Poles apart

Since the expansion of the EU in 2004 Britain has witnessed an influx of an estimated one million Polish immigrants. If you dare to point out the repercussions of this open-gate policy you're branded a Daily Mail reader and reminded of the enormous positive contribution these forward-thinking economic migrants make to the country.

Well I've been unfortunate enough to find myself living with a Polish couple, who, granted are determined to improve their economic and social standing through sheer hard work and dedication, though only at the expense of everyone else around them. Yes, it's true, they are dedicated to spending as much time in bed or feeding their faces with other people's food while pretending to seek employment.

They spend what little money they have on booze and cigarettes and then have the gall to complain with utmost sincerity that life here is so harrrd when they can't afford to pay the rent and the meanie of a bus driver won't let them travel for gratis. One of them did have a jarrrb for a short while, but getting all the way to Cheadle proved to be so harrrd that she decided she needed a holiday in Poland to recuperate. We live in Cheadle for christ's sake; her work place was practically on the door step!
And somehow it's the Brits who have a reputation for being 'whinging POHMs'.

I realise that right now I'm not exactly helping to shake off this stigma, but who wouldn't want to vent when you find yourself living with two slobs who do nothing but boil tomatoes and a variety of other pureed sludge and fornicate at 100+ decibels in rotation morning, noon and night and then leave you to clear up the mess?

One of them asked me if I thought the landlady might be kind enough to return their deposit when the inevitable happens and they are asked to leave, you know, if they "explained the situation". What, that you're selfish cretins and expect other people to pay for you to wash and tumble-dry one t-shirt at a time and share the bill for your long distance phone calls to Poland whilst you refuse to so much as empty the bin or wash a solitary cup? Yes, I'm sure she'll be nice as pie, the epitome of empathy. I know where I won't be when she returns to collect their rent at the weekend and the proverbial hits the fan.

If only us lazy Brits (hang your heads in shame, you know who you are!) could adopt their slavish work ethic this country might not be in such a mess.

...and you thought I was going rake up that xenophobic Daily Mail article about Polish people claiming child benefit for kids who aren't even British residents didn't you. Wouldn't dream of it.

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Sunglasses; the cause of and solution to all of life's problems

When it comes to protecting your health what you need is clear, practical advice from medical professionals. With this in mind isn't it wonderful that scientists have taken all the guess work out of avoiding skin cancer?

Ophthalmologists recommend wearing sunglasses when outdoors because they help to cut the level of ultraviolet radiation penetrating the eyes. This makes perfect sense because excessive exposure to UV light can cause an assortment of nasty ocular ailments such as cataracts, pterygium, photokeratitis, snow blindness, macular degeneration, and a whole host of eye cancers.

Right, so why wouldn't you choose to cover up your peepers? Well perhaps because wearing sunglasses - as well as warding off cancer - may cause cancer. This is supposedly because the artificial darkness tricks your brain into thinking you're not in danger of being fried by the sun's UV rays and so doesn't instigate the production of the melanocyte-stimulating hormone which thickens and tans your skin as a shield against the sun.

That sounds plausible enough... but fails by a country mile to beat the previously accepted notion that allowing intense sun rays capable of turning your skin a blistered shade of bright crimson before emulating reptilian ecdysis isn't such a good idea. Health advisers are always banging on about daubing your skin in sun cream, but you don't put any in your eyes do you.

I don't know about you, but I'll take a pair of healthy eyes, normal vision and a big dollop of skin cancer with sprinkles and a cherry on top.

While sunlight can cause cancer it is recommended that we absorb enough of it to up-regulate the manufacture of vitamin D which facilitates a range of vital bodily processes - those that maintain healthy bone structure and sustain our immune system for instance.

So while we're catching some rays to top up our vitamin D supplies we should cover up to prevent accelerated skin ageing (aka skin photo-damage) and skin cancer. Hiding away inside from the sun like a hermit would be the ideal solution except that it contributes to seasonal affective disorder and leads to vitamin D deficiency which has been implicated in the aetiology of many forms of cancer.
Sunbeds can be used to combat SAD and increase vitamin D synthesis. Tanning salons will even throw in your choice of malignant melanoma or non-melanoma skin cancer such as squamous or basal cell carcinomas for no extra charge, while we destroy the planet with our clown-sized carbon footprints.

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EyeTV MP3 playback

I may be stating the obvious here, but as it's not mentioned anywhere in Elgato's FAQs I thought this might be worthy of a tech tip entry.

