Shai Dorsai

My lovely wife has recently bought me an Asus eee PC.

Wee 7″ screen and a tiny but useable keyboard. Runs a cut  down Xandros Linux distro and works rather nicely on my BT Home Hub, wirelessly. And this in a cottage with 3′ thick stone walls.

512Mb of RAM and a 4G Flash drive - I’m increasing the RAM to 1M, and bunging in an 8G Flash card.

I’ve used it  on public Wi-fi at Inverness airport  - and much to  my amusement, I can log onto my corporate LAN quite easily - and this from a PC smaller than a hardback book.

I intend to use it to blog on holiday, and upload photos. 

When I travel for work, it will do to take notes, watch video and surf.

I considered using the webcam to upload a self portrait - but I have decided to spare you that.

Nice piece of kit for £219 delivered from Currys Online.

While doing some searching for bits and bobs, I noticed that I hadn’t updated this blog in ages, since I resurrected a zorched hard disk back in November. Why? Well, busy at work, holidays and blogging elsewhere all have their bit to do with it.

So what’s this post about?

I got a Wii for Christmas from my wife; loads of fun, all the kids staying enjoyed it and it’s the first console that I think my wife has ever played - and she enjoys it, too.

Obviously, you can play this on its own, but if you attach it to the internet, you get software upgrades and can buy new software for it. I live in a cottage with metre thick walls, and wireless doesn’t play nicely so I added it to the Cat5 network.

That got me thinking. I added it to the 4 port switch in the living room.

I have a Squeezebox in there (playing music from my server, and streaming from the internet with AlienBBC); I have an XBOX there with which the kids get together and kill their friends over the world; I have an internet connected PVR called BT Vision there. I’ve got another couple of PCs upstairs, another Squeezebox in the dining room, an internet connected freeview box and an XBOX media center upstairs. I’ve got a work PC and another server in my office downstairs.

I reckon that’s about 10-14 devices which stay attached to the internet  just about permanently. It’s not *all* that long ago when you used to get an internet connection by dialing up on  a modem. I remember my joy in 2001 when I got an ISDN connection which when connected  though a Smoothwall firewall gave me an effectively always on internet connection - and through my purchased hub (which was only replaced this year) allowed my home PC and my wife’s PC tp effectively have a permanent connection. [ISDN allowed *really* fast set up and tear down of connections].

Most people were really impressed - but “No-one really needs a permanent connection”. We moved here 5 years ago; the fact the cottage had 2 phone lines was an essential. We were delighted when we found broadband would be available eventually. We now have 2 broadband connections, 2 phone lines, a permanent VOIP number, about 4 mobiles, a pager[for the Coastguard].

No permanent connection? No mobiles? Doesn’t bear thinking about… but it means that nowadays I - and people like me - can earn my living working in the Scottish Highlands… and unless I tell them, folk don’t even realise.

How things change. I’ll talk a bit more about my history in another post.

I’ve been using PCs for a long while, and had a hard disk failure early in my career. Ever since then, I’ve been an advocate of backing up. In several places.

At home, I backed up individual PCs to a network server; that to a NAS monthly.

Key data(correspondence and precious photos) was backed up to CD and sent to my mum.

As internet connections get faster, online backup becomes easier. There’s a wide range of suppliers.

BT provide a Digital Vault  with 1 G storage for their broadband customers , 5Gb storage for their Total broadband customers, and up to 20 G for £4.99 a month.

Mozy  provide up to 2G for free home use, and Jungledisk provide unlimited storage (powered by Amazon’s S3 service)  for around 15cents per G a month.

So having said that, why the fuss about Knoppix?

I’ve changed our infrastructure at home, losing 2 servers, while adding some media kit. Backup moved to peer and jungledisk… I forgot to move some media files and some fairly important (though not vital) documents from the USB hard drive I’d moved them to.

The drive failed. Wouldn’t read in windows, tried a different enclosure, tried installing it as a slave/secondary disk in 2 other PCs. Nothing.

