I meant to post this yesterday:
<@flange> so, i hear you can get any gtld you want now apart from .cheezburger
<@flange> icann has .cheezburger
Will needs shooting for that one.
What Jessie Did Next...
...being the inane ramblings of a mundane Yorkshire bird.
Tag: geek (page 4 of 13)
I installed a replacement 2.5″ SATA drive in my MacBook yesterday, and connected the old disk via USB to run Apple Migration Assistant and transfer all my stuff over. All went well and in 3 hours I was back up and running.
One big weirdie was with Parallels 3 (this was build 5600) which suddenly couldn’t find any network interfaces and wouldn’t let me put it in Shared Networking Mode. This seems to be because the startup service isn’t “there” any more (AMA didn’t transfer it for some reason), and a reinstall of Parallels over the top didn’t work.
Solution was to deinstall Parallels (use the “Uninstall” script which comes with the download) and then install it again. Worked fine, although it re-IP’d my virtual network interface.
Still, very impressed with the Migration Assistant – it even did the apps I’d forgotten about leaving me with a fully working system in a short space of time.
Edit: Something else that doesn’t transfer properly is the 3G software for the Vodafone 3G dongle. Re-run it and it’ll reinstall the modem and network devices, and set itself up properly.
Retail therapy ftw. After the beer-meets-Macbook incident I figured a laptop which was cheaper, smaller and more portable that I could use in the pub would be a good idea. Enter the Asus EeePC 901, a tiny Intel Atom-powered laptop with 20G of SSD (no moving disk!), wireless, bluetooth, and a ridiculously long battery life. I picked mine up abroad after getting cold feet on my order from purelygadgets.co.uk, adding an extra gig of RAM.
The unit itself is lovely, very pleased – bit weird having no ambient sound, total silence since there’s no disk! The keyboard isn’t too small, certainly large enough for what I want to use it for (namely, coding when out and about when I can’t drag the MacBook with me). It came without the RAM fitted but ten minutes with a screwdriver sorted that out. Unlike reports on other UK models it seems to have the ZIF connector inside indicating I can add a 5mm 1.8″ ZIF hard disk (the sort which go in 5th-generation iPods) without too much hassle however I’m not sure if the secondary (16GB) SSD and the ZIF drive can coexist. There’s also solder points for a SIM card slot and what looks to be space for a GPS. No wonder folks are saying this is the most hackable EeePC yet!
It comes with a fork of Xandros Linux with all the “dangerous” bits removed, slimming it down to create a slim kiosk-like system with Firefox, StarOffice, Skype, Google Apps and stuff. Unfortunately the dangerous bits are the very bits I want, so using the preinstalled OS is out of the question really.
Digging around, the Eee User Wiki provided lots of information about distributions of Linux which may work: trouble is the 901 is so new it’s not had much chance to be “in the wild”. Being a Debian user my first choice was Debian EeeOS but after digging for a while I couldn’t find much information on what might be supported or not, so the next logical step was to look at Ubuntu Eee.
Wow. Very good. My attempts to get my MacBook to write a bootable image to a USB stick failed so I connected up an external USB2 DVD-rewriter and booted from that. Straight into Ubuntu, fresh install (using the primary 4GB SSD as boot, the 16GB SSD as /home) and bob’s yer uncle. No problems at all.
Well, I say “no problems”. Here’s how I solved some of the more interesting issues:
- For most problems including ethernet and wireless, look here.
- I used the NDISwrapper method of getting wireless working. Internal ethernet is still being a pain in the arse but it’s not essential.
- The webcam and bluetooth are switched off by default in the BIOS. Enabling both reveals a Bluetooth icon in Gnome, and you can use the app ‘cheese’ to take photos or video (it’s like Photo Booth on the Mac).
- Install the custom kernel – it makes things a hell of a lot nicer! Info here.
- A friend suggested the shutdown fix – otherwise the damn thing stays alive when hitting shutdown despite blank screen etc.
