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MAY 2004 |
30th May 2004
Ordered a 512MB PC2700 DDR333 200 Pin CL2.5 SODIMM from Crucial today for the laptop. Whats the deal with just 256MB RAM as standard in the Apple Powerbook anyway? Its just lame.
Track of the day: Prodigy - Their Law
29th May 2004
The laptop is here, and its a beauty...
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I could have ordered it from the Apple Store but then I'd have to wait for delivery, worrying about when the guy is going to come with the parcel. That stuff is bad for your blood pressure. Buy it from John Lewis, take it home straight away, pay the same amount and get a two year guarantee thrown in instead of just one year. If anyone is looking to pay retail for a Vaio/Apple, its the place to go.
Yeah, well, its lovely. I'm going to play around for a while. No doubt there will be some more thoughts on moving from Linux to MacOS 10.3 and the Powerbook in general over the next few months. I'm going from Ion (screenshot) to Aqua... this is going to interesting to say the least.
Track of the day: Red Hot Chili Peppers - Under The Bridge
26th May 2004
Track of the day: Incubus - Southern Girl
24th May 2004
Another week goes by. Had a really sweet cycle yesterday, Stanmore is a beautiful place to go, I found some narrow lanes, big fields and theres loads of hills. Maxed out my bike at about 31.8 MPH, its hard to go faster on my current gearing and aerodynamics were definately not on my side. Definately going to go there again next weekend, and I'll take my camera with me next time. I still haven't been able to pick up my new tyres... by the time we got back from work on Saturday, it was 7pm.
I sold my laptop! 420 page views, 10 watchers and one bid later. The guy who bid on it is nice, he's paid and I'm sending this baby away to him tomorrow. Just typing this log entry makes me think how nice this keyboard really is, and this screen really couldn't be much better. All in all, its pretty sweet, and I hope he's happy with it. I've had this thing for nearly two years now, this is the last log entry on it and I'm going to be laptopless tomorrow. Still, I will be ordering my new one soon. So, what am I getting? You'll just have to wait and see ;) S'pose I'd better get on with backing up my stuff.
Track of the day: Kirsty Hatakka & Kimmo Kajasto - Mona
16th May 2004
Well, I didn't pick up my tyres yesterday, they haven't come in so it'll have to wait for next week. Didn't end up going cycling either dammit as there was a fair bit of stuff to do in the house, mowing lawn, dumping garden rubbish etc etc. Actually did a fair amount of stuff today, I played with CUPS (Common Unix Printing System) and got my HP Deskjet 5550 working on my fileserver. OK, well that took the whole of 10 minutes. The Samba stuff isn't there yet so printing from Windows doesn't quite work, but it'll get there eventually and will be a nice network printing server.
Going to have a little rant now about working on Saturdays. Working every Saturday is fundamentally just wrong. There is nothing wrong with working a Saturday here or there, once a month or so but having to work every Saturday has issues. It means Sunday is your only day off. You can't do anything on a Sunday evening because you have to work on Monday, so really your Sunday is much shorter than you'd think. Combine that with getting a bit more rest in the morning and waking up an hour or two later than normal and this day keeps getting shorter. When you only have a Saturday evening and Sunday off, you can't really go anywhere. Its rushed and tiring to go off somewhere at the weekend for a change of scene. There is so much stuff I want to do, I want to improve my swimming, I want to learn more stuff about OpenBSD, IPSec, IPv6, VoIP, I want to write some documentation for XBMC... but there is just no time. All that would be sorted if I just had a proper weekend like a normal person.
Track of the day: A Tribe Called Quest - Award Tour
14th May 2004
My laptop is now on eBay. I'm looking forward to tomorrow, I should be picking up a pair of new tyres for my bike and testing them out on a high speed run down Harrow hill. Hopefully I'll be going cycling on Sunday with Jon which should be a laugh. I hope the weather is good.
