I’ve just acquired an interesting collection of old computer kit. I now have:

• An Amiga 500 without PSU
• An Amiga 1500 with monitor and keyboard
• A WYSE serial terminal
• And a USB floppy drive

The A500 will probably end up sitting on a shelf somewhere until I can find a PSU for it. I’ll use the A1500 since it has a hard disk and a monitor; I don’t exactly trust 21 year old floppy disks or have a spare TV to use. The Amiga 1500 has a slightly damaged keyboard, but it’s only a few keys on the numberpad that I’ll probably never press anyway.

The terminal might have a problem that causes it to turn off randomly, but I tested it the other night for about an hour and it seemed OK. Once I’ve confirmed I can connect it to my Linux machine I’ll create a giant serial cable and put it downstairs somewhere. It’ll make a nice IRC client or quick login to my server to check things. I figure I can make a long serial cable from some spare Cat5 cable and DB9 connectors.

I own a number of computers and, like most people now have a network to connect them all together (except I was running networks back when coax-cable was the in thing to use). The system works quite nicely given it is made from junk parts. Since the estate agents didn’t visit today I used the time to sort out my server and tidy up its storage arrangements.

I think I’ve found a cheap way of backing up the large amounts of data that live on my server.

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I’ve just finished making my Linux machine work properly again, VMWare Player run XP on it, and then configured my Samba server to be a PDC. I now have roaming profiles and a real Windows Doman for all these Windows instances I have.

In theory it means I have one set of application settings, rather than having to copy data about manually. I know this does actually work because they do it at school - only they have real Windows servers. I just need to work out the offline profile for my Macbook’s Windows instance. Currently I can’t log on unless I log into the machine itself. Somehow my work laptop is able to log onto the domain even when offline.

Further prodding is required, but not now I need to go to bed.

What’s worse than losing data due to a power cut? Losing data due to your UPS dieing…

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My work laptop has had its network identity branded into it. It now connects and drags down my roaming profile data - most of the time. And I can use it for doing Proper Work on again. My Mac’s new RAM upgrade is currently sat in my local Post Office waiting for me to collect it tomorrow. We live in  weird country where Post Offices shut at half past five every evening except Wednesdays when they shut at half twelve. Since I buy stuff at the weekend mostly, it always arrives on Wednesdays.

It’s hard to explain the frustration of having shiny new tech a mere five minutes walk from my house, with the only thing stopping me from having it in my possession being random Post Office rules.

I learnt some new keyboard shortcuts today…

• Cmd-W to close windows
• Cmd-Q to quit
• Cmd-’ for preferences
• Cmd-left/right for home/end
• Cmd-up/down for pgup/pgdn
• Alt-left/right to jump one word to the left or right

I can’t work out the shortcut for Force-Quit though. Well, I can see it, I just don’t understand the heiroglyphs Apple use to describe their keys. It’s weird, like learning a new language.

My Macbook comes with a wonderful invention called Time Machine which is a clever incremental backup system. If an external HDD is connected to the Mac, Time Machine will ask if you want to use this as a backup drive. Saying yes then starts the backup running. It’s all automatic and keeps hourly backups for a day, daily backups for a month and then monthly backups until your external HDD fills up. And since this is a Mac, the backup is bootable without having to do anything special.

The only problem I have is that this is a Macbook, not a desktop machine. I don’t want to plug an external disk into it just to run automated backups, I have a perfectly good Linux server that I store backups on.

Unfortunately Time Machine doesn’t support network shares. Well, actually it does, it’s just an undocumented feature, and like it says on this blog you have to type the following into a terminal

defaults write com.apple.systempreferences TMShowUnsupportedNetworkVolumes 1

Then you go to Finder - Go - Connect To Server, connect to a network share and it’ll appear in the Time Machine list of volumes. The clever part is that a disk image is created on your network share, the disk image is then mounted on your Mac, and Time Machine does its thing. Apple like disk images

I’m currently on 13GB of 21. This is on a freshly bought MacBook that I’ve only installed OpenOffice and Firefox onto. There must be a way of stripping this down and removing some junk.

I gave my new work laptop to the technicians at work. They were in the process of scrubbing Vista off and replacing it with XP last I saw. Vista Home won’t connect to Windows Domains so it had to go.

This nugget of information comes from the Coding Horror blog:

Take a look in your Documents folder right now. Go ahead. Look. Do you see any files or folders in there that you personally did not create? If so, you’ve been victimized. Applications should never create or modify anything in your documents folder without your permission. And yet, sadly, it happens all the time. Applications, and more specifically, the programmers who wrote those applications, think it’s perfectly A-OK to carpet bomb your personal user space with their junk.

Where applications should store their data is a confusing situation for the programmer. Especially when Microsoft seem to like changing the “standard” between Windows revisions. I can kind of see why most applications stuff it all in “My Documents” - there’s a fairly simple way to ask Windows for the location of that and it doesn’t require checking what version of Windows you’re using.

