. Restore background image, this was not restored from MyBackup Pro.
11. Restore MyBackup schedule.
12. Remove old apps restored my Titanium, apps that have been removed previously are still stored by Titanium and therefore restored unless default options are changed.
13. Restore lockscreen gesture, any gesture was allowed when I had restored.

Another thing that I noticed wasn't restored was my wireless connections, which was a little annoying.  Apart from that, all is perfect, so very happy with the restore process.

Duke Nudem Photoshopping!

Played the new flash game "Duke Nudem" last night, quite fun actually.  It's basically a promo for the upcoming Duke Nukem Forever game, you have to shoot targets "against" a skantily clad  lady, is you win, she strips, easy!

The final one was actually quite difficult!  For each one you win, you unlock a wallpaper, you can imagine what is on them!

Anyway, there is one final wallpaper that needs a cheat code to unlock, type "dnitems" on the game screen (where the wallpapers are shown) and a box will pop up as you type, this unlocks the final wallpaper and a gallery link appears.

This contains more photos of the ladies around where the videos were taken, you can download them all.  I spotted two images with similar names, "DSC_0099.jpg" and "DSC_0099 2.jpg", basically, one is a Photoshop of the other, you can see where some "fat" has been cut off, very amusing.

No idea if they left this in on purpose or not, see for yourself.....

25,000 Contacts in Gmail????

OK, I love Gmail, the whole shebang, calendars, contacts, mail, chat etc etc.

Just through on my RSS is this:

http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/05/store-up-to-25000-contacts.html

Gmail used to have a limit of 10,000 contacts. For most of us, this was way more than enough, but we heard from some of you who use Gmail to communicate with more than 10,000 people. We want you to be able to store all of your contacts in a single place, so starting today, we’ve increased the limit for all Gmail users, including all those of you who use Google Apps, to 25,000 contacts.

I can't belive people have this many contacts, pretty insane!  I thought I had a lot at 250!

It goes on to say:

Also, previously an individual contact could be no larger than 32KB — big enough for most people, but not always sufficient for those who like to keep a lot of notes on individual contacts. Now, each contact may be up to 128KB in size, allowing you to store more information in the notes field.

Now that doesn't sound like a lot, but it is.  The old maximum, 10,000 at 32KB each totals 312.5MB, quite a lot really.  The new maximum, 25,000 at 128KB each totals just over 3GB!!!!!!!!

I know that maybe a few people in the world would actually use anything like that, but crazy space Google must have for their free email service, very impressive.

April Fools Round-up 2011

A few things that have made me chuckle today, April Fools Day

The Register - Wank-O-Meter
http://www.reghardware.com/2011/04/01/app_of_the_week_wink_o_meter/

Google - Gmail Motion
http://gmailblog.blogspot.com/2011/04/introducing-gmail-motion.html

Google - Google Docs Motion
http://googledocs.blogspot.com/2011/04/coming-soon-google-docs-motion-beta.html

Maddox - Worth a thousand words
http://maddox.xmission.com/

Gamer Sushi - Sony Drops Lawsuit
http://gamersushi.com/2011/04/01/sony-drops-lawsuit-hires-geohot/

Ebuyer - 3D True Sight
http://www.ebuyer.com/real-d-true-sight

I think Maddox and The Register have to be my favourites, others are fairly meh this year

Radio 1's Longest Show

Radio 1's longest show finished this morning with Chris Moyles and Comedy Dave, I'm kind of sad it's over....

It's been huge fun turning on the Radio for the past few days and those guys being on all of the time, watching it on the Red Button in the morning and in the evening, I miss it now.

I am in serious amazement of everyone at Radio 1 for pulling off an amazing couple of days radio, well done to you all.

Then there's the money, I just can't believe how much money was raised, seriously, just under 2.5 million ££££.  I had a few teary moments listening to the "money raised so far" announcements.

For those that are not in the UK, or did not hear about this, 2 Radio 1 DJs broke the world record for the longest DJ show by staying on for 52 hours straight.  Other DJs came in at their normal times and did the show with them.  There was a ton of celeb guests during the whole thing, it was also videoed and streamed online and on BBC TV.  The whole thing was to raise money for Comic Relief, a UK charity raising money for less fortunate people in the UK and Africa.

Well done guys

What a con

I felt compelled to post this, very annoying indeed.

I use Quidco, it's great, have earnt about £150 in cashback from just buying stuff I would normally over the past 4-5 months!

So one of the things I got cashback on was a free trial to CreditExpert.  Checked out the reviews and found that they are easy to cancel with (if you go over the trial you get charger of course).  So I went ahead and signed up.

A few weeks later, I rang up to cancel, no hassle.  The only bother was that they did not send out the confirmation emaiul to say that your trial has been cancelled, which is reassuring to have!  I even rang up a second time to confirm.

So the trial ran out yesterday, no charges or anything so all is good.  Untill today, when I get an email titled:

"CreditExpert Alert"

Great....

The email then goes on:


"We’ve detected a change to your credit report that you should check. If you weren’t responsible for this change, it could be a possible indicator of identity fraud."

Like hell, the day after my trial ran out?????  To obvious I'm afraid CreditExpert.

So I clicked on to login, just to see what happened, sure enough, I was linked straight through to my saved debit card details, just one click away from paying £7.99 to see the "alert", ha!

I will of course be ignoring the message, very irritating that they would try something on like that though.  Would love to know what fake alert they concoct if you were to pay etc