Monitor Broke

Well, it’s kind-of broke, although it’s not really broke at all, just developed an annoying fault. It looks like an image has burnt into it, although it is very faint and, and looks like the top part of Firefox.

The thing is though, I haven’t a clue how this has happened.

I always thought that for an image to burn in it had to be left on the screen for hours, although my monitor’s are set to switch off after 5 minutes.

So it doesn’t seem to make any sense to me at all, and it is one of those things that I wish I had never noticed, as my eyes keep getting drawn to the spot where it is.

But, what top’s it off is that I have 2 monitor’s, both identical, and the one that should go wrong would have to be the older one outside just of it’s warranty period. Although maybe Acer wouldn’t notice if I said it was the newer one. Hmm, Maybe that’s worth a try ;) (I never said that though!)

Posted in Hardware | 2 Comments

Tab’s have their annoyances

They’re still great, but can be annoying. By the end of the day I always end up with far too many of them open, a minute ago I did have about 20 open in one window, and FF was using 280Mb of ram, it’s worth it, but slows down my PC like mad.

Is there actually a name for having far too many tab’s? I mean, it can’t be good (for you or the computer), half the time I look back at them and wonder where the hell it came from.

Ah well, FF tabs still beat IE tab’s :P

Even if they are hungrier.

Posted in Software, Thoughts | 2 Comments

My Server[ything] Is working AGAIN!

Turned out it was an easy fix, and i’m kinda proud for doing it without even using google, just overwriting xorg.conf with xorg.conf.backup

Yay :D

Posted in Ubuntu | Leave a comment

My Server[ything] Isn’t working & It’s Snowing!

I new I shouldn’t mess with something that is doing the job well, but I just couldn’t resist, thinking what harm can it do. Last night I was trying to get beryl+emerald to work, obviously not a good idea for someone whois a total linux noob, I was installing all kinds of packages from synaptic, expecting it to just not do anything. How wrong was I.

I’ve just booted it up today, since I have a day of school because of the snow :D to find a message:

The X server(graphical interface) could not be started, would you like to diagnose this problem? So I chose yes, but nothing.

Not a good start!

Luckily I’m able to login, and that starts up samba so I can backup everything I want.

Not exactly a great start to the day, as it looks like I’m going to have to spend an hour or so re-installing ubuntu.

Bloody Brilliant

But at least it’s snowing, so I get the day off :D And I’m hoping it will continue until tomorrow!

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Floppy Discs: Designed to be annoying?

I was watching my computer boot up earlier, and noticed the speed ratings were totally out. It was saying my processor was 2 cores running at 462Mhz, rather than 1.86Ghz each. Now, this seems a bit too much out for a little error. So, the obvious option seemed to be update the BIOS. I went to the Asus website, and had 2 options, create a DOS boot floppy and install from there, or use their software from within windows.

Now, the last time I used their software it froze my pc, and corrupted the BIOS, luckily it just auto-restored it when I rebooted. So I chose the floppy option. What A Mistake.

Firstly, I don’t have a floppy drive in my PC, so, off to the cupboard and under a pill of crap I find one, plug it in, start up, anf the light just won’t go off, and I can’t access it. After a couple of reboots I finally gave up. Back to the cupboard, another floppy, this time it worked. So, hanging out of the side of my computer, stacked upon 100 CD-r’s I was able to format it as a boot disk, then copy over the files.

Nice and simple, or so it sounds. Shutdown, Reboot, but Nooo Won’t load up any of the files. Stubborn thing. By now I’d spent about 1/2 an hour messing around with floppy discs and had had no success. So, I find a live XP CD (Not sure where it came from, it’s just there). So I booted into that, which took bloody ages, formated it, and then copied over the files. Et Voila. Kindof.

Same process again, reboot, open the flashing software, load the bios file, FREEZE. For crying out loud, one simple thing, and a computer cannot handle it. Alls I ask from it is that it boots from a floppy disc, updates the bios, and done, job’s a good ‘un.

By now I was getting rather annoyed, but, was wanting to sort this problem, so refused to give up. I was looking around for other floppy discs and found one in the motherboard box labelled “Asus Updated BIOS”. Thinking it couldn’t get any worse, I gave this a try, finally, the darn thing worked. No, it isn’t the most up to date bios, but it works, and that counts for something.

