Bigbro's foray into the scary world of blogging
04 2008
The Irish Linux User Group (ILUG) will be holding a Pint of the Day (PotD) in the Longstone Pub, Townsend Street, Dublin on Thursday next, 1st May 2008, starting at about 7:30pm.
Come along and join us - we're easy to recognise due to the proliferation of penguins, and possibly technology. See you there...
posted at: 22:47 | path: | permanent link to this entry
I've been looking for a method of centralising my RSS feeds for quite a while, and have found Thunderbird an excellent reader.
However, I use multiple machines and laptops and Thunderbird provides no method of sync'ing either the list of RSS feeds or which articles I've read between machines. Something like a special folder that can write to a designated IMAP server would do the job excellently, but it appears that Google have beaten the developers to the punch with Google Reader.
Firefox, my web browser of choice supports 'live bookmarks', which keep track of updates to a site, but I've been hearing good things about Google Reader so I thought I'd give it a whirl... I've not regretted it.
By creating a google account, (I phoned a friend of mine who works for Google and he's assured me that they will not at any point be stealing my soul, nor requiring my first-born for any purposes) I can now use Google reader to subscribe to all my RSS feeds. I can access them anywhere provided I have web access, and upon logging in I'm greeted with an up to date list of articles I've not yet read. Even better, I can download the last (up to) 2000 articles using Google Gears and read them even though I'm offline. Connecting to the internet once more and selecting 'online' mode synchronises the list of read/unread articles back to the server. It works perfectly on my eeePC so I'm happy with my new, ultra-mobile, globally accessible, RSS aggregator :-)
On a slightly related note, I use Foxmarks bookmark synchroniser to ensure that I have one, common set of firefox bookmarks on the multiple machines I use.
posted at: 22:15 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
It looks like the larger screened version of the Asus eeePC is now becoming available. The specifications are online, but I've not seen any information on pricing yet, nor technical information on the expected life (predicted number of write cycles) of the new style SSD drives, which appear to use a combination of built in SSD and flash memory.
This definitely looks like a real option for those of us that want to work in the cramped confines of a train or plane. For their next trick, I hope they add in a 3G / GPRS modem and a GPS. Then I really wouldn't need to bring anything else around with me :)
posted at: 14:41 | path: /technical | permanent link to this entry
Since the eeePC has no CD/DVD drive, and I wanted to watch some DVDs I bought here, a friend helpfully encoded them for me on his MacBook Pro. Unfortunately, he chose the h264 video codec since his settings default to encoding for an iPod type device. This works very well on an iPod, but I got audio only output on the eeePC. Fortunately, mplayer has decent debugging (as does smplayer, which provides a menu to view the logs of mplayer) so I had a good idea about what the problem was. Mplayer on the eeePC does not come with the h264 video codec.
Digging about on some forums led me to the suggestion that I would need to pull an alternate version of mplayer to get the codec. Here, in brief, is exactly what I did, which now enables me to watch h264 encoded video without having to install Ubuntu on the eeePC.
sudo su - and enter your password./etc/apt/sources.list
deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free contribsources.list file and in the terminal, run aptitude updateaptitude install mplayer=1.0~rc1-12etch2, which should install the Debian version of mplayer, which includes h264 support.deb http://http.us.debian.org/debian/ etch main non-free contrib line from your sources.list file, to ensure that no other updates are accidentally pulled from the Debian repository. Many may not work on the Xandros distribution on your eeePC, and may cause it to break in unspeakable ways. You have been warned!/usr/share/mplayer/scripts/binary_codecs.sh install which will install another ~10MB of various useful codecs for mplayer....have once again screwed up my day. Signalling failure (allegedly) has resulted in the 2033 train leaving Connolly at an untenable 2119. Every Friday evening, Irish Rail habitually and repeatedly screw up the train service. I imagine it's some kind of sadistic game that us passengers are merely pawns in, played ritually by the powers that be in Irish Rail's operations office.
I admire the brass-neckery that allowed the station announcer to announce that the train was running '10 minutes late' when the figure was immediately presented on the board as 22 minutes late - which changed to 'delay' once Irish Rail realised that they couldn't remove their heads far enough from their collective orifices to arrange that a train get from a point A to a point B.
Any suggestions as to why trains in Dublin invariably break every Friday evening? Am I just being paranoid?
posted at: 21:30 | path: /rants | permanent link to this entry
