I have finally managed to upload the video I made from a presentation at the local Linux User Group. The topic is on the running of a Highlands Wireless ISP.
The quality is not the best. The lighting in the room was messing with the camera a bit and the sound is a bit low so you may want to turn up the volume. I am by no means a video expert, I just dumped the footage, whacked on a title and credits then encoded it twice, once to mpeg and the next to xvid.
Hopefully it will be educational/entertaining. Liscensed under a Creative commons By-Sa 2.5 liscense, you have permission to copy, give to folk and edit it so long as you attribute the source and distribute your versions under the same liscense.
Tags: geek, linux, LUG, video | 16.11.2008 19:03 | No Comments
I have booked the accommodation for the Vancouver trip at new year. I will be staying in at the HI Vancouver Downtown hostel from the 30th of December until the 5th of January. There is apparently free WiFi which I will make much use of while I’m there.
The interesting part is I will be staying in a dorm with possibly 3 other people that I don’t know. Hopefully my social skills have increaced.
Tags: accommodation, hostel, RantMeet, vagabonding, Vancouver | 16.11.2008 12:46 | 2 Comments
Last night, I got a phone call asking If I wanted to go bowling. I replied positivly an had my tea. Sortly afterward, another which changed the plan to seeing a band in Glasgow. Fair enough, seeing a random band would be ok.
Franny and Stu picked me up and we sped (pretty quickly) off to Glasgow. Little did I know how interesting this night would be.
The first time we got lost was interesting. I think we went round a roubdabout about 5 or 6 times trying to pick an exit. My phone with its gps capabilities was pretty useless. Franny picked an exit and we drove, further getting lost. Eventually we saw a sign for the city center and followed that.
About 500 meters away from the venue (Carling Academy), a dog ran out into the street. Thankfully, the car infront of us slowed down in time so I don’t think it was hit though I could be wrong. Round the corner, we saw a fox (never seen one before, let alone in the middle of a city) doing its thing. Very strange.
We abandoned the car in a private car park, got our tickets and went in to the gig.
Caught the tail end of the support band, I think they were calld Hotleg. Think hair metal with Justin Hawking as the singer. Not bad but the singing was too high pitched.
The main band were a group called Extreme. With a name like that, I thought it would be death metal or some derivative which had me a bit worried, we were in prime mosh pit space. Thankfully, they were less heavy than I thought.
Two phrases that spring to mind when describing the vocalist are “bust a move” and “strike a pose”. The guy was working the entire stage, swinging the mic stand about, climbing on stacked boxes and even riding the bass amps like a horse at one point.
Not sure hoe to describe their music. Good chunky riffs (for the most part) but the singing was a bit naff in my opinion. Eventually after over an hour and a half of playing, they departed the stage for good and we left for the next interesting phase of the trip, getting home.
We got lost. Franny had no idea how to get back to the motorway so we drove about, taking random roads, almost running a red light (again). After 15 mins of random driving, we found the motorway and got on thinking it would take us back to Perth. Oh how wrong we were.
To give you an idea, we crossed the Fourth Road Bridge.
Eventually we got back to Perth, cruised about for a bit and then I crashed at my house leaving the stoners to do what they do at 1am.
Next time we do this, I’m bringing a real sat-nav.
Tags: Extreme, gig, Hotleg, lost, metal, music, random | 16.11.2008 10:52 | 4 Comments
So I’m sitting in front of my computer and I remembered I was given a guide on how to use the mobile internet functionality of my N95 with an EeePC. I figured I would give it a shot.
I selected PC mode as the usb connection type. Lo’ and behold, NetworkManager picked it right up. Told it I was on the o2 network with a contract, hit apply, disabled the wifi and I was online through my phone.
No terminal, no esoteric config files, just select from a menu and hit a button. Can it really be this easy?! I was looking forward to something more interesting. Oh well.
(This was done with Ubuntu 8.10, Intrepid Ibex, I doubt it would be this easy with an earlier version)
Tags: cool, geek, internet, linux, mobile, ubuntu n95 | 14.11.2008 17:29 | No Comments
Just done a tally of my storage media. I have nearly 2.5 terabytes of data capacity in various hard drives and flash media. Most of it is fairly empty. This is not including the stack of blank cds and dvds.
Think I’m gonna set up a RAID or something similar.
Tags: geek, storage | 13.11.2008 15:56 | No Comments
Had trouble convincing it to run in a virtual machine.
Partitioner is confusing as hell (using cylinders to determine partition size?!)
Install was very fast (10 mins)
FVWM is the default window manager which I hate.
Lacks binaries for libiconv and gettext so gnome won’t install.
Ports system is somewhat confusing
CVS won’t work
No wget! This is blasphemy! Have to use ftp to grab stuff!
OpenBSD is more complicated than Slackware and that is a difficult thing to have. Still, I have the most secure OS avaliable to the general public. I just can’t use it for anything.
Tags: confusion, geek, headdesk, OpenBSD, unix | 7.11.2008 22:51 | 2 Comments
A lot of folk these days are using Gmail as their email provider. There are some good (interface is the best I have used) and bad (the whole cloud computing thing) points to this. An entry on Digg popped up in my news feeds with a link to a program called Gmail Backup. It does exactly what it says. You give it your login details, pick a folder and it dumps all your email into that folder so in the event of Google being evil, you have a backup of all your mail. Very handy.
Comes in both Windows and Linux flavours. The Linux one needs a copy of wxpython installed. There is a command line mac version but it is unsupported.
Tags: backup, cool, email, Gmail, linux, Windows | 5.11.2008 13:56 | No Comments
I have the adapter for my implementation of Project Gargoyle almost done. I just need to aquire a 9 volt battery snap and it will be complete. In the meantime, take a look at my crappy soldering work.
Tags: geek, project gargoyle, soldering | 4.11.2008 18:38 | No Comments
A few days ago I made a mini review of Ubuntu 8.10. In it I said that Transmission lacked a tray icon. I found the option to turn it on. View menu > tray icon. Now all is good. Why that is not on by default I have no idea.
Tags: Transmission | 2.11.2008 10:44 | No Comments