Then I remembered hearing about Knoppix  - perhaps that would help? I installed the bust disk in an old PII machine with 192M of RAM, hey, it was lyiing about. I’d burned Knoppix onto CD, and bunged it into the drive… powered up…

Knoppix started - albeit slowly - recognised the network, recognised the disk and allowed me to connect to the internet (so I could read any necessary tips, though it was simple enough not to require any).

I opened hda (which was the broken disk) and saw much to my surprise that my directories and files were there. I browsed the Samba neighbourhood, and found my real PC. Copied files over the network from one to the other.

If you haven’t tried Knoppix, can I suggest you get a copy, burn it to disk, and have a quick play. It really, really helped me out.

I’ve earlier alluded to using Facebook, and initially wasn’t sure what use I’d make of it.

I’ve actually been learning more and more in the last few weeks as I see what my Facebook friends have been doing. I learned about tiddlywiki, and its founder Jeremy Ruston moving to BT.

I’ve started using a Wordpress.com blog, imaginatively titled Is This Future Shock? (Yes, a nod to Toffler, and the paradigm shifts he envisioned), ,and found that I’m commenting on another Facebook friends blog about the change in internal communications.

I’d seen JP comment about Open Social, and next thing I know, I’ve spent an hour or so last night reading up about microformats. Now, if I decide to take that into my personal websites, I’ll be using the learning, too.

I’m learning more and more, but need to chat with guys in my community about how I can usefully structure my own learning - and how I can help open it up to people.

Of course, blogging here helps me think about - and will at least show it on Facebook.

OK, we all get annoyed by people asking inane questions, when a moments’ effort could find the answer.

In days gone by, you’d tend to tell the questioner to RTFM (Read the ‘Fine’ Manual).

Now?
You’d tend to tell them GIYF (Google is Your Friend), or in egregious cases STFW (Search the ‘Fine’ Web).

A better way might be to provide them a link to STFW which politely tells them this. If you’re feeling particularly subtle, you can of course use something like tinyurl.com to obfuscate the link a bit.

Lots of stuff going on at RL work, so much less time available for here. I had a really good vacation with hordes of teenagers etc staying with us for a couple or three weeks. Swimming in the sea, loads of XBOX - very tiring.

I also joined Facebook to see what it was like… I’m not too sure what I think about it really. Lots of easy ways of seeing what friends/colleagues are doing; I discovered a relative had split from his squeeze… before his dad knew. Which must have unsettled his dad a bit… It’s all a bit closed in though - and only shares information with those who log in… any nana can see this stuff - and you don’t even have to log in!

I’ve also moved to a new ISP - the one run by my employer - and am now a convert to wireless, and am happily using the VOIP telephony bundled in with it. I’m looking forward to seeing how well the PVR works, when that arrives.

Knowledge Management

Lots of stuff going on at work at the moment, with a focus on improving life in our professional communities.

We have a wiki, which we’re working on to share some knowledge and experience, but we haven’t yet reached takeoff, let’s say.

Lots of interest in blogging, but mostly stymied by our continuing uncertainty as to what we should use; until we bite the bullet and decide we’re going to get nowhere.

I host my implementation of WordPress on a hosting site that runs Fantastico
and while it was a bit easy to install, the messages you get saying “It’s out of date, upgrade! Upgrade!” were a bit alarming.

In the end, I googled for advice, backed up WP as an xml file, and updated. [Again, Fantastico made it easy]. A quick, easy, alteration to wp-config.php and it seemed OK.

4dogsgairloch.jpg

I use - amongst other things - Flock as a Web browser.

That easily lets you upload photos to Flickr and once you have a photo displayed in your Flock photo bar? Right click and choose “Blog This”.

Easy or what?

technorati tags:flickr, photographs

Blogged with Flock

Stuck in an airport? No access to your PC?

Aw,poor dear.I’ve managed to post directly from my Blackberry - which is nice, if a little slow.