ubuntu 10.04 1st impressions
May 15th
I have installed this on two machines now. The 1st is the samsung nc10. I instaled through wubi as this is a great way of installing Ubuntu if you wish to keep your Windows installation in one piece (and who wouldn’t). All the hardware is working on 1st attempt including bluetooth and wireless. Even most of the keyboard f keys are working with the exception of the brightness keys. The system is responsive and comparable to windows 7. The open office spreadsheet loads in a reasonable time ( a few seconds) and is very usable. Clearly, the Ubuntu team have worked hard to ensure that Netbooks are covered.
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4870×2 overheating, BFBC2 crash, PC reboots, PC freeze
Apr 21st
I have been having a nightmare with my PC lately. This rig is 18 months old with the following spec:
Intel q9550 2.8 @ 3.4ghz
Asus Rampage Forumula x48 mobo
8 gig corsair DDR2 Ram
Power Color 4870×2
In a antec gaming 900 case with enough fans to power a hover craft.
All was well in the world of my baby for the 1st 18 months of life till I started to place Battlefield Bad Company 2. For the 1st time it crashed in a game! It has never done this before. I am running Windows 7 x 64 and this is a dream system. Even after 18 months it feels as good as the day we bought it despite 2 changes in OS and a constant stream of experimental beta apps. Windows 7 is awesome :)
And now.. it crashes!! it even turns the monitor off when it feels like it! Like many people I blamed BFBC2.. it does have a few bugs after all. However, things just got worse and even in 2d use things were starting to fall apart.
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How to fix VNC in opensuse 11.2
Mar 17th
Just to give a bit of background.. We have a load of PCs in the house.. 3 in the study, 1 in the kitchen, a couple of floating laptops and an old tablet PC acting as a media centre in the lounge. It is the latter that has been the cause of my latest grief. Having so many PCs means it is very expensive to upgrade everything to Windows 7. I tried the early betas and the RC of Windows 7 on just about everything we had to see how it performed with different hardware and I have to say Windows 7 is awesome.
However, MS are still greedy sods and it costs way to much for a house hold like ours. So the fall back is Linux. Last week the Tablet PC laptop started to reboot every 2 hours anouncing the end of the RC period for windows 7. Time to find an alternative. My default Linux dostro is Ubuntu apart from failing to install the wireless drivers this generally detects everything and works a treat (once you get rid of that god awful orange and brown).
I installed Ubuntu on this aging Asus R1F and all looked good. Movies streamed from my main Windows 7 machines and I nearly died when for a laugh I threw the toggle switch and discovered that the bluetooth AND the WIFI worked out of the box!! This is an amazing achievement for Ubuntu. So all was well in the world till we sat down to watch the latest Supernatural… where was the sound!!
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Where was RAF Skellingthorpe located.
Feb 19th
This map shows a modern OS map with a 1960s map over laid. I have used the lakes and Doddington Road and Skellingthorpe Road as place markers. There appears to be a bit of discrepancy around the tree line at the top. Essentially what is currently the Birchwood estate occupies most of the area where the runway was. Remains of this can still be seen in the area eg behind the Birchwood Community Centre. Other clues are in the woodland that borders the north of the estate. What is currently the Wild Life Public House represent the original entrance to the base as indicated by blue sign on the pub. Bomber Command 50 squadron 1st arrived in November of 1941. At its peak it housed 1803 men and 295 women. In 1942 50 squadron relocated to Swinderby and flew the newer Lancaster bomber. In 1943 61 squadron arrived at Skellingthorpe with 30-36 Lancaster bombers. Over 208 bombers in total were lost from Skellingthorpe.
add to the mini-cart left hand box in Magento
Feb 14th
You need to tweak your theme to allow you to post a message in the mini-cart area (the bit that show “You have no items in your shopping cart”)
This is quite simple.
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What does PAX / P.A.X mean in business retail
Jan 16th
Per Annum Exclusive
Essentially it refers to fact that the rent doesn’t include additional costs eg insurance or business rates.
Enable concurrent remote desktop connections in windows 7
Jan 11th
We have 1 main pc in our house which holds all the data and applications. A number of older laptops and desktops then use Remote Desktop Connection to connect to the main pc. The problem of course is that windows xp, vista and 7 have only allowed 1 user to be connected to a pc at once. This sucks and in light of Linux competition should have been fixed by now. To get this sort of functionality in windows you need to use a server edition.
However, this can be patched to allow as many people as you like to connect to different user account on the same PC at the same time… hence Concurrent RDP.
To achieve this download this file which will work with Windows 7 Professional.
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Photostory 3 and Windows Movie Maker in Windows 7
Nov 25th
If you have just discovered that these two applications are no longer working or availabe in the Windows 7 world DONT PANIC. These tools are very important in the education arena as they are great concept developers for helping people to move on to more powerful software. Photostory is an educators dream bit of software and Windows movie maker is a great intro to track based editing and can also be used for animation. The new Windows Essential Movie maker is a dumbed down bit of rubbish.
With the advent of Windows 7 the Vista download of Photostory no longer works.. the solution? Look for the XP version.
or click here
The same trick works for Movie Maker as the 2.1 version for XP is still available…
UPDATE
As you can see from the comments there appears to be some issues around this and some people are reporting problems. After some playing with different setups I think that this trick WORKS with Windows 7 x64 but does NOT WORK with x32 bit versions of Windows 7. If anyone can confirm or deny this let me know.
An alternative installation of Photostory involved the use of XP mode and again this does work but you need to at least have Windows 7 Professional or above.
UPDATE 2
It looks like the OS check has now been dropped on the latest version I down loaded.
Useful WordPress plugins for Content Management – CMS
Sep 4th
WordPress is God. Except better… as it is real 
I run a lot of websites and frequently use wordpress as the basis of these sites. It is often quicker and easier to install WordPress than to fire up Dreamweaver. The power in WordPress is the ability of 3rd party plugins to transform the humble blogging platform in a tool for every occasion. Here are some of my favourite Plugins More >
