Sunday, February 25, 2007

Kaiser Chiefs @ The Manchester Apollo

On Thursday Pete, Kath, Caroline and myself went to see the Kaiser Chiefs at the Apollo in Manchester.

The first support act were called Ripchord and can only be described as The Beatles on speed with a touch of Geaorge Formby chucked in for good measure. I was not overly impressed.

The second support band were called Th 1990s (I think) and they were much better.

Next was the Kaiser Chiefs who were very good - although not quite as good as the last time I saw them. The set was a mixture of existing material as well as material from their new album which I believe is out tomorrow.

The gig itself was quite short, finishing at approx. 10.45 but it then took us half an hour to get out of the car park!

On the whole then, a very enjoyable evening.

Wednesday, February 14, 2007

Motorola KRZR

Well my Motorola RZR finally gave up the ghost the other night. The battery had been going for a bit and I think that I have had it nearly 2 years. Anyway, on Friday night it finally packed in and will now no longer turn on!

Anyway, Sunday I got around to ringing Vodafone and arranging a phone upgrade. After a good chat about the cheaply available handsets and my requirements, I decided to shell out £25 for a MOTO KRZR.

The phone arrived yesterday, whilst I was out but from using it to make a couple of calls and send some text messages it seems OK.

The thing that did worry me slightly was the slowness of my old RZR but this has been much improved and the clarity of the keypad is far better too. The silver mirror finish puts my black RZR to shame and it certainly looks dated. This finish looks equally good on the included bluetooth headset too.

Talking of bluetooth, the bluetooth connection worked flawlessly when transferring names from my PDA. I'm also glad to see that Motorola have finally decided to implement a 'proper' phone book that allowss you to save multiple numbers with each name.

Jodrell Bank and the Dog Inn

Well yesterday I had a lovely day out with Caroline, taking advantage of my holiday.

It was decided that we should go to Jodrell Bank because we often see the large Lovell Radio Telescope from the motorway.

For the princely sum of £1.50 each we were admitted entry to the small visitors' centre and, after declining tickets for the shows in the '3D Theatre', we had a quick look 'round and watched some videos about the Lovell Telescope - although the screaming kids making a lot of noise made it somewhat difficult to concentrate.

We then had a walk around the base of the Lovell Telescope, which was unfortunately parked and so wasn't much to look at, before have a look at the 'Granada Arboritum' - a rather pleasant landscaped area full of trees.

After having a good look around we ventured off in search of a pub with a humorous name... we had a couple that we had found by trawling the web earlier in the day but the directions (courtesy of the RAC) sucked. We did happen upon 'The Dog Inn' and it was decided that the name was suitably humorous (plus it was in Lower Peover - which is a funny name in itself).

The pub was quite quiet, only a few customers other than us and the service could have been a little quicker but the food was excellent and the atmosphere was lovely too.

Saturday, February 10, 2007

Wolfmother @ The Manchester Apollo

Well, last night we braved the elements and went to the Manchester Apollo to watch Wolfmother.

By the time we reached Domo's in Farnworth, the snow was falling quite heavily but we got some lovely chinese food and then off we went... by the time we reached Manchester the snow had vanished... although this didn't prevent some stupid woman nearly driving into the side of me!

The support act for the evening were called Wolf & Cub. Their set started well... 2 drummers and a prog-rock style! This soon deteriorated into some trashy indie rubbish.

Anyway, the support act was soon finished and Wolfmother came on. Wolfmother were far better and it was most enjoyable. Very loud and some strange 'chicken-dancing' by the lead singer!

Wednesday, February 07, 2007

CUPS and Pykota

I decided a couple of days ago, after reading more about the capabilities of Pykota, that it may be the way forward for print accounting and management. For those not in the know, Pykota is an addon to CUPS (the printing subsystem for Linux) which does lots of clever accounting and reporting stuff on a print server.

Some of the particularly interesting features of Pykota and CUPS are:
* Users are not charged if the job does not print
* Jobs can be 're-processed' to add headers and the like that could include the username!
* Ability to save PDFs of all the jobs printed for keeping an eye on the little darlings
* Windows clients only need a single printer driver - CUPS then converts to the relevant format for the printer

We currently use Print Manager Plus and I don't have an issue with it. I recently upgraded to an MSDE backend and since then it has been VERY stable (not that it was unstable before) and it takes care of charging the little darlings like it should.

The reason that I decided to take the plunge with Pykota though, is mostly cost. The annual software maintenance is approx. £200 and if this cost can be saved it could be better spent elsewhere. There is a nominal fee of €25 for Pykota (I paid £25) which is a kind of donation to get access to the downloads of current and future releases - even just for an initial play it's probably worth it and it supports open software too.

Anyway... software downloaded and armed with a spare server from the cupboard (loaded with hard disks in case I want to start saving PDFs) I began the install.

I'll post more soon... possibly a mini-howto. It's just a bit of a steep learning curve at the moment since I've never run a Linux print server before.

Saturday, February 03, 2007

StumbleUpon

I heard about a great Firefox addon in Linux Format recently called StumbleUpon - you can check it out at https://addons.mozilla.org/firefox/138/

Basically, it gives you a button in the toolbar which you press and you will be sent off to a random web page based upon your pre-defined preferences. This thing is great for finding new sites and general time wasting when there is nothing on TV.