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JULY 2004 |
31st July 2004
This weekend I'm off on a mini adventure, cycling with Sid near Merseyside and a spot of camping too. At about midday I head off from work and cycle over a couple of minutes to Palmers Green train station. Take a train down to Kings Cross and then another minute or two on my bike to get to Euston. In all that excitement, I end up being about 40mins early. On top of that, my train was delayed by another half an hour. Ah well, I wandered around the station for a while, went to the Swatch shop, looked through the brochures and seriously considered the Sergio Garcia Irony Chrono. I need a new watch, my old lovely Chrono Alarm stops every so often, so I haven't worn it for months and my wrist feels naked. In the newsagent I thumbed through an issue of MacUser thinking it would be a nice read on the train. But no, it seemed extremely boring compared to my semi-regular read of Personal Computer World or any of the current Linux magazines. Also cycled around in circles fine tuning the gears on my bike (I couldn't really get them any better), and phoned people using my free minutes until it was time to get on the train.
The Virgin train was ok, it was comfy, the staff were nice and my bike was locked up. It wasn't great though, we were half an hour late, the A/C wasn't working, and my Asparagus and Mushroom wrap was a little bit soggy. Still, I was chilling out, watching the sheep go by out of the window and listening to Portishead et al on my Rio.
The train had made up some lost time on the way and about 3 hours later I was in Wigan. Sid picked me up and we were off in the car, and wasted no time trying to find a place to pitch our tent for the night. After trying a few places, we set up at Leisure Lakes in Mere Brow, just off the A565. After about half an hour we had booked in, pitched our tent, sorted out our stuff and were off on our bikes exploring. Cycled along the A565 and before we knew it we were in Southport. Had a lovely meal at a little Italian restaurant just before closing time, and then head back. On the ride back we overshot our turning off for Mere Brow and went as far as the junction for the A59. It was cold, and we were a bit confused, but we got back and found the turning in the end. On the way back it started to get pretty cold and there was some serious fog, really couldn't see much. Still, we made some good tea in the tent and my sleeping bag was warm, so all was well. Did about 33 miles today.
Track of the day: Pink Floyd - Breathe
25th July 2004
The sun was shining (briefly) it didn't rain (too much) and I was tearing around Harrow on my bike. Popped into Computer Exchange on my travels to sell in some stuff I had kicking about and somehow managed to walk out with a serious new toy. A Rio Karma 20GB MP3/Ogg/FLAC player. Its damn sweet. I'm off to write a couple of Perl scripts that should hopefully ID3 my music from the meticulously organised filenames and paths and also encode my FLACs as MP3 (yes, I know, I could Ogg them, but then the battery on the Rio won't last as long).
Track of the day: Prodigy - Girls
11th July 2004
Our mosque organised a sports day today. It was lots of fun, I got to try out my camera, fell on my face in the sand on the long jump and ate lots of biriyani. Awesome.
Track of the day: Jellys - Feels Like Sunshine
8th July 2004
My Canon IXUS V2 is a sweet camera. Its small, and outdoor photos are great. But its a fairly slow camera, and only gives good photos on longer shutter speeds than average which means there are a lot of shake and blur problems, especially indoors. I've used a good friends Canon Powershot G2 (and used a G3 and G5) and like them. I was watching a few Canon G2's on eBay so I saw how much they were worth, and yesterday there was a mint one in London, it was the right price and I won it. w000t! Finally, a serious camera for me :)
Track of the day: Lit - My Own Worst Enemy (Acoustic)
6th July 2004
Last week I was playing with my new Sparcstations to replace the x86 machines I'm using as routers now. As much as I'd like to take one of them home, I don't think I can. Its too big to fit in cupboard where kitty currently is and I couldn't put it anywhere else because the old SCSI hard drive sounds like a swarm of mice screaming. I'm a bit annoyed as there really isn't anywhere for it to go. I think I'm going to put one of them on eBay again. While I'm doing that I think I'm going to put up a bunch of other stuff I have lying about, ADSL Modem/Routers, SCSI and IDE Harddrives, Network Cards, Cables and more junk. Going to do that over the next week I think.
We are switching ISP as well. Eclipse are charging us too much as they have not revised their pricing recently, so we are moving to E7even. We have 2 accounts with them and one was migrated today, but migration for the home account was messed up for the second time. So I gave up and simply cancelled the account at home and signed up with E7even without migration. This means no broadband at home for two weeks.
Track of the day: Janet Jackson - Doesn't Really Matter
4th July 2004
Met Sid in London today. It was great, we chilled out in a cafe, messed about with some high-tech toys on Tottenham Court Road and had some class takeaway from Wasabi near Embankment. I got back just in time to catch a showing of Harry Potter with my sister. I haven't read the books but every film so far has been simple but lots of fun and always leaves you with a smile. Suppose its a typical kids movie really.
Track of the day: Incubus - Crowded Elevator
3rd July 2004
Had a suprise birthday party for my dad today. Lots of family were over and we all had a great time.
Track of the day: The Roots - Star
2nd July 2004
I got network printing working at home after a couple of minutes of fiddling. Its all pretty simple really, its better not to bother sharing a CUPS printer over Samba to use with Windows clients as you can use IPP (Internet Printing Protocol) instead. Combined with the Adobe Postscript Driver for Windows, printing over the network is a breeze. There is a strange problem with MacOS X which doesn't let me use IPP, but sharing over Samba works. I will try to go back in my steps of installing CUPS, installing hpijs, setting permissions and using the Adobe drivers in Windows to print so I can write a Mini-HOWTO. It shouldn't take long but I'll have to do it later, still got some other stuff to finish at the moment and still not much time.
Track of the day: The Roots - Somebodys Gotta Do It
1st July 2004
At home and at my dads shop I'm currently using Pentium 133 (Lump) and Cyrix P150+ (Kitty) based machines to do things like routing, firewalling, DNS, DHCP and IPSEC VPN using OpenBSD. It works really well but those machines are pretty boring from a hardware point of view. So, a couple of weeks ago I was browsing around eBay and found some Sun Sparcstation 20's which I snapped up for not a lot. I also picked up a USB to Serial adapter and a bunch of cables to talk to the Sparcs by serial console with my laptop. I had some fun with these cables. I had a USB ---> 9M cable to go from my laptop and a 9M --(NM)--> 25M cable to go to the Sparc, but I obviously can't connect the two 9M bits together to make it work. So for a couple of quid I ordered a Direct 9F --> 9F Belkin cable thinking that would do the trick. But no. By Direct, they mean Direct file transfer which is a Null Modem cable and not the straight one I was expecting. Thats pretty annoying as now I have two Null Modem cables which cancel themselves out if I connected them together and make a straight wired cable, which just ain't going to work. I was frustrated but armed with a pair of sidecutters, a stripper, a multimeter, a soldiering iron, some insulating tape and heatshrink... I fixed my new cable by rewiring it the correct way around. Plugged it all in, installed Z-Term on my laptop, set the baud rate to 9600 et voila, serial console magic. Got OpenBSD 3.5 installed in minutes after that. I now have a useful Sparcstation :)
Track of the day: Lamb - Stronger
