Handy iGoogle gubbin

Just found a handy widgetty-thing for iGoogle that allows you to quickly post a blog entry (e.g. this one).

Sam has a dance in the Windmill

Unfortunately I wasn't there to see this - too busy selling Dave a 'puter. Anyway, Ollie sent me a video of the night's events for your viewing please ;-)

BTW - Ollie has a rubbish phone so sorry about the quality ;-)

Dancing in the dark in Salwick Club

Sorry about the poor quality but it was dark! It is still pretty funny though :-D

The things that people do at 11.30pm eh?

Blakey's Colar

No running away now Blakey!

EduGeek North '08 Conference Pictures

A selection of my pictures can now be found in my EduGeek.net albums at http://www.edugeek.net/forums/members/ric_-albums-edugeek-north-conference-2008.html - a few notes will be added soon (along with comments for the pics).

See if you can see Jenny the Horse too ;-)

Jenny the Horse on her travels again

This weekend, Jenny the Horse went on her travels again... this time for a walk along the Lancaster Canal. This picture was taken as she stopped off for a quick drink of water out of the canal. :-D

A wildlife walk (trialing Google Docs)

I took another walk today to photograph some of the local wildlife.

My camera had decided to go off on one when on Aperture Priority mode which was a pain... everything was under exposed! :-(

Anyway, the wonders of shooting in RAW allowed me to rescue some images and I got some good ones later by switching to manual and keeping a better eye on the shutter speed.

I have decided to add a selection of images using a Google Docs presentation. Here goes ;-)

Jenny the Horse

Named after Jenny at Document Express, Jenny the Horse was taken on a walk today. I thought it only fitting that a horse should have its picture taken in a field ;-)

Sorry Vista... It's turned out well now

It turns out that Vista hadn't shafted my PC after all... the rubbish Western Digital hard disk (that I had previously stolen from a Dell) had died in a major fashion. Being the system disk, this prevented any OS booting :-(

The only upside from doing this is that it forced me to buy a NAS - I got a bargain 750GB Lacie NAS (rackmount) for £160!!! I have put the Samsung Spinpoint from my external caddy into the media centre and installed MCE 2005 (yeas I finally found the disk).

I haven't quite finished re-instlaling eerything but it seems to be working like new again. The lack of Vista bloatedness is making it fly too!

Bloody Vista!

Apart from deciding to go for x64 which caused a whole load of its own issues, Windows last night decided it was time for some updates and the obligitory reboot.

Very kindly of course, Windows waited until the middle of the night to do this, thus waking me in the early hours of the morning when the black screen with bright white writing appeared to inform me that my registry was stuffed. I duly turned off the computer and went back to sleep.

I returned home from work today thinking I would fix the problem. Tried booting 'Last known good configuration' and tried booting 'Safe Mode' but received the same error message over and over.

I went for a hunt around for my Vista media. After a good 15 minutes of searching, I found the disk and booted off it, selecting the repair option. Apparently my system volume had bad sectors. I then restarted my computer and exactly the same problem occurred!

So I booted off the disc again and again it told me that it had to repair my system volume and told me to wait... restart... same again!

Around I go again - note that the process of booting from the DVD takes a while... especially if you forget to press a key when prompted! - and after a couple more attempts and the advanced CLI that I opened up to run chkdsk /F for myself, it eventually tries to fix the registry.

Same message again! I'm starting to get a little annoyed by this point but I persevered to no avail.

My computer is now reinstalling Windows in the faint hope that I might be able to resolve the problem and then perform not too many tasks to get my computer working 'properly' again... at least this might fix my problem with Windows only using one of the tuners in my dual-DVBT card!

Another Walk

Following my little walk on Friday, I decided to go on another walk today. I was a little unsure about the weather but it was warm and sunny and the 24 hour weather forecast showed nothing but overcast skies.

I set out walking, spotted some ducks and got some nice pics with lovely reflections. The weather could have been nicer but I was even able to get some relatively nice landscape shots.

