Well at 0610 (ish) this morning I became an uncle. well done sis!

little ella lousie.

the pic is taken with a camera phone.

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Well its all done now - no problems with the overclock - all runs fine with xbench and Glucas.
heres the proof

Kudos to stoo for the deft de-soldering skills

more pics

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Apple arn’t streaming the keynote live but they are a few websites that say they will give transcription updates. However macintouch has just had this posted up on it

“Dan D. emailed us about his live Macworld keynote coverage:

Just an FYI, not sure if it matters. I will be offering live keynote coverage during the Macworld keynote presentation. Might be something your readers will want.
  I will not be posting any ads, or soliciting money - this is just a service I am doing at my expense to the mac faithful.”

fingers crosssed it delivers the goods

Well thats all done and all my software updates done now

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Well according to the news - Golden
Wonder have gone into administration.  Now I know
that this maybe isn’t the biggest news you’ve seen all week but the
fact remains that the last mainstream competitor to the behemoth that
is Walkers Snacks.

I don’t know how many of you out there have noticed but it is very
difficult to walk into a small corner shop or local newsagent and buy a
packet of crisps that are not walkers. The fact that they have bought
up all the brands they possibly could only adds to the problem
(remember smiths salt’n’shake with the little blue
bag?? - walkers). I also am eternally annoyed by the fact that these
buggers took it upon themselves to redesign the colour/flavour
combinations of the bags (b3ta funny). Pre - walkers we had
green for cheese and onion,  blue for salt and vinegar etc etc
but no they had to change them all.

Now I hvae been trying to get people to stop buying walkers. Ive been
doing this for the past 3 years. It’s actually more difficult than you
may think as the kids that grow up don’t seem to know any other brand
and are completely unaware of the colour/flavour change. Plus one has
to actually check the back of the packets to make sure it isn’t walkers
as they own everything now - the biggest issue for other crisp makers
is the distribution, walkers have have a monopoly and are founf in most
shops - squeezing out the smaller companies.

So well unless there is a rescue package or a buyer for Golden Wonder
then it can be placed carefully ontop of the scrap heap of gone crisp
makers, along with tudor and kp.  Try this little crisp quiz.

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Well christmas is coming and i feel distinctly un-christmasy, dunno why but it just feels nothing like christmas, meh. Anyways ive decided to flog the thinkpad and purchase a shiny macintosh - it wont be a new one as i see no point buying one now when apple are going to be releasing the Intel macs soon enough, anyway it makes sense to try before i stump up “new-apple-monay”.

On the note of apple - caits finally got her replacement ipod from the insurance company. We had been waiting for them to replace the (hideous) pink ipod mini for months - it turns out they cant get their hands on an ipod mini and therefore offered her the nano - but she would have to wait for a couple of weeks untill they got them, she told them this wasnt good enough and now the jammy little sod has been given a stunning 30GB new Ipod - the one that does video, pics, choons etc etc etc.

Now as some of you may know but traditionally i hate Ipods - pure form over function. No dedicated volume buttons and therefore no way to turn down the volume when in the middle of a menu, (very!!) limited codec support, and the fact that i simply cant stand itunes (admititdly this is on win32).

I dont know what they’ve done - i love this one, i mean the video playback is stunning and the audio quality finally seems to be upto a level i could call excellent (tried with me shure earphones - damm good) - it nearly sounds as good as the excellent (but prone to dieing) Rio karma. So in short i want one.

On that note here comes the spam :- a couple of mates down south have participated in this promotion and have both recieved free ipods. To be honest theres also a couple of good deals on it too - for instance free dvd rentals for 30days from online dvd companies. Anyways i’ll let you have a looksie for yourselves.

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On a brief note - there has been quite a bit of activity on the overclockers uk debacle , check it out if you have ever used them and experienced problems or if you like add your story about them there as well.

