Ubuntu FTW!

The hard-drive on my laptop died so I decided to take the plunge and install Ubuntu on it. Now, my laptop doesn't have an optical drive on it (or have an external drive either) so this meant I was going to have to do a USB or Network install. I'd installed Fedora (Core 8 I think) from a USB Flash key previously but I remember the process being a bit drawn out and convoluted. Luckily this time however I found UNetbootin (see links for details). This app allows you easily create a bootable imag...

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March 5, 2009 11:11 AM

Golden handshake

After almost six years of loyal service my desktop PC has been retired. At the time when I got it it was considered medium -> high spec: Pentium 4 1.8 GHz CPU 1Gb RAM Recently though it had really been showing its ages, particularly when trying to perform multiple tasks at once. With this in mind I started to research the current hardware and ended up building and buying (via Cumbernauld Computers) the following: Intel Q6600 Quad Core CPU 4Gb RAM 8800GT Video Card Asus P5K series Mo...

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June 12, 2008 9:26 AM

Wii with Linksys WAG200G

A quick note on how to get the Wii Wifi to work with a Linksys WAG200G Wireless ADSL Router. There didn't seem to be much on Google apart from a few badly translated pages from Dutch forums etc. 1. THIS IS THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP! Wii doesn't seem to support WPA2 AES (this took me a while to figure out) from this router. It only supports WEP or WPA (TKIP). Obviously you don't want to use WEP so WPA it is. 2. Auto detect SSID. It should do this by default anyway. 3. Manually set IP Addy,...

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April 15, 2008 8:02 PM

Farewell my faithful Beast

So I finally bit the bullet and decomissioned my old server. It was long overdue as it was starting to sound a bit agricultural i.e. like a tractor. I guess I could've replaced the fans, which were the source of the noise but "the beast", as I liked to call it, was built in the days before power usage were a consideration. On the few times I opened it up it's power supply seemed to be some sort of ex Soviet Bloc reactor. I suspect that efficiency was not high on the designers list of priorities....

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February 16, 2008 10:17 AM

Number one bad boy

Hello, Please find attached a complaint that we have received, alleging that you are infringing copyright via your service with us. As the material does not appear to be hosted on our servers, we do not intend to take any action. However we did think that you should be aware of this as you may wish to reconsider your use of our service in this way. If you have any questions relating to the complaint, we would suggest that you take them up with the complainant directly. You shou...

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July 17, 2006 8:09 PM

Back in business again!

After a good few weeks of technical problems, infact over a month I've got my server and therefore this website etc up and running. It has been one problem after another and TBH at the moment I still don't trust the box not to freak out - it's died, seemingly randomly, at least three times unexpectedly so far. On the plus side it has encouraged me to write a backup script which I will run religously. I lost over 6Gb of music, pictures, movies etc when the last one went South. I still haven't giv...

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December 1, 2004 11:02 PM

Cool wrapping

The cool line breaks below are cos my editor was set "wierd". Sorted.

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September 19, 2004 11:09 PM

Lists, lists and more lists

I don't think I mentioned it anywhere, infact I'm sure I didn't so...........the old IBM Harddrive (a Deskstar Pro gpx37) on my Windoze box had been giving me trouble for a long time; bad clusters etc. On Friday night it decided to die, nuking a lot of important system stuff in the process, so much so that it couldn't boot etc. I thought about reinstalling on the same drive but I decided to use the new 120Gb "bad boy" I bought last weekend - sweet. For some reason clean installs of X...

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September 19, 2004 11:08 PM

Back in business

Server was offline for about 36 hours :-( It must have flaked out during the day. The first thing I noticed was that squid wasn't available from in my work. No probs I thought, try SSH. Noope. So at this point I was thinking that the USB had had some sort of buffer overflow, which it seems to every couple of months and therefore takes down the ADSL modem but when I got home the power lights were off. No probs, switch it on. Oh dear, it can't find the hard drive. Go into the CMOS, reset it. Found...

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September 3, 2004 11:02 AM

X-Factor

I dunno if I mentioned previously but a few months ago I tried to upgrade the installation on this server (a RedHat 9 box), to include the X/graphical environment. Now the reason I wanted to do this was so that I could install Oracle 9i using the graphical Java client that comes with the installation discs. Anyway, when I tried the upgrade all seemed to go well but when I rebooted the machine I got all sorts of Linux type errors: missing modules, files etc and you just know that trying to fix it...

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May 11, 2004 8:44 AM

Webcam is fubar, I repeat fubar

As predicted the webcam is fubar. Is seems to be having problems with the USB drivers and is locking up after about tem minutes; helpfully spitting out nonsense such as: "usb_control/bulk_msg: timeout" "v4l2: open /dev/video0: Device or resource busy v4l2: open /dev/video0: Device or resource busy v4l: open /dev/video0: Device or resource busy no grabber device available" You wouldn't have these problems with Windoze ;-)

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March 29, 2004 6:20 AM

Bah humbug

I'm getting problems with the webcam. It appears to be f**king up the USB ADSL modem I'm using. I've seen this before on Macs with the same make of USB modem but when using a USB printer at the same time. It just seems to unload the driver or drop the connection etc etc. Only a reboot fixes it. Early days yet but it ain't looking good.

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March 27, 2004 9:22 AM

Crikey

"You acknowledge that Software is not designed, licensed or intended for use in the design, construction, operation or maintenance of any nuclear facility." - locks a lordy, my botty's on fire!!!

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January 12, 2004 10:11 PM