The first of our EeePCs arrived at work today, and what a lovely bit of kit it is. As is traditional, there was an Unpacking Ceremony, and here are a few pictures of the box and the unit in action. Apologies for poor quality camera scans. It really is a lovely unit though. A bit thicker than I expected (and probably thicker than it needs to be really – especially at the back), and it runs slightly warm (but only …
Someone just shut down my Mac mini. Without asking. I managed to take a screen grab of my carefully cultivated uptime as it slowly faded away, to begin again as a mere single figure day count. And I was so close to 93 days as well. Bah. Suggestions for things to slip in her tea gratefully received via the comments…
No, that’s not some new spreadsheet package from Corel, it’s this error message I just got:
After yesterday’s Macbook uptime report I had to reboot as expected. Today, I installed a new keyboard on my PC (sadly, last week’s cleaning killed my other one a bit) and had to reboot that. Here’s the uptime before I hit the switch. Pathetic!
Well, it isn’t that massive, but compared to the usual peak of 40 days (ish) on my desktop PCs, 123 days on my Macbook is quite impressive. Even more so because it’s a laptop, I think. Anyway, I took this photo as my Mac has stopped recognising external drives (my fault – I was backing it up last night and pulled the external drive too early) so I think I may have to reboot soon. Shame!
1,887,480How Many Germs Live On Your Keyboard? At least, there were. I’ve just spent the last half an hour cleaning it, removing all the keys, getting the anti-bacterial spray out and giving it a good wash. I didn’t intend to do anything more than just wipe over the keys and key surrounds, but a key popped out and what was underneath made me feel a little ill… Mmm, tasty. I even found a couple of dead insects. Ace! Anyway, nice …
Apparently, I am a software pirate. You see, I’m looking for a vector version of the Chinese characters for “Welcome” for work. I know what they look like, but only have them as a tiny gif and need it blown up to hugebig proportions for a sign. So I searched the internet for something to do this, and typed “chinese symbol finder” as a Google search term. In the results, I see a link for “Chinese Symbol Studio”, so follow …
DYSWIST? Anyway, I’ve just had a look at my site logs for this week and something slightly shocking and Yahoo-shaped seems to have occurred: It doesn’t surprise me that there have been so many individual robots in the list, but that Yahoo figure is a bit high, don’t you think? Almost 60% of my week’s hits have been from Yahoo? What are they doing? Also interesting is the decline of Internet Explorer. Firefox and Mozilla combined are now somewhat ahead …
Doesn’t the title of this post just fill you with thoughts of fun and excitement? Of things you love to do on warm, sunny days? Of course it does. On Friday evening, I thought (as you do), “I know! I’m going to create my own RSS feed in PHP!”. And promptly did. Hurrah! Thing is, it turned out to be a lot harder than I expected, due to the lack of full and/or correct information on the internet. Here then, …
OK, so I’m having a Geek Day today. Sorry about that. But “Siggi”, from the newsgroup comp.sys.sinclair has done something quite amazing. Whilst the rest of us on the group have often giggled about the possibility of creating a webserver that runs on a Sinclair Spectrum, this guy has gone one better – by creating one for the ZX81. Amazing. Assuming the thing is still running (and Siggi says it could go down at any time), you can see it …
This is perhaps the most geeky blog post I’ve done yet. Basically, I ran into a problem this morning. A couple of weeks ago I installed Ubuntu on a virtual server to replace the aging physical server running SuSE 7.3 that powers the intranet pages at work. Everything was fine, until today… I also use the install of PHP on that server to create thumbnail images as part of a photo gallery creation system I have for work’s website. As …
I was staying with my inlaws at the weekend, and they’ve bought a new PC. I offered to transfer all their files from their seven year old Windows 98 PC over to their new one for them. However, this was fraught with complications. My usual method of doing this would be with a USB drive of some kind. Unfortunately, we’d called in at the inlaws on the way back from our holiday in Bournemouth, so I didn’t have any with …
This is me using gparted to clone and expand the partitions on my old work machine boot drive to my new one. I also upgraded by data drive too, and kept the old drives as backups. So now, I have a staggering 1.5 terabytes of storage on that PC. I remember just ten short years ago when I bought a “cavernous” 4.3 GB hard drive, ad thought that would last me forever.
And I don’t mean how long it took to come to market, either. Today, I took delivery of an Acer Aspire 5051AWXMi (yes, all them letters), that comes with Vista Home Basic. It’s a cheap (¬¨¬£255) and cheerful laptop, but it’s only for internet and office use and replaces an older, heavier, less powerful laptop that had an accident involving a flight of concrete steps. I didn’t actually want Vista, but they don’t have any other OS option, so I …