Edit: and, shock, could said Embassy be the victim of a campaign of deliberate disinformation? Or is the director just playing around? He is, after all, so money and he doesn't even know it.

I've recently had a bit of a tinker with writing my own Greasemonkey script for Firefox which links directly to the flash video (FLV) files on the TVNZ ondemand site. This means instead of poring through your browser cache, you can actually download the files directly to whatever folder and watch them later on. Allegedly this might actually get around the geo-restrictions that stop ex-pats overseas watching it, but I couldn't possibly comment for obvious reasons.

FLV files can be watched in VLC which, of course, you're using as your default video player.

I haven't managed to test this on as many clients as I would have liked but it appears to work in Firefox 2.0.0.13 on Windows XP and Ubuntu 7.10. The resultant page should look something like this.

This was originally written with Media 7 in mind but it appears to work on all the "free" shows on TVNZ ondemand (e.g. recent episodes of Shortland Street) so I've changed the @includes to, erm, include all of the TVNZ show "skins". Let me know whether you have any issues with it.

Edit: on consideration, it would probably help if I linked to the user script in question.

Edit #2: alternatively, download it from userscripts.org.

David Tennant needs to stop acting with his chin.

Item 2: Tales of the Black Freighter to be narrated by Gerard Butler and included on the DVD release

Why this medley is apt:

When David Bowie was asked to write English lyrics to "Comme d'habitude" in 1968, the song he came up with was "Even a Fool Learns to Love." However, Paul Anka bought the rights to the original French version, and Bowie's version was never released. "Life on Mars?" was Bowie's riposte to losing out on a fortune; it has similar chords to "My Way".

Also vaguely apt: Jonty Bankes (the singer playing the "bass ukulele") kind of looks like John Simm.

I remember Chippindale often coming for dinner when visiting Christchurch, and thinking he was freakin' tall. I also remember thinking his name was funny, thanks to the undue influence of Wonderful World of Disney on Sunday nights (bless). It was always striking to see a photo of him in the dock in that book "Darkest Days" (anybody else ever have a copy of it?).

Interestingly, my grandfather (on my mother's side) was the court clerk during the Erebus inquiry. Photos and footage of the court show him always sitting in front of Justice Mahon, and was actually portrayed by... erm, an unknown actor in the 1988 mini-series (and name-checked in the screenplay by Mahon's character, whats more).

Terri's apparently cool with this since Edward is "fair dinkum". What's fair dinkum about charging AUD90 to hear a fraudster pretend he's talking to the dead?

Anyway, this criticism is all rather amusing and, frankly, doesn't have nearly enough exposure. Where's the NZ equivalent of Derren Brown, pretending to be a high-profile psychic and then revealing his un-supernatural techniques? I guess it wouldn't rate.

Other things beginning with "P" I want to blog about:
- the Police concert
- Playmarket

Maybe this week.