Category: Technology

As twittered back in December, I got a new PC, so my mother got my old system, which left her old system spare.

It seems so simple, get a big hard drive and rip all my CDs, at last, I mean its not like its was a 286. Its a 900MHz AMD Athlon with a 120Gb ATA100 drive, 512Mb RAM, two extra ATA133 ports, 1 ethernet port, so more than fine for a bit of file server.

I now got around to getting the drives and ripping out the modem, floppy drive, CDR and slapped Ubuntu server on the main drive. Which was super minimal, even the ssh server is an extra package.

Its still very much up in the air what I’m going to use it for, but so far I have Music server (no idea which one but maybe SqueezeCenter), so form of IMAP email to get all that data off my desktop, a bit torrent client so I can just leave them running and I’ve really wanted to play with Asterisk for a while now.

I can see this taking lots of time and having a learning curve but I’ve been admining my Ubuntu laptop for a few years now and a few of the servers at work, so I should be fine and anyway not knowing what I’m doing has never stopped me in the past.

I wonder how many time I end up reinstalling stuff?

Just uploading a few new photos from the journey back to Bristol and well the upload page had completely changed from last night.

New flickr upload page

I must say the new version is much better, at least you can see how far it got with each file, and you have an overall progress bar, much much better feedback on the process.

or how I came to understand why I would want GPS in my phone. Here’s the story.

We were in the new (relatively speaking) part of Carcassonne (which is well worth a visit if you are in the area). This area framed by wide boulevard (which are on the site of the city walls) with lots of parking around a the grid like centre of narrow streets full of shops and places to eat, so we parked the car. Asking my mother that she remembered where we had parked, and off we go to window shop and get some food. So after a few hours and a very lovely meal finishing with a fantastic pear tart, we headed back to the car, or at least tried.

We had been having such a good time that my mother had forgotten where the car was, but had an idea which direction so off we walked, out from the center towards the car, no joy. In the end it was nearly two hour before we found the car, this was in February, and yes the south of France is cold at that time of year.

Since, I’ve always used my phone to take a picture of the street name where the car is, as a sort of outboard brain thing. But it would be so much easier with a GPS, set a marker where the car is, then just forget about it, shop, go for a meal whatever, then simply walk back towards that marker, easy.

We have Lotus Notes inflicted on us at work, it made me really appreciate Outlook. That is high praise indeed for a former life long Outlook hater (over complex, cluttered gui, feature overload).

Today’s Notes horror, got a meeting request, it overlapped with existing ones, nice dialog box telling me it overlapped but not on which meetings caused the problem. I was given the option to look at my calendar but not edit it, for that I had to go to another screen, open up the calendar, find and delete the overlapping meeting. Still the meeting request was saying meeting where still overlapping, turns out I had to close and reopen the meeting request, so it would then check the updated calendar, and everything was fine.

I’m now getting to the point where if I ever go for another interview and that company uses Notes, then I’m not going to work for them.

First thing I thought of when this article over at lifehacks popped up in my feedreader was in Klingon?