And I bet you didn’t even know there was a UK email lottery!

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Your email address was picked.

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Tel:(+44)704-571-5336

Acer Aspire One playing QuakeWorld

I’m visiting my sister for her birthday, and after a BBQ we’ve come inside to watch telly and consume her Internet. Amy’s playing QuakeWorld on her Mac, and with her suggestion I installed ezQuake on my sister’s Acer Aspire One netbook. I didn’t really expect it to actually work, but it does - with OpenGL too. And it plays very well, I’m just as crap on this as I am on my proper PC at home

If I didn’t have a Macbook, I’d be off to the shops tomorrow to buy one of these things, they’re quite cool. So are the EeePCs, but these Acer things appear to have a more powerful CPU.

Mind you, maybe I’ll get an Eee 901 and have a decent battery life too. But then I have a Macbook too.

Readers of my blog… convince me to buy an Eee 901 - I have a Macbook, why should I bother buying something smaller that effectively does the same? I also have a Nokia N810…

It’s amazing just how cheaply we can talk to each other now. The other day I had a two hour Skype video call with someone, later that same person phoned me using a cheap call service and it cost him zero pence per minute; so after finding out the name of this company and signing up I can also now make free phone calls during the day.

On Friday I needed to demo some software I’d created, and talk about some design ideas for it. After five minutes of attempting to talk through the stuff over the phone we both gave up and used XP’s Remote Assistance to great effect. I was able to speak on the phone (using the previously mentioned free call service) while waving my mouse around his screen. It was really productive and worked extremely well.

Today I received a letter from BT telling me my cheap mobile discount plan was due to expire, and unless I phoned them they’d start charging me for it. So I phoned them to cancel the plan as I never really got any benefit from it. While on the phone BT told me that I now have free evening and weekend calls to all BT landlines.

So now I can ring people for free, which is how it should be.

I find this all quite interesting since I am ploughing my way through the Best of 2600 book I bought earlier. Right now I’m at the part where the American phone system is being split up, resulting in loads of little phone companies, confusing dialling systems, long distance providers and the general confusion that arises when something like this happens. There’s a lot of articles from the 80s in this chapter of the book where people attempt to guess what the future will be like, and whether it’ll be just as confusing. Well 20-odd years on and it’s not as confusing in general - we can at least direct-dial numbers for most places on the planet now, but choosing just who should carry your calls can be a complicated and time consuming process.

Got my hair cut, it no longer looks like a bush and after a quick (but expensive) spin round Asda I have some new shoes, a new t-shirt (with cool Space Invaders logo on) and a bit of food.

This holiday has been good, I’ve been off to France on holiday, sorted out my website, seen friends and generally had time off. It would have been good to have completed a project that I’ve been meaning to do for years which is build a MAME cabinet, however I lack the space in my house to put one.

I have all the parts, I just need the wood and space to put one. I’m getting rid of a big TV to my sister’s so maybe I could put one in its’ place.

Work starts on Monday, best boot my work laptop and see if there’s anything important I need to do before I start. Monday is an INSET day though, which is good since I’ve not got my class lists yet, so I don’t know who I’m teaching.

I do have more clue about what’s happening next term though. There’s a lot less to learn, I should only have to learn the names of four classes of kids, rather than twenty and the work I did last year can be modified and used again.

My photos from a trip inside the Mer Du Glace.

The entrance

Translucent ice

Refracted light

Solid glacier ice

A melted hole

The glacier at this point is covered in a layer of rock

Looking up the Mer Du Glace

One of the walks we went on started from Le Tour and went over the Aiguillette des Possettes after a brief wander into Switzerland. The weather was excellent, being neither too hot nor too cold, clear and sunny all day. The terrain was fairly easy to walk over too. Here’s today’s selection from a much larger set.

The summit

Mont Blanc through the trees

A cairn

The Swiss border

Mont Blanc from Le Tour

Mont Blanc

Snagged from the Telegraph…

A helicopter searching the slopes of Mont-Blanc has been unable to trace the climbers - five Austrian and three Swiss – who were swept away by the avalanche at 3am on Sunday on western Europe’s highest peak.

The climbers were scaling the Mont-Blanc du Tacul - one of the peaks in the range - in perfect weather conditions, but were suddenly subjected to what one mountain guide described as “a scene from the apocalypse”

(more…)

Since I have taken a lot of photos, I’m going to be spending the next few days picking out the best and displaying them here.

To begin, here are photos from my cable car trip up the Aiguille Du Midi

The lower viewing platform

The summit of the Aiguille Du Midi

Hanging Icicles

Looking down towards Chamonix

The Aiguille Du Midi cablecar station

Vertigo

After spending all night and day shuffling data off old hard drives onto my new terabyte drive, everything is complete. Some of the drives in my server were really slow and it’s only because it was attached to my network that I never noticed. My main video drive, for example, was managing a whole 2 megabytes per second. It took ages to empty that!

After removing the five old drives and the ATA controller card the machine draws 100w of power. I have left the kill-a-watt plugged in permanently and will watch it out of mild interest. Strangely the UPS draws 50w with no load.

With all my data moved across I have 583GB of space free. This should do me for a few years if I remember to clean up and periodically delete accumulated junk.

For those of you who are interested, have some stats:

Disk /dev/sda: 1000.2 GB, 1000204886016 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 121601 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/sda1               1      121601   976760001   83  Linux

Attached devices:
Host: scsi0 Channel: 00 Id: 00 Lun: 00
  Vendor: ATA      Model: MAXTOR STM310003 Rev: MX15
  Type:   Direct-Access                    ANSI SCSI revision: 05

/dev/sda1:
 Timing cached reads:   578 MB in  2.00 seconds = 288.34 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads:  226 MB in  3.01 seconds =  74.98 MB/sec