anything technology related, not fitting into other categories
The greenhouse effect takes its toll, and winters are no longer what they used to be (in Finland: white). Walking the rainy streets, I have been looking for shoes that could handle the constant “interim” climate that we are now living in. Got mysef a pair of Merrel Outland Mid Waterproof models yesterday — they feel great and the quality of design is convincing, but lets see how they handle out there. More:
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&q=Merrell+Outland+Mid+Waterproof&btnG=Search
One of the obvious benefits from using these tiny new netbook PCs is taking them to the road. While travelling, there are two key variables that often go against to each other: the battery life and the weight. I have been experimenting with several different batteries in the Acer Aspire One, and at this time I’d recommend going for the most powerful battery available — the weight gain is not (at least for me) significant enough to outweight the increased lifespan. Particularly on travels with long working days, often with rare access to a power plug, a battery that can go on for the entire day is a true gift.
Here are some shots, featuring the original, Continue reading “6600 mAh battery for Aspire One”
This looks very promising: the next generation system cameras/SLRs are going to provide amazing video recording features, on top of the amazing photo capabilities. At least you are left stunned at the level of detail and low-light dynamics of Canon’s forthcoming 5D MK II that Vincent Laforet used for shooting a short film ‘Reverie’ over a weekend. You can see the behind of the scenes documentary here:
http://vincentlaforet.smugmug.com/gallery/6021407_xEg87/1/#378608891_Jd2CT-A-LB
Edit: the original film is again available through here:
http://blog.vincentlaforet.com/2008/10/10/without-further-ado-reverie/
You can also download some original raw movie files from here:
There has been some pretty complicated issues with this server, once again. My current hypothesis is that the combination of badly configured backup processes and the buggy CUPS server together filled up the root disk, leading to a situation where MySQL database was not able to start any more. And that led e.g. me being unable to log into Ubuntu regularly via Gnome desktop. Also, it appears that either caused by this mess, or regardless of it, my main data disk (external USB Lacie) had got its “superblock” corrupted — and I did not find a way to fix it so far.
Well, luckily it was possible to log in via console, and (with some help) I have now deleted enough stuff from the root so that this system runs again. I also took the opportunity and finally did some memory upgrades: firstly, the default memory chip (512 MB in this Proliant ML110 G3) was replaced by two 1 MB chips (regular Kingston DDR2 value chips). Secondly, I got a bigger disk (not USB this time) and plugged it into the second SATA slot inside the Proliant. Seems to run ok: it is Samsung Spinpoint F1 750 GB model (more info here; a promo pic below). Now, if I only can find a way to access that corrupted Lacie USB disk somehow — it was formatted in FAT so using Windows software is an option here, too. And understanding what crashed the disk in the first place would peace my mind as well.
Probably the most useful feature in a digital television is the capability to define search terms to run automatic scheduling of recordings. That way, you can e.g. record every piece of “news” or “Buffy Vampire Slayer”, regardless of from which channel and at what time they appear. It is a small and intermediate step towards true VoD (“Video on Demand”), but a necessary one in a broadcast dominated media reality. Continue reading “TV for Mac”
I have used a subnotebook (a Compaq) way back, but this is our first try into the new “UMPC” category: got Laura Acer Asprire One as a present yesterday. First impressions are rather positive, but I personally think the Linpus Linux Lite OS/desktop is in need of some serious hacking (it is sooo “easy”/limiting), or worth chancing into Ubuntu, but Laura seems happy at the moment so — lets not break it. 🙂 Price: Verkkokauppa.com, 298,90 €. Continue reading “Acer Aspire One unpacking”
I have shared my Finncon lecture about the science and fiction (fiction mostly) of houses and living in Slideshare (in Finnish only):
This is most probably yet another form of wasting time, but for some time I have wanted to have all main varieties of operating systems available in a single workstation. There is some benefit in this (e.g. comparing the performance and usability issues on identical system), but mostly I have been playing with the system just for the fun of it. Tonight I finally got Mac OS X Leopard (using the “Leo4Allv3” hackintosh installation), Ubuntu 8.04 LTS and Microsoft Vista living side-by-side in one sweet multiboot harmony, hooray Continue reading “Triple booting”
I have written earlier about challenges of setting up Samba for a typical, mixed home network environment. One particular irritating bug was related to backing up/synchronizing files from my Vista workstation and Windows XP based laptop to a same, shared disk in the Ubuntu (6.06 LTS Server release) file & web server. Since I am a Scandinavian user, which means many non-ASCII characters in my file names, it has been pain to get all operating systems to read and display file names correctly. Setting up Samba to use UTF-8 in the smb.conf has been one important step. I used these parameters in my /etc/samba/smb.conf:
dos charset = CP850
unix charset = UTF-8
display charset = UTF-8
But one problem remained in how Ubuntu handled file names in the disk, which is a removable, USB-linked data storage. I finally seem to have solved the issue by tweaking /etc/fstab file; I have now this line for the USB disk:
/dev/sdb1 /musicdrive vfat rw,user,iocharset=utf8,umask=000,uid=113,gid=65534 0 0
The “iocharset” part seems to have done the trick.
My summer holidays are starting from Midsummer, and just in time arrived thunder, lightning and rain to Finland. A lightning strike close to our home created an electronic impulse that apparently broke our ADSL modem, and this site was couple of days offline. Luckily, nothing else seems broken, and we got a new, identical TeleWell EA-501 v.3 from Verkkokauppa.com in Sunday. Looking at news, we are not alone: there are thunder damages reported from various places. I have a feeling these have been increasing during the last few years… It might be of course that we are just more concerned about the climate change and thus thunderstorms make more of headlines, but then again — it also might be that investing into a telephone line surge protector is a good idea, after all.
frans goes blog 
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