- Sometimes going into supend fails if I use the fn-1 hotkey. Power button and selecting ‘Suspend’ works though.
- Unrelated to the Eee specifically but when installing Mulberry I had some fonts/labels disappearing. This is due to installing Mulberry in a different place to where it suggests, so $HOME/.mulberry is not found. You need to rsync $mulberrydir/.mulberry to $HOME/.mulberry which fixed it all for me.
(*snogs* to bgeek who pointed me at some of these resources.)
In all of this I did discover it had a fan, while restoring a MySQL database and giving it a hard thrashing. Mmm, a little toasty there.
This weekend is the first real test when I’m away without my MacBook. If that’s fine, I shall consider this a success!
There’s such a concept as overdoing the geek thing.
As documented recently, my Macbook Pro had a bit of an accident with a glass of beer the other week and I’m awaiting a replacement keyboard. The MacBook itself is out of warranty and I can do the switch myself for roughly £50. However, at the same time I thought I’d upgrade the internal drive, so I bought a larger SATA drive to fit.
I had some spare time last weekend so wanted to do the reinstall while life is a little quieter. However, the keyboard hadn’t arrived and I didn’t want to have to pull the MBP apart twice. I thus hit upon the idea of using the SATA drive with an external interface (this one from Maplin).
I connected it up to the MacBook (running 10.5.4) and it detected fine. Partitioned it for system installation and commenced a Leopard install from DVD media. So far so good. Once completed, I installed iWork ’08 and Logic Pro (the latter taking 6 hours to install – it does come on 7 DVDs!). Then came Apple System Update which attempted to install lots of things including the combo 10.5.4 update. Bear in mind the drive is running on USB still.
Reboot time. It sits, spinning its cog and showing the grey apple for, ooh, 3 hours. No response from the disk. Must have done something wrong, so I disconnect and reboot back to the internal disk. I download the 10.5.4 combo update and install manually to the SATA drive (still on USB, still recognising from my MacBook Pro running 10.5.4).
Reboot. Sits spinning again.
I start it into verbose mode (command-V on boot), which shows me that it ‘forgets’ the USB interface a little way into the boot sequence. Bugger. So it seems I have found a bug in 10.5.4 which happens only when booting from an external USB drive (if I plug it in when it’s booted from the internal disk it’s fine, and I can do what I want to the disk!).
There’s images documenting it here. If anyone with a little more Apple boot-fu than I have can offer advice that would be good. I’ve attempted without any other USB devices present and still get the same effect. I’ve not tried the disk internally yet, although it does check out fine under Disk Utility.
It’s been a bugger of a week, so I’ve gone in for a little retail therapy after being caught short without a login on Wednesday afternoon (theoretically time off but you know how it is).
One Asus Eee PC 901 with 20G SSD on the way. It’s in white, but beggars can’t be choosers. If you’re hunting one yourself this site is useful.
Update: I ordered from purelygadgets.co.uk. A brief Google suggests this was a bad idea, but I will post further information as and when something happens.
My Palm TX started causing me issues on the digitiser a month or two back: namely it doesn’t work, or it only senses at the bottom of the digitiser thinking it’s the top of the screen.
Despite some rather useful links, cleaning around it, installing ‘fix software’, etc. it’s refusing to work although I haven’t had the back off yet (need a torx 5 and the smallest I have is an 8).
Does anyone have a Palm TX which the digitiser works on please, and which they wouldn’t mind parting with? The annoying thing is that the Palm runs my TomTom install, and has the extra maps on which I can’t transfer… thus if it’s properly broken, it will be an expensive outing to sort out!
Edit: I took the back off, and it appears to be something pressing on the back of the digitiser. Whether that means it’s a loose connection or just the digitiser being too compressed I don’t know, but at least it’s a temporary fix.
I have today dealt with three separate telecommunication companies. Large companies, who you’d have thought could get it right.
