NonStampCollector tackles the question of whether the biblical Ten Commandments are actually the basis of our laws and morals:

I enjoyed the video very much and should be watched by as many people as possible. It’s a heady mix of information and irreverent humour which should spice up any coffee break.

For my part, I don’t think either version of the commandments listed in the bible have much to do with the laws and morals that we live by today. Neither the covenant made in Exodus 34, or the one we’re more familiar with from Deuteronomy 5 give much moral guidance for today’s world, except for the latter’s obvious rulings about killing, stealing, bearing false witness and adultery. After all, the world of the present is a much more complex place than that of the fairly distant past.

I haven’t posted anything to tumblr just yet but I hope to be up and running with some thoughts on God Is Not Great by the late Christopher Hitchens very soon.

2 minutes to midnight
The hands that threaten doom

So goes the refrain of the Iron Maiden song 2 Minutes To Midnight and, whilst things are not so bleak as the rather grim lyrics of that song suggest, isn’t it nice to read news that the Doomsday Clock moves one minute closer to midnight.

Of course, this latest adjustment only moves the hands of that dread timepiece to 5 minutes to midnight. But I guess it is nice to know that particular relic of the cold war is still ticking – especially as one reason given for moving the clock forward is “the failure of multiple nations to control the spread of nuclear weapons”.

This is 2012, isn’t it?

Next up on the blast from the past jukebox? The very excellent Gillan play Mutually Assured Destruction.

From where I stand
I know just what they’re planning
I know they’re planning one big bang
And they call it Mutually Assured Destruction

Happy Days, eh?

We really just went to check out the fireworks display and didn’t hang around for long after it. That said, the fireworks were very, very impressive and we were lucky enough to find ourselves in what amounted to a front row seat at centre stage. We found ourselves at the harbour gate, directly opposite the Woodlands Centre where the fireworks were launched from and so had a grandstand view of everything. It was so good that, although I don’t take many pictures these days, I wished I’d had a decent camera with me.

As we arrived at 9.30, the festivities had already kicked off but we heard one of the bands playing as we walked towards Bayhead and caught Fiona Martin’s set in full – apparently it was her first live show and, if that is the case, she nevertheless put in a very good performance. Perhaps we should have stayed to catch the act(s) appearing after the fireworks but by then the cold was taking it’s toll. And (perhaps more significantly) the cold beer and chilled wine in our fridge were calling us home.

The Stornoway Amenity Trust are to be given lots of gold stars and much kudos for putting on such a good show.

As for the alleged grumblings about the fireworks display not taking place at midnight because New Year’s Day was a Sunday and offence might be taken by some amongst the local faithful? Well, it would be a shame if this was true but I for one think its better to have these events during the earlier part of New Year’s Eve anyway. An earlier display makes it easier for families with young children to attend and for those who live further from Stornoway to come along. In effect you can have the best of both worlds – enjoy a cracking fireworks display then get back home in time for the traditional family gathering to welcome the New Year.

In the event that there is anyone out there whose religious convictions make them feel attendance at a Saturday night into Sunday morning event would risk their immortal soul or otherwise offend their almighty? Well an earlier start means they can see the show and be safely back home without spiritual risk.

After all, the more that can make it to these community events, the merrier they are for all.

All is quiet on New Year’s Day

So begins the song by U2. And it has been quiet on New Year’s Day here, if a little wet.

That didn’t prevent a nice long walk through the Castle Grounds and along the River Creed. Always a nice walk that, very picturesque and refreshing and a very good way to start the New Year. A year which, unlike the song, will see a few changes.

These changes will not be as dramatic as the events referred to by the song with it’s turbulent images of “a world in white”, “a blood red sky” and “gold [being] the reason for the wars we wage”. Though they will be pretty significant for this little household – when it moves to a much larger, newly built house sometime in summer.

Hopefully this year will also see an increase in both my input and output – I have a growing back log of books to read and also of stuff I want to write, not forgetting the stuff I want to learn to play on guitar, mandolin and (since Christmas) ukulele. And as ever, there are pounds to shed.

Looks like a busy year ahead.

And let’s hope it’s a happy one for one and all.

Happy New Year!