Anyway, I think this is enough ranting for one night :)

On a unrelated note though, aren’t computers cheap! I was looking around on ebuyer earlier, just messing, as you do :P And wondered how much you could get a computer for, the total, justunder £140 (this is with a 250Gb HDD though, so it could be less). No, it isn’t the best spec in the world, but it would make a good file/development server, with ubuntu on it. For anyone interested here are the parts:

Now, it is possible to make it cheaper, but be reasonable,have you ever tried to run ubuntu with 128 meg of ram, I have, through MS Virtual PC, trust me, you need lots of patience (and I’m talking about pre-install)

Anyway, I think i’ve written far to much random irrelated stuff for now.

Posted in Thoughts | Leave a comment

My Server[ything] Is working

Running linux, and 100% windows free :)

I posted before about getting ubuntu working, But now I’ve got a new hard drive for it, and alls going well. It serves files to all computers on the network, a hell of a lot quicker than my PC connected over wireless, runs MySQL with no problems, and just works excellently!

Although for something just to server up files I think it’s a bit over-specced, although this is the only hardware I have not in use:

  • AMD Athlon 64 3500+
  • 1.25 Gb of Ram
  • GigaByte Motherboard (not sure which, but it’s pretty good)
  • nVidia GeForce 256mb 6-something PCI-e graphics card (being wasted in this computer, monitor is off all the time, and when I do use it it’s through VNC)
  • 1x 8 GB hard drive, for OS and software
  • 250Gb SATAII Drive for files

Initially I had a bit of trouble getting it to mount, but then I found the “Enable” button in System>Administration>Disks. The I just needed to configure apache to serve files fomr the drive, and setup samba to do the same. All was working well in under an hour. And it’s had no random hiccups so far.

Admittedly this probably isn’t the most energy-efficient device in the world, but it’s convenient and not on 24/7.

In fact, the only annoyance so far was my dad waking me up this morning at about 6:30am (my eyes were too blurry to see the time) to ask me how to switch it off, at least he didn’t think i’d destroyed the world because it wasn’t windows. He managed to turn it off by using the unstructions “Click the thing that looks like a door, then shut down”. And I was then able to go back to sleep. Yay :)

Posted in Ubuntu | 2 Comments

Vista speech recognition hole

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/6320865.stm

Not sure why, but I think this is a pretty funny way of attacking someones computer. I can just imagine hearing voices in the background, whilst my computer is self detructing :P

Posted in Vista | Leave a comment

I’ve actually managed to make something work with Linux

Without making it die upon restarting :O

Today I went back to fiddling trying to get a Ubuntu set up as a file/web server. Last time I tried I failed with both samba and apache, I managed to compile apache from source, but couldn’t get it to work. So after a small amount of googling I found possibly the best help websites, http://ubuntuguide.org/wiki/Dapper. It has everything stored on one place where it is easy to find, I started off with samba. No problem, then apache & php, yet again, no problem, I didn’t even have to open httpd.conf. Now I have a fully functioning LAMP + S (Samba) server.

I’m quite proud of myself for just under an hours worth of work, as now everything is setup and I know what I’m doing when my new hard drive comes on wednesday.

Posted in Linux | Leave a comment

I’ve found my new favourite Software

FreeMind

It is an excellent piece of software for brainstorming, previously I tried to use Inspiration, but it’s just soo big and clunky, FreeMind is the total opposite, it’s easy to use, you don’t need top faff around to get everything working nicely, and it does it’s job well. I’d totally reccomend it to anyone who want’s something to organise their ideas/projects, its just, well, great! I can’t believe I haven’t found it before, previously whist searching for Brainstorming software I got huge lists of paid-for stuff. But recently I’ve found a nice little trick, put “open source” before whatever you want, there seems to be a great open source version of everything.

Posted in Software, Thoughts | 1 Comment

Linux

I think it’s a great operating system, although I’m not too experienced in it, and if more games supported it then I would possibly be a user on it, but, it doesn’t always just work, and i’m not complaining, far from in fact, I think it’s great how people develop it totally for free, and it is free to download, anyway, my points, I’m using Ubuntu 6.0.6 on another machine, which I’m trying to setup as a server using an old hard drive, to see if it will be worth it, currently I’ve managed to setup samba, and will be going LAMP later, but for now I’m trying out vista’s gaming capability’s.

Update: I’ve tried to install apache, download the source code, compiled it, and it installed, but wouldn’t start, then I realised you could get it through apt-get, but that’s for another day.

Posted in Linux | Leave a comment