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Ok, I’ve been pushing people to use Linux as an alternative OS for a couple of years now, but recently ive decided to stop and change my approach, I realised that its not people not using *nix that annoys me when i do a job for a friend or family but its the lack of a home network. Now i know that some people are gonna take the whole “not everyone needs a home network” approach but i think that’s rubbish. My setup at the moment has grown out of adding bits and to make my life easier, always on debian box in attic with all files on it being shared via samba to debian/windows dual p3 machine, a debian/windows centrino thinkpad via wifi and the chipped xbox under the telly connected to all the files across the LAN.

I even bought an mp3 player (Rio Karma) that has a RJ45 port on its docking station and grabbed an old HP Laserjet4 printer with JetDirect server from ebay. What this means is that anyone who comes here can have full access to all the bits and bobs that one generally needs, contrast this to other peoples setups and i find myself thinking “fuck how do i do this?” when i need to do something - there are other solutions but most things can be accomplished with the minimum of fuss across a network. And with Telewest upgrading my broadband to 10Mbps the divider between “Internet” and “home LAN” is blurring very very quickly - in fact if i still had my old thinkpad there would be a real chance that the bottleneck would have been the 11Mbps 80211a. The printer server itself is only on a 10Mbps.

The point of all this is that we live in a networked world. We always have done and we always will, humans communicate - it makes us human and networks allows us to do this at great speeds and distances with minimum effort, i knew very very little about networks until i got into Linux and im sure that these two (networks and Linux) are very comfortable bedfellows, after all Linux is a Unix clone - Unix is a true network OS. So my new approach?? - promote home networks - the Linux bit will soon follow.

Oh btwon the topic of networks have a look at the wifi survey myself and a friend carried out in Dundee (most of these networks on here were found and plotted by ourselves - not all of the features work on all browsers on all OS’s yet - click the link for the old maps if this is the case.)

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Well i thought id better stick up a post in order to justify this site still being here . On a plus note we finally got the insurance sorted out for the stuff that got nicked a couple of months ago. The insurance company furnished me with a nice shiny (well black and death looking) IBM Thinkpad T43, which is a nice update from the T41 that got thieved - all nicely debianised as well now. New xbox and camera - although what the insurance company deemed a fair replacement isn’t what we would have said. But with a little extra cash i managed to get a coolpix 4600 which i suppose will do until i get the Olympus E1 I’m after .

+++++MISSING CAT++++++

Alfie the cute little swine of a cat that people always seem to comment on has been missing for a couple of days, although this doesn’t sound much for a cat - this little bugger always returns for food and warmth and attention, so this isn’t like him at all. The girlfriend is quite worried and I’m just hoping he’ll turn up soon !!!!

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Have just got back from a Henri Cartier-Bresson exhibition in Edinburgh. He’s been my favourite photographer for as long as i can remember and this exhibtion is there to celebrate his life and work, as he unfortunately past away last year.

He has an unnerving knack of managing to portray so many different emotions all in a single image and his work is very enjoyable to see. The exhibiting is at the Dean Gallery in Edinburgh and tickets can be booked on-line and collected from the hub, it runs until the 23rd October, with adult tickets a bargain at £5 each. Without reservation I can recommend this as a great way to spend a couple of hours.

Cheers Caits for the tickets, taxiing and lunch.

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Nintendo DS booting DS Linux

Image by jepstone.

Now heres a good reason to get my hands on a Nintendo DS, small clamshell machine with nix shoved on it- nice.

Seriously tho, the next buy is going to have to be some driving lessons, after blitzing around the garden in Rose Cottage when on holiday i can definitley say that i have a natural talent for it (im a bloke im bound to say that tho - Caits seem’s to disagree tho, afterall it was her car). Then i can get a lovely series 2 Land Rover and LPG it - design classic and suitably geekily different.

On a different note were still waiting for the insurance company to organise its paperwork so im still laptopless and chipped xboxless - oh how i miss XBMC networked to the debian box in the attic.

Thievin’ bastards.

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