EyeTV (at least version 2 anyway), as well as playing back externally created video files is capable of opening MP3s. So what? you may be wondering. Well this means that if music and podcasts can be opened with EyeTV, they can be paused, fast-forwarded, rewound and generally monkeyed around with using the remote control which comes with your TV box/stick, and this will be helpful to anyone who doesn't sit right next to their computers while they listen to audio.

The way you do this is identical to the procedure for opening third-party movies; by clicking on the 'Open Quicktime Movie' option under the 'File' menu. You see this is obviously the killer clandestine feature Elgato don't want you to know about because, erm... oh you know, for all sorts of nefarious reasons, probably.

Another inconspicuous feature you may be unaware of is that if you keep pressing the increase volume button on your remote control after EyeTV's volume indicator hits its maximum notch, you can continue to boost the volume by ratcheting up your OS's volume control. Most sensible people would normally stop at this point, but apparently not me.

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Geek criminals should be made to work harder to earn their jail cells say Finnish courts

Mikko Rauhala, the owner of a web site where instructions for circumventing CSS DVD copyright protection were posted will not be prosecuted. The decision made by the Helsinki District Court resulted from the adherence to a 2001 amendment to European copyright laws that state it is only illegal to defeat "effective technological measures".

Knowledge pertaining to outwitting DVD copyright protection has been widely available on the internet since 1999, and a plethora of idiot-proof applications designed to automate the process are merely a mouse click or two away, rendering CSS barriers defective.

You've got to marvel at the Catch-22 of this judicial loophole. Cracking copyright protection is only illegal while it's too tricky to accomplish. As soon as someone susses out how to do it, the protection can be deemed ineffective and the perpetrator of this heinous crime against society walks free.
I'm hoping the same laws apply to bank robbery because my local branch of Barclays has this really flimsy safe and the only security guard patrolling the area always leaves his post at 9.00am to buy a bacon sarnie from the greasy spoon next door.

Hey, if everyone does it, it must be OK. ;)

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Uninventing the search engine

Don't you hate it when stuff just works? It's predictable and boring, and if you ask me, anything falling into this category should be sabotaged immediately to spice things up a little.
Many web coders clearly share my view because this is precisely what they've been doing with their previously accurate, efficient and dependable search engines.

Take Googles' Image Search for example. Imagine your typical day; you're surfing the web when a sudden impulse to track down a picture of Spider-man wrestling a T-Rex grips you with full force. You visit Google Image Search and type in the keywords 'spiderman', 'wrestles' and 'trex'. Now you wouldn't imagine there would be all that many depictions of such a scene so it would be reasonable to expect a return of say less than half a dozen hits at the most. Well you'd be wrong; supposedly Google currently indexes 1030 images of the web-shooting wonder getting down and dirty with the "last and largest known carnosaur".

It's curious that amongst these 'hits' are images of King Kong, random politicians, The Simpsons, Bambi, fish corpses and Wacko Jacko's face embedded in a slice of toast, but none of them remotely resemble what I actually searched for.

The fact that there are lots of pictures containing isolated wrestlers, spidermen and dinosaurs might indicate that Google has applied the OR Boolean search operator to my query rather than the more useful AND one. This isn't the case, however; if you click on the 'Advanced Image Search' link you'll see that the keywords are automatically entered into the "find results related to all of the words" box to demonstrate which kind of search I performed prior to reaching this page. Just to confirm, clicking the search button again at this point returns exactly the same set of irrelevant flotsam.

It could be that I'll never ascertain for certain if Spider-Man (yes, I know that's the correct way to write it) ever unleashed the Pumphandle Michinoku driver II on a 43 foot long, 7.5 tonne 'tyrant lizard king'. It's no laughing matter.

That's just a drop in the ocean. All kinds of search engines across the board are falling prey to Boolean vandalism; software repositories, forums, recipe databases - the list is endless. The digg coders are prime suspects. Try probing it for stories involving two of the widest prevailing bedfellows, the 'llama' and 'blamange'. Go on, guess how many hits there are for this keyword combo. 89! That's eighty-nine, EIGHTY-NINE!

It appears that contrary to the norm, you can crowbar the AND operator in between them to narrow down the field, but why wouldn't this be the default setting to begin with as it is with Google? (well, the text search element of Google anyway). You wouldn't dial 999 to report a crime and when asked, "which service do you require" reply police... OR a florist please, either will do. So why would it make sense in any other context?

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