Anyway, about three-quarter's of the way to the Hand and Dagger (my usual point for a half-way pint!), the weather turned and it started to spot on... then we had sleet... then full on snow! How much did that annoy me!?! (I just had a fleece on!). I got a couple of pictures with snow... this one of the lambs was taken while I hid under a canal bridge at Salwick.

Canal Walk

Today I went on another of my little walks down the Lancaster Canal. As always, I took my trusty camera with me (Canon EOS 10D). I came across the usual pair of swans, although they weren't together today.

Just as I noticed the swimming swan, the sun poked its head out. Thinking that the swan would do one, I thought that I would take a picture from the rear to begin with... the swan clearly liked having his picture taken because he turned around and came closer! I thought that it was going to jump out of the water and attack me at one point!

Here's a couple of the pics anyway.

Flexing

My broadband connection through Eclipse (link on the right), allows me to 'flex' the speed up temporarily. Although I know that my line is pretty poor I thought I'd perform a little experiment and given that an hour of flexing to 2Mbit is only 5p at the moment it will hardly break the bank!

I chose Speedtest.net to perform the tests and from there I used the Maidenhead and Dublin servers to test against.

The results were (download/upload):

• Standard speed to Maidenhead = 544kbps/528kbps
• Standard speed to Dublin = 619kbps/528kbps
• Flexed speed to Maidenhead = 692kbps/527kbps
• Flexed speed to Dublin = 652kbps/530kbps

My conclusion from this little test is that my line could handle a little more speed but it is hardly worth the effort (or money) realistically.

If I lived in an area with better lines, nearer to an exchange, this model would be great because you could just flex up when you need to download a big file. I wouldn't be surprised if some people could double their connection speed for that 5p! For me, unless BT get their arses into gear and sort out their infrastructure, I don't think that there is much point in me flexing again.

ADSL Speeds

Today I thought that I would spend some time seeing what sort of speed I actually get on my ADSL line - those of you that know me will be aware of my living out in the sticks and so being limited to an appauling speed :-(

Anyway, as long as I am getting my full 512kbps I'm happy. So off I go to www.speedtest.com and run a few tests. A representative result of my tests to different servers in the UK and overseas gave the following result:

I then decided to run some more tests...

www.speedtest.bbmax.co.uk - 629kbps/531kbps

www.kbps.co.uk - 530kbps/-kbps

From my limited experiment, I can see that the results vary quite a bit but I can pretty safely say that I am getting around 600kbps download and 530kbps upload which IMHO is pretty good for a line tat supposedly is only good for 512kbps ADSL. I particularly like the upload speed that Eclipse Internet gives me :-D

Phillips Pronto Remotes (on Linux!)

Some of you may know about my little project at home which will ultimately mean that that I have a Linn Knekt multiroom sound system, Comfort Alarm system (with home automation stuff) and multiple Pronto remotes.

I recently purchased 5 Prontos from eBay (one for each family member) and now need to program them but have found ProntoEdit to be a PITA to work with... plus it doesn't work on Linux :-(

I have found a project called Tonto (see http://giantlaser.com/tonto/ ) which is written in Java. I haven't fully tested this yet but it does look promising and is supposedly more intuitive. I will update soon on this!

What I will say is how to run the bloody thing in Ubuntu because that was a bugger to set up!


First you need the latest JRE...
apt-get install sun-java6-jre

You then need to extract tonto to /usr/share and edit the tonto.sh file to point to the jre...
JHOME="/usr/lib/jvm/java-6-sun/jre"

Then make the tonto.sh file executable...
chmod +x tonto.sh

Then simply run tonto.sh and the job should be a good 'un ;-)

More on LinuxMCE

Since my recent foray into attempting to set up LinuxMCE I have purchased a second-hand Hauppage HVR-1100 tuner. This has much better support in Linux! It should be noted that IMHO the picture quality on the GDI BlackGold cards is far better and less affected by poor signal quality.

