Category Archives: Technology

sucker for toys…

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Yes I know It’s been all quiet on the blogging front for quite some time!

Many things have changed, new house, new phone, new laptop, new toys galore….

My latest toy is an Arduino board. I first discovered them almost two and a half years ago. (According to my bookmarks on Del.ico.us) However I never ventured any further than just reading about them.
Then after a recent MSN conversation with my good friend Dave, I decided it was time!

I’ll post some more info on this, once the board arrives, should be a few days away though, as it’s a new revision of the Arduino board, and nowhere has stock.

Stay Tuned!….

development makes jack a dull boy??

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I have to say, the Debian team (Or should I say the GNU community!) have out done themselves, Debians latest offering is by far the most user friendly version i’ve used.

After using the latest testing release for about 5 hours last night, I’m now downloading the latest stable release (v4r3) to setup a LAMP server.

As for the title “development makes jack a dull boy??” per haps it should have read “development makes Linux more user friendly!”

time for debian?

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Well I figure I must be time for my yearly encounter with Debian Linux, it seems every year I devote an afternoon to installing and working with Debian.

I’ve downloaded the weekly testing DVD set, now it’s time to fire it up on a virtual machine, and dive back into manually configuring hardware! Wohooooo!

consoles galore!

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For months since the Nintendo Wii came out, I swore blind i’d never get one, however today, here I am with a brand new Wii sat on the kitchen table, staring me in the face!

So at home that’s console number 3, just need to find somewhere to put it, so it fits in with the Xbox 360 and the PS3.

 

I’m interested in seeing Tiger Woods 08, plus I fancy challenging Hast to a spot of darts! The Wii should also be fun for the Mrs, as the 360 and the PS3 seems to be mainly aimed at lads.

 

Time to start unplugging cables and rearrange the beast that is, my media setup.

Vista Service Pack 1

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Today I was lucky enough to receive a copy of Windows Vista Service Pack1 via my MSDN subscription. So after a 25 minute download, I fired up the installer, and was greeted by a screen welcoming me to the service pack. After a few simple clicks, the installer stared and told me that the process could take an hour or so.

So I waited……..

Then waited some more…..

 

Almost two hours pass with a total of 3 reboots, (This machine isn’t a terrible machine either, AMD dualcore 4800 with 2gb RAM, running Windows Vista Business x64)

However post service pack install, everything is running smoothly, and I have to say I’m impressed, the random drive writes have stopped, plus the nagging security warning on the rdp client can finally be turned off!

 

Lets see how Vista performs over a working day…………..

/home storage & multimedia

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Yet another day is upon us, and it’s another day to spend tinkering with Ubuntu on the eee!

After reading many a discussion on the eee user forums I decided to mount my 8GB SDHC card as my /home folder. This gives me more personal storage & saves disk writes to the internal SSD, As I already had Ubuntu installed, I followed this post here – Mount SDHC as /home

So far everything has worked perfectly, and i’ve had no umount problems that some users have encountered. All I can do is monitor it for the next few days, but so far… so good!!

The next thing I wanted to do was intall the Skype2 beta (With video support) and also install so multimedia codecs, There is a software repo setup just for this. Medibuntu, I simply followed the repository how-to and i was all set.

I installed the following packages;
acroread – Adobe Acrobate Reader
skype – Skype Internet Telephony
w32codecs – Video & Audio codecs, such as windows media
non-free-codecs – Not too sure whats in this one, but figured it couldn’t hurt!!

For a full list of available packages from Medibuntu have a look at their packages page available here – Medibuntu packages

new blog… new platform… new laptop!

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Welcome to my new blog, i’ll be posting my experiences with my latest gadget, an Asus EEE.

I’ve recently purchased an EEE701 4GB model in black, i’ve upgraded the RAM to 2GB from the stock 512MB. I used a stick of 2GB Kingston DDR2 667mhz SODIMM, and also purchased a Kingston Class6 8GB SDHC memory card.

After upgrading the RAM, the first thing I did was remove the default Xandros based distro and installed a copy of Ubuntu 7.10.

So far the following sites have guided me along my way;
Ubuntu EEE Help Page
EEE User Forum

As i find more useful sites and tidbits of info, i’ll post them here.