Can we stop with the “My” prefix on everything? It destroys file sorting, looks a mess and is as irritating as the “i” prefix on every Apple product and the “k” prefix on anything remotely to do with KDE.

I’ve bought myself a scanner, with the vague hope of scanning in my important documents and paperwork. I have a filing cabinet full of quite useful information but no easy way to search it or work out what I’ve got. PC World sell a very cheap £20 scanner called the “PCL-3000“. Not expecting much I bought one to see what it was like…

I am pleasantly surprised! It works quite well, scanning in both colour and greyscale without any problems. The Windows scanning software is a bit crap but functional, the OCR software making a passable attempt at most printed text. I had little hope of it running in Linux though.

Again, I was pleasantly surprised! It is recognised by SANE as being a GT68xx based Mustek scanner and after copying the firmware file into the correct location, works perfectly well with The Gimp and anything else that talks to scanners. There’s even some OCR software which will scrape the text off pages, although it’s not quite at the level of the Windows software which recreates the documents with formatting and font sizes. There is a good scan-to-PDF program called gscan2pdf available though, which looks like a useful piece of software if you want to turn scanned images into text.

Two decent, cheap devices from PC World… this isn’t right!

This scanned image is of my old ZX Spectrum +3’s manual cover.

plus3manualcover.jpg

Blogged with Flock

My machine contains an NVIDIA Geforce graphics chip which is capable of running two displays at once. Naturally I have this set up so that I have one massive desktop. The downside is that the graphics chip just isn’t powerful enough to cope with running a 1024×768 display and a 1440×900 display at the same time without slowing down.

In a fit of desperation I thought that maybe the TwinView option was causing this, and turned it off. I now have a very curious looking display.

On Monitor 1 I have a “K” menu, taskbar and a clock plus a desktop. On Monitor 2 I have a “K” menu, taskbar and clock plus a desktop.

Yeah, I have two of everything. It’s like I’m running two computers, except it’s just one. The mouse pointer moves between the screens and I can change keyboard focus correctly. Windows, however, cannot cross the monitor join. It’s very bizarre.

I will keep it like this for a while to see if it makes a difference. What I really suspect is that Flock is eating everything.

Ever since I created a server in my house with all my music on, I’ve been looking for ways to play this music throughout my house without having to put PCs all over the place. PCs are great inventions, letting us listen to music, watch video and communicate with fellow humans. Their only failing is they require time to boot up, and who wants a PC whirring away in their front room? It’s a front room, not an office.

So to begin with I had ideas of building a small “media PC” to put under my telly. I could stuff Linux on it and leave it on all the time. It’d work and I would be in my technical ability to make.

Then I got an Xbox, chipped it and put XBMC on it. The Xbox boots up in about ten seconds and works with a remote control. I can now listen to music and watch video in my front room without a PC. Problem solved. Now how can I do the other things I want like browsing the web or chatting to people…

Well obviously I could get a laptop, then I could do everything on that without a problem. I could Internet while on the toilet if the desire took me. Laptops are just PCs though, and when their batteries fail they require plugging into the mains. I’ve got two though, and I do sometimes drag them about my house when the need arises.

However, I also own a Nokia Internet Tablet. It’s tiny, it stays powered on all the time and runs Skype. It also streams music from the web and has a fairly good web browser. I can now do random web searches while watching TV, or in bed. It’s much easier to Skype with a small VCR sized box in your hand than an entire laptop crushing your legs.

Its music playback facilities are a bit… limited though, and streaming music off the web is a sure way to eat battery. This is where I discovered the world of “Internet Radios” and the Squeezebox 3. This magical device will not only stream music off the web, but also your local network, and they do a wifi version. So I could have one in my bedroom and listen to my music without needing another PC whirring away in my house.

They’re a bit expensive though. Cheaper ones exist, but they don’t play OGG which is the format all my music is stored in, and I’m not transcoding all my music into MP3 just to please some cheap music player. Last night this changed when I discovered the rather cheap Logik IR100. It plays OGG/MP3/WMA from the Internet or local network. It is also £40, which was cheap enough to make me get in my car and whizz off to PC World last night to buy one.

So now in my house I can either sit in my office and listen to music and watch videos, or I can sit downstairs and do the same, and now I can sit in my bedroom and listen to the exact same music. Should the urge take me I can also fire up my Internet Tablet and wander about chatting on Skype to people.

Convergence was something people were banging on about in the early 2000’s and it was going to revolutionise the way we live. Well I think it’s crept up without anyone noticing. Once I’ve imported some music into my server it’s available for playing on any of my network devices with no further effort. I don’t have to synchronise anything with a central server, nor do I have to use proprietary “server” programs. It’s all either standard Windows sharing/NFS or UPNP.