Without exception all three have been sluggish, faceless and monolithic, and have finished either making less out of the deal by the end of the conversation, or ended up without the business altogether. Especially silly when you consider I’ve been ready to sign contracts and things, and finished the discussion wishing I’d never bothered to make the call to sales or support in the first place. In one case, I ended up going round in circles for 2 hours (presumably in Bangalore) before finding an operative who actually knew what they were on about – and even then had to phone 5 separate departments to get information before I could do anything else.
My experience over the past 15 years of dealing with telcos is that there aren’t any out there who are competent or refrain from pigeonholing customers – maybe one day though. However, I’m not holding my breath.
As I stated a couple of weeks back, UKnot is leaving my custody after 10 years (almost to the day – I started work at Mailbox on 12th May 1998).
So the time has come, and on Friday it will be moving to a new server outside my remit, complete with a new mailman installation – so don’t come pestering me about subscriptions, talk to Maulkin!
(Although this has been long overdue, sadly it’ll mean the end of the ‘X-Conspiracy’ and ‘X-Cunt: Yes’ headers. Boo!)
I got round to putting Haven Viewdata back online this evening. The user file is a bit corrupt but I think i’ve managed to fix that.
Have fun 🙂
Earlier this year I was given some MDFS kit. Manufactured by SJ Research, this was a modular Econet fileserver system which didn’t require a host computer (the MDFS controller did all that) and you could just attach drives and printers to it – very advanced for its time and the hardware even matched. All told I had three MDFS controller units, a few drive units, a tape drive and a dual 5.25″ drive unit. Add to that the three (!) printed manuals and 5.25″ floppy software and I’ve got what can probably be said to be a complete system with spares!
So having a little spare time I got mine working. The first thing was getting the MDFS controller running: these have CMOS battery backup that charges over time, but given they’d been switched off for some years it was all corrupted. Simple fix, hold down the ‘RELEASE’ button for 5s and it’ll clear.
Next thing – talk to it. SJ Research were pretty forward-thinking so you can do rudimentary utility control through the serial port allowing disk format, copy, initialise, resetting password file, set Econet station number, all that sort of thing. It takes a 5-pin domino RS423 connector which is coincidentally the same as in a BBC Micro so I had one available, and it only took 5 minutes to reset it all.
The SCSI drives were a bit more complex. One of the slices worked straight off giving me two Fujitsu SCSI drives (40MB and 100MB), but the other disk slice with the Rodime RO752 drive was defective. I did however have a Morley external hard disk unit from an Acorn A3000 which had a SCSI drive in – further investigation yielded a Seagate ST277N-1, which with a few jumper changes and when that didn’t work a quick hunt for the jumper settings on the ‘Net, made a third drive of 60MB.
All formatted, passwords set, and… ‘*I AM SYST’ worked fine across on the workbench BBC Master!
So, it’s all racked up now. The A4000 is the older fileserver, the A5000 is there for assistance in copying 5.25″ floppies. Hooray!
Photos here.
I’ve just been having a look at the contents of those LVROM discs – aside from the Countryside Disc I mean.
I have three volumes of ‘Energy Curriculum Pack’, produced by the British Nuclear Forum and distributed by Eltec; inside each pack there are a few floppy discs, a laserdisc and an instruction manual. Reading the requirements they’ve been designed for an Acorn A3000 hooked up to a Philips VP406 player (not the same one as the Domesday System), together with a serial interface (RS232), genlock and memory upgrade inside the A3000. The system itself is referred to as LaserStar V occasionally in the documentation so I guess that’s what we have to look out for!
As well as the Energy stuff there’s also three volumes of 3 laserdiscs each marked ‘The World Of Number’, with ‘Trial Version (c) NCC 1992’. No instructions or indication of what system they run on. That’ll be the biggest mystery I think!
I showed up to demonstrate the restored Domesday Project at the Wakefield Acorn Show today, which took place at Cedar Court Hotel just off M1 J39.
