S went to print some photos the other day, and what was supposed to have been a simple exercise turned out to be a very frustrating one for both of us. I was utterly amazed to discover that even on the eve of 2009 there are web sites that think the world is only viewed … Continue reading Photo printing pain
Category: Technology
Tech stuff goes here!
I held out for a long, long time. I'd even talked myself entirely out of getting one. Like they say in the classics though, "you think you've escaped, but they pull you back in". I now have a 32GB iPod touch and it's doin' alright, even though it took me nearly a week before I … Continue reading Living with an iPod touch
Newcomers to UNIX-like operating systems are often confused by the difference between the shell operations pipe and redirection. The difference is easily explained with an example, in the context of web development. The shell command echo "st=1" | ./lifeswork.pl shows how a pipe is used to supply command line input to a script usually invoked … Continue reading The difference between pipe and redirection
I was about to post about how pleased I was with Synergy in helping me tidy up my desktop clutter (by removing a keyboard and mouse from the surface). Ironically, I'm instead posting about a problem with the configuration that will cause me to throw it out and look for something else. Why the title? … Continue reading Security blows
I had a failure of my Cacti system over the weekend, entirely caused by bad Gentoo emerges. Two different problems, both caused by bad upgrades of packages brought in from ~amd64 or ~x86, made Cacti colourfully dysfunctional for a couple of days.The first was an update to the spine resource poller, part of the Cacti … Continue reading Sometimes, Gentoo bites
I have been in the mobile phone market on-and-off for nearly 12 months. There wasn't really anything wrong with the N70, I guess I was just getting a little fidgety with lots of new "shiny" going around. The trip to the US in May, and seeing an iPhone in person for the first time, probably … Continue reading New gadget: Nokia E71
Thanks to work, I am now the possessor of a rather cool piece of kit: a tablet PC. It's a Mobile Computing LE1700, and I'm quite impressed with how it works. The big question though is of course... Will it run Linux?At the moment it's still running Windows XP Tablet Edition, but that's only because … Continue reading Motion Computing Tablet PC
Way back in May I had a hard disk in my laptop fail, and after the warranty replacement disk showed up it took me a few days to get around to doing the replace. It didn't get off to a very good start though... In the past when I've done this kind of recovery I … Continue reading Laptop hard disk replacement, part two
Sometimes when working with computers and networks (as with most things in life) the thing that causes the most problem is the last thing you suspect--or often something you never suspected. I had a reminder of this the other day, when a moderately complex task I'd set myself looked to be scuppered for absolutely no … Continue reading Don’t you hate it when defaults change?
Over the last fortnight I finally got the wriggle-on to upgrade all my (K)Ubuntu systems to Hardy Heron. Various issues occurred with each of them, but overall the entire exercise went smoothly (my wife's little old Fujitsu Lifebook was probably smoothest of the lot). I had one rather vexing issue however, on my old (I'm … Continue reading Ubuntu 8.04 Wireless Weirdness
Crossed Wires 