The only difficulty I had was that I had to recompile the Video4Linux DVB drivers - I believe that this is an Ubuntu problem but it isn't exactly hard to do ;-)

Anyway, I re-installed LinuxMCE and it works quite well... I'm undecided whether to switch back to vanilla Linux with MythTV or not though - I'm not using LinuxMCE to its full potential and I haven't got time to investigate more at the moment.

LinuxMCE

I recently spotted a news item on AutomatedHome about the new release of LinuxMCE (http://www.automatedhome.co.uk/Software/LinuxMCE-0704-Released.html). Basically, the project aims to be a Linux replacement for Microsoft's Windows Media Center Edition... with extra bells and whistles.

I have been using Windows MCE for almost 2 years and I have found it great as a PVR using my two GDI Black Gold digital tuner cards. I have found that it is a bit limited though... particularly if you want to intergrate it with other systems.

One of the biggest of these drawbacks is extending it to other rooms - this requires a Microsoft Media Extender and even then you can't watch live TV in the secondary room. With LinuxMCE, thin client devices boot from the 'core' machine and media can follow you around the home... this can be seen to good affect in the video on the LinuxMCE site.

Anyway... I checked compatibility for my existing hardware and all seemed well... I downloaded the quickstart ISO (a DVD featuring Kubuntu and LinuxMCE - which is itself a collection of several other projects) which took an age due to its size!

I proceeded to install the distro on my PC and all went well until the initial hardware setup wizard began. No output on the screen! I tried every combination of the number keys to get a resolution that my DVI-connected TFT would accept to no avail. I then tried the second DVI port on my graphics card and it worked straight away! That was a serious schoolboy error!!!

I then followed the rest of the setup wizard (which includes a number of video with a lovely woman telling you what to do) but at no point were my TV cards detected :-(

By reading the dmesg output it seems that my card type isn't automatically detected. This has been my major stumbling block as there seems to be nothing on the net about my particular card in Linux. By editting the modprobe.conf I have successfully got Linux to recognise one of my cards but that is as far as I can get.

I cannot seem to make the card play any further... either through the LinuxMCE wizard or MythTV. I'm not going to give up now that I have got this far and I'm hoping to have an influx of people telling what to do. An update will be forthcoming when I crack it ;-)

Neglecting my blog

I've let things slip a little and haven't updated my blog for a while... partly because I have been busy with bits and pieces and partly because I haven't done anything of any particular interest :-(

Anyway, I will try to remedy that soon.

In the meantime, a quick note... I found a dual-head PCI-X graphics card (in fact it is a quad-head card!) although Beryl isn't playing yet. I have also spent a bit of time playing with Joomla for the work's website - some nice pics there too now :-)

VMWare Server (Part 1)

Also tonight I have installed VMWare Server on my Debian Etch laptop. After my last attempt, when Etch was still Testing and the kernel headers were conspicuous by their absence, I was surprised with the ease with which it installed.

This has given me a cunning plan for my new workstation at work... I have just purchased a HP ML350 G3 to use as a workstation and I think I will now install Debian Etch onto that too so that I get the groovy eye candy and the power of Linux. My Windows admin tasks could then be performed in a VM running Windows Server. My idea of running Server is so that I can install Citrix and connect in to that remotely to access things - rather than using the generic server farm that I would have to share with all the other lusers ;-)

Now I just need to find a PCI-X dual-head graphics card with 3D capability to run my twin NEC MultiSync LCDs :-D

Part 2 will tell of my success ;-)

Citrix Fun

If anybody doesn't already know... I love Citrix!

Anyway... since getting my X60 laptop, I haven't been able to run the ICA Client :-( It turns out that this is a known bug to do with UTF-8 locales - something that Etch uses by default.

After trying the recommended work arounds to no avail, I discovered that the only bit that wasn't working was the selection of the applications from the browse list (ignoring the warning messages when running wfmgr from the command line).

If I type the application name in manually, I can connect to my applications.... YAY!!!

I know that this configuration isn't ideal but I can put up with it for now because it works. I was a little dissapointed not to have any replies to my post on the Citrix forums though :-( Usually you get a response within the hour (and a good response at that!)