I was a bit late to be honest – I’d nipped via the office to pick up some speakers and then via Maplin to get a cable for the Music 5000 system, arriving at the hotel around 9:30am (with the show opening at 10am!). Thankfully there were quite a few helpers on-hand to assist in getting everything upstairs, and the organisers had laid on some cages-on-wheels to transport stuff to the stand.
My demo chiefly comprised the Domesday Project, but I’d brought along a BBC Master with Sprow’s ARM7 coprocessor, a Music 5000 system, and some games (mostly educational). I was pleasantly surprised the Domesday LVROM started up without any problems, and for the first two hours the demonstrations went without a hitch.
A gentleman showed up on the stand during the morning, asking if I was interested in some more laserdiscs – of course I was, although I thought they might be videodiscs. However, when he brought them up they were some of the ‘very hard to find’ LVROMs including a full copy of the Countryside Disc and some other ones I’d not seen before. Some digging led to the discovery that these were designed for use on an A3000 with a VP506 laserdisc player – what a great find!
Meantime, all the fiddling with these ‘new’ discs did something to the Domesday LV player itself – the damn thing stopped reading the discs. I carry the service manual on my laptop which led to a quick faultfinding session resulting in error code 004: the tilt unit. This bit keeps the laser perpendicular to the (slightly curved) surface of the disc which curves into a convex shape due to its weight. I was just about tearing my hair out when Rick Sterry mentioned he’d got his toolkit, and with the judicious application of a toothbrush and a good old fashioned blow of air, the dust came out and it started working again although I declined to change the disc after that “just in case”.
All was going so well – then the Music 5000 packed up. Grr! Good job I’d got the old Podd game to keep people amused, although I bet you didn’t know Podd can’t smeg.
Interesting bits: seeing an EeePC running RiscOS; noting that Virtual Acorn seems to be a bit happier on Intel Mac hardware nowadays (the guy on the stand was a bit curt but did say it had been out since last September, but I wasn’t in the mood to buy a copy when he’d been quite snappy with me); the RiscOS package project now has a Kerberos port (but no ssh for it, limiting its usefulness for anything I’d do with it).
In general there was a lot less 8-bit stuff around this time. The charity stand had a few odds and ends (mostly ones I’d brought although there was a Torch Z80 Disc Pack) but no other 8-bit exhibitors other than myself. Jonathan Harston had booked a table but didn’t show which was a shame. I think for future shows I may suggest a larger table for 8-bit amusement since visitors were obviously interested and kept asking if I’d brought more software to play with; perhaps that’s a cue for an Econet next time round!
All told I came home with less junk than I’d taken, some more LVROMs to play with, an Acorn User Group mug, and a RiscPC that was on the charity stand (and which I’ll probably use as a spare).
It’s the Wakefield Acorn Show tomorrow, Saturday 26th April. The show takes place at Cedar Court Hotel on junction 39 of the M1, and is bigger than last year (they’ve actually been turning companies away for stand space!).
Apart from myself doing old 8-bit demos and showing off the Domesday Project (which still doesn’t have working sound but is fine otherwise), I can see that JGH is there too. There’ll also be most likely some 8-bit fun to buy on the charity stall.
I have a box of things which will be ‘for sale’ based upon ‘give what you think it’s worth for the charity box’. Looking over at the box now there’s some BBC motherboards, some networking gear, some internal boards, manuals/books, and a pile of software. No I won’t send it anywhere, this is exclusive to the stand tomorrow 😛
Show opens at 10am. See you there 🙂
Yorkshire lass, born-and-bred. Photographs stuff, writes software, makes music, cooks, dances round the kitchen. Happy lesbinum, wife, and parent to three. Proud to have a rainbow family.
Musician, composer and producer, under the monicker of The Bleeding Obvious.
Regularly seen performing live – gig list here. Been on TV and radio in various capacities.
I’m on Facebook, Instagram and Mastodon
By day I work as a systems architect for a marine technology company. More details about all that on LinkedIn.
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