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Instant Queue: Children of Heaven

By Demian Perry | Published: 09 Aug 2012

On the surface, Children of Heaven is the simple story of what happens when a poor Iranian child loses his sister’s shoes, but dig deeper and you find a timeless parable of kindness and virtue even in the hopelessness of poverty.

Sumptuously filmed on the streets of Tehran, the film presents the question of why people remain poor in spite of social programs and noblesse oblige. Outside the context of the story, the premise — two children going to great lengths to get by with only one pair of shoes between them — would seem absurd. As absurd, perhaps, as the many minimum wage workers in America who will pay $60 per night to live in a hotel when they could live much more cheaply in an apartment. Read More »

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How to proxy surf on a mac for free

By Demian Perry | Published: 28 Jul 2012

If you read this post, Vinnie Jones will shut your head in a car door.

There are many uses for this, but the one I’m most familiar with is the need to watch the BBC and ITV from outside the UK. The BBC derives a significant portion of its operating budget from a tax on all british households with a TV (I think it’s something like 11 pounds per month). The British would be bloody well narked if us non-paying colonists could just nip into their website and watch the Beeb whenever we wanted. At the same time, if the BBC put up any sort of serious security on their site (such as a registration wall that asked you to prove you paid the tax), the British people would probably burn down their building. So the BBC digital media team long ago settled on the idea of waving through anyone coming in through a UK server, and keeping out everyone else. It’s a pretty good system: no one has burned down the building yet, and it keeps the foreign wankers out…mostly.

If you find yourself far from the sepulchred isle, and you’re a non-wanker who really loves Downton Abbey (is that possible?), you might try circumventing the IP sniffer by routing your browser through a proxy server.

The Setup:

1. First, you need the ip address of a proxy server in the UK. There are lots of listings on the web, but I like: http://hidemyass.com/proxy-list/ Just select United Kingdom from the drop down (you may also want to filter for speed). Pick one of the listed servers and copy the IP address. Also note the port (you’ll need this).

2. Go into System Preferences -> Network. Click the ‘Locations’ drop-down and select ‘Edit locations’ and click the + sign to add a new location. Call it something like ‘UK’ or ‘Stamp Act Retribution’ if you’re feeling cheeky.

3. In the lower right corner, hit the ‘advanced’ button and select Proxies from the top menu.

4. Click ‘Web Proxy (HTTP)’, paste the IP address you just copied, and type in the port, and click ok. Now click ‘Apply’. Congrats! You’re jammy buggered!

Using your new proxy server:

1. Surfing through a proxy server can be slow, so I’d recommend reverting to your default location whenever you don’t need to use it (this is also a good security precaution, since the proxy server can view all the internet traffic that passes through).

2. Once you find the webpage of the episode you want to watch, copy the url, quit your browser, switch to the UK proxy server you set up earlier (don’t forget to hit ‘apply’), open the browser, paste the url, and watch your show. It will take a few seconds (maybe even a minute or two) to load, but once it loads it should play exactly as if you were sitting in an East End pub, minus the shouting and piss-warm beer.

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How to install Gnumeric (and other linux apps) on mac OS/X

By Demian Perry | Published: 21 Apr 2012

Gnumeric is the best spreadsheet application on the market. LibreOffice and OpenOffice break every time I try to do something as simple as a vlookup, and Excel lacks the heavy statistical analysis tools of gnumeric (plus you have to pay for it). Don’t take my word for it: check out the editor and user reviews on CNET. Unfortunately, it’s not available as a Mac distribution (only Windows and Linux).

Here’s the work-around:

Install homebrew (I found these instructions to be the easiest).
Open the “terminal” application on your mac and type “brew install gnumeric” and go grab a beer: if this is your first linux install, it’s going to take a while.
Open the “applescript editor” application on your mac and paste the following code:

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tell application "Terminal"
do script "gnumeric &"
end tell

Save it as an application on your desktop (or wherever you want to keep it…you can drag it into your launch tray later)
Mouse over the launch icon you see here, hold control while clicking and select ‘copy image’
Now mouse over the applescript icon you created earlier and hold control while clicking it. Select get info.
In the upper left corner of the window, you’ll see the applescript launch icon. Click it and hit control-v

Presto! You now have a launchable version of gnumeric. One warning: this build leaves a little to be desired. Clipboard transfer of data doesn’t work very well, the text is a bit small, and terminal has to run in the background the whole time, which is a little messy. Still, it’s fully functional and crunches just as fast as native.