Track of the day: Pixies - Where Is My Mind
7th May 2004
Last month I had a crazy couple of days when I put a new hard drive in my fileserver, installed Gentoo on it, created a RAID array and something bad happened which almost made me lose all my movies, episodes of Friends, music and stuff. A couple of weeks ago I looked at what had gone wrong, and running the the Seagate Drive Diagnostic utilities showed that the problematic disk had acquired some bad sectors. I couldn't think of a reason why this would happen, but looking inside the case it becomes crystal clear what the problem was. Heat. There is now three disks in the case, my 160GB at the bottom, and the two 120s in 5.25" bays above it. Then on top of that are the two CD drives. So, the heat rose up to the top drive (the one which has the bad sectors now) and didn't really have anywhere to go. Creating the RAID array would have made the two 120s heat up a fair bit and voila... drive failure.
About a week ago I RMA'd my drive back to Seagate for a replacement as it is still under warranty. They are very efficient, I sent my old drive to the Netherlands (where hacking is not allowed) and my replacement arrived today. I didn't get around to ordering any disk cooling systems from anywhere as all the ones I've looked at are pretty expensive and make too much noise. I installed the drive back into the case and had to find a way to fit some kind of fan somewhere to get some airflow going - if a drive overheated again, I would be totally gutted. Two small pieces of sellotape, a couple of ice-lolly sticks, a handful of cable ties and a fan broken off an Intel P4 heatsink later, this is my solution:
Track of the day: Stereophonics - Nothing Precious At All
6th May 2004
I got bored of the old music page that I used to have here, it was just a list of albums I've got. About half an hour of perl and tweaking, and this is the result. Much more funky! All my CDs are now in FLAC, apart from one... I can't find my Spooks album dammit.
Track of the day: Feeder - Piece By Piece
3rd May 2004
Last weekend I was at a trade show called Interbuild 2004 at the Birmingham NEC. I was there with my cousins looking at lighting, heating, ventilation, electrical accessories etc as this is what we do as Electrical Wholesalers. Anyway, at the show there was lots of interesting companies and products offering 'Distributed Home Entertainment Systems'. This is where a house wired with Cat5E cable can have video and audio patched though from a central location to any room in the house. Its interesting from a technical perspective, and I think its extremely fun. Some of these systems cost many many thousands of pounds, and can be large and awesomely OTT. I breifly looked at an interesting home automation product as well, where you can control your heating, ventilation, lighting, security system, hifi and video equipment and all kinds of stuff using a remote control and a black box connected to your TV. It was vaguely programmable in a sense that you can put actions on a timer, though I found it to be an extremely tacky implementation with a horrible blocky text-based UI. Some interesting ideas though.
Over the past week at the shop I've been looking at security systems, Network-Enabled CCTV, Smart Alarm Panels - and this is all very interesting stuff as well. One not very expensive alarm system I was looking at had a serial port for configuration and debugging. The possibilities for a panel like that is almost endless.
Anyway, there is all this technology, and I'm also still fascinated with Voice over IP (its the future, dont-cha-know). All these things, sending my brain in a spin. I want to do so many things, I want to start my own business doing something innovative. I can see markets which are not saturated with good products/solutions yet, and I want to be there. One day. Soon.
Track of the day: Outkast - The Way You Move
1st May 2004
I ordered an XIR remote control reciever for my Xbox some time in March and it arrived on Wednesday. Basically its a PIC chip programmed to power up the Xbox (its looped through the power button cable) when it recieves the correct signal from the Xbox remote control using an IR reciever. It listens for either the Select or Display button to power up when its off and the '0' button to power down when its on. Its a piece of cake to install and works flawlessly. I drilled a small hole in the front of the Xbox and taped the reciever behind it. Its not visible at all from a distance when its under my TV. Its a brilliant little thing, really useful on a modded box when playing games from the HD or using XBMC.
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Track of the day: Lamb - Gabriel
