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
I really don't use Twitter much at all. It's one of those things, like Facebook, that I just signed up to more-or-less on a whim. But with all the stability and performance problems they've been having recently (and the flak they've been taking in the press, I understand) I'm hoping that they pull through. You … Continue reading Whither Twitter
If I see or hear one more reference to something being a "perfect storm" I think I'm going to be sick.
It doesn't take much to see just how rubbish I am at this blogging thing. The last few months have been full of interesting happenings, and the blog has been silent. I'm not going to embarrass myself by saying "I'll do more frequent updates, really I will" because I know it won't happen. Oh well, … Continue reading Slack blogger
I'm in the US right now, for a work conference and some meetings. It's been an interesting trip already: a non-eventful flight over (when I was expecting it to be really bad having not flown economy to the US before, yes I know I'm spoilt), and a fascinating and very enjoyable tour of Los Angeles … Continue reading USA travel!
I wrote about Zeroshell, and how I thought it was pretty great. I still do, but it hasn't taken centre-stage in my network configuration like I thought it would. I've had to tone down my raves about some of its integrated features as well. The fact that it hasn't taken centre-stage is possibly as much … Continue reading Zeroshell redux
I'm running Debian on a Linksys NSLU2 storage device, and it works really well in general. So well in fact that a lot of the time I forget the thing is even there! It's sitting in the garage minding its own business, serving out video and music files, and storing backups of the other systems … Continue reading When Upgrades Go Wrong
A couple of weeks ago I had bootup problems with my old Sony laptop. I had replaced the hard disk in it last year (February), and everything was pointing to another busted hard disk. First time I'd had a machine outlive two hard disks! :(Sure enough, I put a different disk in the laptop and … Continue reading Laptop hard disk replacement, part one