Finally completed building Brian’s machine that I promised him. It’s not a bad little set up: Dual PIII 866, 120 GB hard disk, 512 MB RAM, Dual Layer DVD ReWriter, 128 MB graphics. All put together for $300 or so…..
Plus I finally get to decrease the clutter at home rather than add to it. Speaking of clutter I’ve managed to put my hands on another PIII 933 machine for free – no RAM but other than that it’s fully functional, perhaps someone else i know needs a new machine.
That’s right all you motorists, you better watch out! Adam is on the road and legal Feels like a 2 ton weight has been lifted off my shoulders too. Many thanks go to all the people who helped me – Brian, Ruth, Matt and Tomoko – you were all great, and very patient with me On another subject entirely, seems I was not the only one who was a victim of urban-isp going under, a fellow victim (Tom) got in touch with me to see how to rescue his domain.
Debian has never been a distro I got too excited over – I knew why it existed and what the attractions were but I usually went with something else. Then I came across this site. It features a guide on how to install Debian on the Cobalt Qube2 – a MIPS based server appliance that I happen to own.
Previously I had only been able to get NetBSD running on it, and while I can use BSD systems, I’m just not as comfortable on them as I am on Linux and as a result I have not been using it much at all.
I got a letter yesterday, from Audi Financial saying my credit application had been turned down. Naturally, this frightened the crap out of me and it was too late to contact anyone by then. Thankfully it was all a false alarm, the letter was generated by accident and everything is fine with my car again Hopefully I can get my license by next week – I’ve booked an appointment for a test for next Friday (yes I know it’s the 13th) which gives me another week or so to get everything down, which should be plenty.
Picked up the new car yesterday – I still can’t drive it without a licensed driver in the car too but that should all be rectified soon enough. Pictures can be found here.
On the techy front, I finally managed to get some of my content back up following the Urban-ISP used alloys disaster. The How to flash a FireWire/i-Link DVD page is back – people seemed to find that helpful, so I’m happy I got it back.
Unfortunately it sems that my webhosting company has gone tits up. Urban-ISP.net no longer resolves, they don’t return e-mails and their phones are disconnected. Looks like that is that so i decided to switch to ipage hosting. Because I recently lost my back up of the site I have lost most of the content too A few exceptions are my blog (obviously) and a couple of pages I found in the Google cache.
OK, I knew that the whole Atkins diet low carb thing was big in the US but I was still surprised when I got here at how pervasive the whole thing is. I’m prepared to live with it because, lets face it, most of us could stand to shed a few punds – me definitely included But just now I saw an ad on the TV – it was for a low carb DOG FOOD from Pedigree!
Decided it was time to flex my coding muscles this week so I’ve put together a little tool that converts IP Addresses, URL’s and Host names into Autonomous System numbers and gives a few other little tidbits while it’s at it too. It can be found here:
AS Number Tool
Of course it can be found on the old homepage too. It all came about because I couldn’t find anything to do this for me – needless to say there’s a command line version that I use personally too.
Went to see Spiderman 2 last night – have to say that I liked it – didn’t have the fun of the first one when you were learning how they were going to implement all the superpowers and stuff but still good none the less.
Some soppy bits – to be expected in a blockbuster these days – but the effects were good and the action scenes were well put together.
The site has been down/slow for the last couple of day – no idea why and I’m too lazy to find out. Hence the reson for the lack of new entries – I have confirmation that my shiny new Audi A4 is on the way to the dealer and everything is in motion – now all I need is that license. Unfortunately I have to wait until 15th July until I can do the test since there’s a 30 day waiting period before you can take the test.