Until about a year ago, Winamp had been my longest serving music library application but then it decided that my requests that it burn music CDs were to be ignored for no apparent reason. After exhausting the usual cycle of update, uninstall, reinstall, replace drivers, try different brands of blank CD, I ditched it in favour of Media Jukebox which had no such qualms about producing CDs. And Media Jukebox has been doing a very good job up to now – although its UI is sometimes slow it plays all the music formats in my library (flac, mp3, ogg, etc) without complaint and has been free of glitches to date. So I had no plans to replace it until I started using Subsonic and consequently began looking at integrating it with the music manager on my PC.

MusicBee has a solid set of features for managing and playing music, synchronizing external devices, and CD ripping, though it currently lacks CD burning support. I think it also looks pretty good (click the image below to see it in more detail).

But what really got my attention was the post on the MusicBee plugin forum about using it as a Subsonic client. Download a dll, copy it to the MusicBee Plugins folder, restart MusicBee, enter your Subsonic details and start browsing and streaming from your Subsonic server. Sounds good to me. So I downloaded and installed MusicBee (no problems there) added the plugin and soon had a Subsonic link available in MusicBee (the little yellow submarine which you should be able to make it out in the above picture). Clicking on this expands a tree which shows the folders available on a Subsonic server which you can then browse and play music from. And what’s more, MusicBee plays the tracks back from the Subsonic server gaplessly – something that’s very important to me as many of my digital albums are live recordings where gaps between songs are not to be tolerated. At all!!

So now, despite the lack of CD burning support (which will hopefully be added soon), MusicBee has become my music library manager of choice. And the more I use and configure it the more impressed I become. For example, there’s a nice little feature that allows you to search the interweb when you spot that an album cover is missing. This search will return image results from last.fm, Amazon, Google, and discogs and you can then pick the best one to download and fill your album art gap. It scrobbles to last.fm (though I don’t know how much longer I’ll be sticking with that service). In addition to music you can manage podcasts, audio books and internet radio stations. And lots, lots more.

Playback of non-Subsonic tracks (i.e. those stored locally) is excellent and a wide range of formats is supported (flac, Ogg Vorbis, wav, mp3, etc) though support for the AAC format has to be added by downloading an extra dll. The same range of formats is supported for encoding but, due to licensing restrictions, you need to download encoders for encoding to mp3 and AAC – all of which is explained on the MusicBee Help page. There is also an Equaliser, a set of DSP Effects, Crossfade, and Replay Gain support so you can get just the right sound level and balance to suit your taste.

Overall, I think MusicBee is an brilliant music player and manager which will only become better when CD burning support is added. Top marks and a gold star to the developer.

Why not download it and give it bash. You will not be disappointed.

I’m posting it again because I read A Note About a Christmas Comic in which the author of Calamities of Nature, Tony Piro, expresses concerns that his work is being re-used without proper attribution and recognition. This has been done to the extent that the author feels his original point has been obscured by the abuse of his original work.

So here, once again, is the funny and illuminating comic, What Christmas Is All About.

I urge you to click the image above to see this cartoon in better detail. This will also raise the profile of the author’s original work and lift it above that of those who have misused it.

You should also note that today is the Winter Solstice, the day on which (in the Northern Hemisphere) the Sun reaches its furthest point to the South and we experience the shortest day of the year.

Much more importantly it is also the first day of my 2011 Christmas holiday. Yay!

This is an absolutely spot on introduction to the application because, as that advert keeps telling us, “it does exactly what it says on the tin!”

I’ve been using Launchy for a long time now, on both my home PC and the ones I use at work, and it has become my automatic first choice when I want to launch anything from a command prompt to a word processor.

With a few key presses I can be launching an application much more quickly than by using the traditional Windows Start button, All Program Files, etc. route. The index within Launchy responds very quickly and provides a list of options matching your first couple of key presses. If you’ve already used Launchy a few times then it recognises previously used application entries very quickly and will display your most commonly used application beginning with “c” (for instance) very quickly.

Launchy is very configurable, allowing you to select your own shortcut key combination to launch it. You can centre it, make it opaque, fade it in and out, skin it, specify the types of items to be catalogued for launching and you can enhance it with plug-ins. That said, I haven’t really made much use of the plug-ins that are available but there’s a great collection of skins available both from the Launchy Forum and from deviantART.

When I first started using Launchy I had doubts about how responsive a keyboard-based application launcher would be as I’d only used point-and-click toolbar style launchers in the past. Now that approach is a thing of the past because Launchy has been such a revelation.

