Owens L'ill Slice of the Web » tech

Acer RS780HVF

Owen — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 17:00:37 +0000

So, my main PC is a Acer Aspire M3201, cheap and cheerful, It has been fine for me.. But I’ve been transcoding some video lately and it feels sluggish compared to my works machine. It only has a x250 twin core processor: time to see what a RS780HVF motherboard can go up to: and the answer is: any AM3 socket chip which draws 95W or less, which includes several 4 core processors that are now dropping in price. Upgrade time soon I think.

Things that never happen in Star Trek

Owen — Thu, 28 Jul 2011 12:40:23 +0000

#6 : An enigmatic being composed of pure energy attempts to interface to the Enterprise’s computer, only to find out that it has forgotten to bring the right leads.

It’s Alive!

Owen — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 10:09:35 +0000

Honeycomb UI goodness.

So; I got my POV MobII tablet resurrected; I thought it was dead, bricked. The usual trick to put it into recovery (pressing and holding the back switch, pressing the power switch after 2 seconds, holding for 2 more and then releasing both at 2 seconds intervals..) did not work! However; the trick of first holding the power switch for at least 20 seconds, and then doing the buttons, did. Phew.

So now I have a working Android tablet; with ‘VegaComb‘ on it; a lash-up (hacked) version of Android 3.0 Honeycomb UI stuff running on a Android 2.3 kernel.. Very handy; biggest problem is that Flash is not working; so it’s just like having an Ipad

Fedora15 and Gnome3

Owen — Fri, 10 Jun 2011 09:48:23 +0000

I’ve been running Fedora15 for a couple of weeks on my work computer; and I have to say I’m loving Gnome3.. lots of frustration when switching over, it’s not a traditional desktop interface.. much more radical than, say, Windows7. But a bit of perserverence and I’m starting to really get into how it works. But I cant wait for Gnome3.1, and I miss my screensaver

ToyTime

Owen — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 17:49:36 +0000

Toys for Boys

My cool new toy; An android tablet..

I went out and got myself a POV Mobii Tablet, 10′ screen, running Android on a very efficient but fast Nvidia TegraII chipset. It’s the perfect antidote to the iPad.

I’ve had it a week now and I am very impressed; it is fast, responsive, very portable and has excellent battery life (the screen backlight is the killer in this, keep it on minimum and I double my runtime.. which shows how efficient the rest of the machine is). Android is working well, although some dialogues and applications still betray the fact it was designed for small screen devices. I did a bit of work to get the Android 2.3 virtual keyboard; and flash running on it (actually all I did was hunt for and download down the relevant installers and double-click them) plus a few apps and a tweak that lets me run the ‘proper’ Android marketplace as well as the POV supplied one (which is not so good). Wifi is good once connected, but it can be slow connecting when I have changed locations.

It ships with Android 2.2, but is ‘rooted’ as supplied, so I can replace key OS elements without having to hack it first. I am sure that I’ll be able to get the full Android 2.3 release on it eventually; and since the Galaxy tablet runs the same screen resolution (but in a 7′ form factor) and there are many 10′ android tablets in the pipeline, I’m sure that the UI experience is just going to get better. Also a hacking community is already building around it, and it’s ‘badge cousin’ the Advent Vega tablet sold in the UK.

Apple fanbois please note: 1) I have multiple application markets on this (choice!) 2) It has a Standard USB port, I can plug a memorystick, or even a USB disk into it. 3) It has a bigger screen than the iPad.. 4) It has a HDMI port and can play full HD content (Nvidia Graphics.) 5) It plays Flash, Flash based websites simply work. (this is currently a hack, I installed the FlashPlayer beta myself; advantages of an open system!), an ‘official’ flash player is due later this month. 6) It has a standard 3.5mm headphone jack.

HaHaHa

Owen — Tue, 07 Dec 2010 17:54:51 +0000

“It is dispiriting and upsetting for anyone who cares about the American tradition of a free press to see Eric Holder, Hillary Clinton and Robert Gibbs turn into H.R. Haldeman, John Erlichman and John Dean. We can only pray that we won’t soon be hit with secret White House tapes of Obama drinking scotch and slurring his words while calling Assange bad names.”

- David Samuels in The Atlantic

Random photos from my gallery

Owen — Thu, 28 May 2009 09:30:48 +0000

I’m so proud… I finally managed to add a block of random images from my gallery to the right-hand side of my homepage (You can probably see them now). I wasted loads of time playing with the wrong plugins to WordPress for this. Finally I just created a new RSS feed on my gallery set to dynamically provide random imagesfrom the whole gallery site. Then I used the Photo Sidebar Widget to display the first three images off the feed. This plugin does exactly what I want with no additional baggage, all the other solutions I found were vastly overcomplex (WPG2) or buggy (External Gallery2 Image Block Plugin).

But! I had to modify it to work with Gallery2.3 on my system like so:

Edit file: (you can do this via the WordPress inbuilt plugin editor if your system is setup to permit it.)

.../wp-content/plugins/photo-sidebar-widget/photo_sb.php

Find the following line:

case "Gallery 2 RSS Module, version 1.1.0":

And add a new line below it:

case "Gallery 2 RSS Module, version 1.1.0":
case "Gallery 2 RSS Module, version 1.1.7":

This allows it to grab a RSS feed from gallery 2.3 (the original line is for Gallery2.2). It totally failed to display any images for me until I worked this out, adding the above made it instantly spring into life.

Internet at sea? I’m writing this on a ferry :-)

Owen — Thu, 21 May 2009 18:36:24 +0000

The bandwidth is terrible, but it’s free, and the view of the coast of France is good.. though not deeply exciting.
Looks like they only open a few ports though, no SSH session to my server, and Instant Messenger (MSN) protocols are blocked too.. which is not so good. Google came back in Swedish/Danish by default, but this is a Scandinavian owned ferry, and Google is no doubt detecting that the request comes from Maersk’s IT department.

Still, full cludos to Norfolkline for giving some access anyway.. and for not charging me when Belgian stupidity forced me to miss my booked crossing, they just smiled and put me on the next one.

Edit: On the way home I noticed another passenger using MSN (Windows live) quite happily (I didn’t peer too closely over their shoulder, but it was definately working for them) so maybe I caught them on a off day.. or aMSN on linux has particular issues.. I also had a meal in the restaurant and it was not exactly great value for money, SeaFrance is much better for food.

I only like tropical phish!

Owen — Fri, 15 May 2009 09:26:25 +0000

So, I just had a sudden message from an infrequent MSN contact.. It went like this:

Danger.. Phishermen at work.

Looks like a phishing attempt… no reputable site would ever ask for your MSN username and password.. The alarm bells went off for me immediately. I’m sure http://ImageStoriez.com/ is a scam.. Now who do I notify? :-S

My other concern is that this probably means that one or the other of us has had their MSN account or system compromised in order to send the initial IM to me in the first place. So who has the infected machine.. is it their end or mine.. or is it somewhere in between? Irritating stuff.. and all just because the world is stuffed full of antisocial greedy people and ruled by a profit at any cost motive.

Going forward

Owen — Mon, 27 Apr 2009 15:30:15 +0000

Lots of Theme customisation has been done, but it’s not totally visible since the overall style has not changed yet, all the improvements so far are ‘peripheral’. There is a lot more to come.

~~I’ve been trying (and failing) to import my old weblog from Blogger.. Problems with WordPresses import function driving me nuts.~~
Yippeee! my old blog is now restored!

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