Unlike those point-and-click types, Launchy is completely unobtrusive if set to activate by a keyboard shortcut – it doesn’t use much memory and pops up instantly when activated. It also disappears instantly when you’re done with it or if you move focus away from it, unless you’ve set the rather cool fade out option.

As if all that isn’t enough, it is also portable and can be run from a USB stick!

I suggest you download it from www.launchy.net and give it a try. Immediately.

This is the last in a series of re-posts from my old The Free Software Files blog. From this point on, any posts about free and/or open source software will be all new – starting with one about a superb music manager that I’ve taken to using lately, MusicBee. Expect to see that one appear some time in the next few days.

I’ve been using it for quite a while now and it’s reliable and very easy to use. It will convert between a range of audio file formats including MP3, MP4, OGG, FLAC and AAC. And conversion is the main use that I put it to, converting high bit rate audio files that I’ve bought to a lower bit rate (and smaller size) for playback on my Sansa Fuze.

It has also become my CD ripper of choice as it uses less memory than a full-blown music manager and seems to do a quicker job of ripping CD tracks to my hard drive. It also works very well with the CDDB database to retrieve and accurately append tag information to each track.

As well as that, it offers a whole range of other useful features such as:

• automatic creation of cue sheets and playlists;
• encoding to a single file;
• filename patterns to ensure your audio files are automatically organised into the correct folders by artist, year, album, etc;
• support for plug-ins, and;
• a multi-language interface.

All of which is packaged into an easy to use interface.

As I mentioned, I’ve been using fre:ac for some time now and I think it is very good indeed. I’ve had no problems with it or the audio files it has output (either converted or ripped). So I can happily recommend it to anyone looking for a reliable audio converter and CD ripper.

fre:ac is also available in portable form so you can install it on a USB stick (using PortableApps.com) and take it’s conversion and ripping powers on the road with you.

This is another in the series of re-posted items from my now resting in peace blog, The Free Software Files.

Battle For Wesnoth can be run on multiple platforms (Linux, MacOS and Windows) and can you can download either a stable release or the current development version. I suggest you go with the stable release in order to avoid any potential problems that might either put you off the game or spoil your enjoyment of it. At time of writing I’m using the current stable release (version 1.6.4) for Windows and you should bear that in mind for the rest of this review.

Once you’ve downloaded and installed the smartest next step is to run the tutorial and read the online Getting Started guide. The tutorial shows you the game basics – movement, recruiting allies, combat – and introduces you to a couple of key characters. It’s a pretty straightforward task to master the game-play which has been kept fairly simple. This is very important as you’ll find that to succeed in the game you need to focus on tactics, strategy and development of the characters the make up your band of followers.

Each character has different abilities determined by their attributes, the terrain they are operating in and the time of day. Yes, you need to pay a lot of attention to the time of day in game as this can have a big impact on how well your characters perform!

Much thought also must be given to how you will move your characters around the game space, as characters can travel different distances during each turn. Keep an eye on the position and possible moves of your opponents characters too otherwise you may find yourself surrounded then overwhelmed when battle begins.

It will take a lot of time and experimentation to get the right tactical balance as you work your way through the scenarios available within Battle For Wesnoth. You will lose the occasional campaign and you will suffer the grief of losing characters who have risen through the experience levels to gain a special place in your heart. But do not loose heart because there are many campaigns to enjoy as standard and there are more to download as add-ons making this a game with a long shelf-life indeed.

As well as being able to download add-ons the game includes a map editor so you can create your own campaigns. You can easily change the game language and configure a range of other settings via the Preferences dialogue. Should you suddenly find you’ve been up half the night immersed in a campaign you can save your game before grabbing a few hours sleep and picking up where you left off. There’s also a Multiplayer option so you can play against your mates over a network or the interweb. What more could you ask for?

Well, as you can see the game has great graphics and take my word that it also has lots of cool sound effects which enhance the whole experience. Horses neigh and gallop, swords clang, bowstrings hum, and magical spells warble. So this is not one to play in the office!

Overall, Battle For Wesnoth is a brilliant game which is all the sweeter for being free. In fact it easily stands comparison with the turn-based fantasy games that you can buy in the shops. I thoroughly recommend it and suggest that you head for www.wesnoth.org and download it for yourself. I know it is a 200Mb+ download but that really isn’t all that much these days – it’s not that much bigger than an album download but will perhaps hold your interest for longer!