I’ve just placed an order for broadband (512Kb/s ADSL) from Plusnet, our ISP. I opted for the router starter pack, which includes a single ethernet port, so I’ll have to set one of the PCs up as a bridge with 2 NICs in so that we can still network the two PCs and get online from both PCs. I’ll probably use Mandrake’s Internet Connection Sharing.
Oh, I’m off work with a stomach bug. Not so good.
We’ve just returned from Chertsey, Surrey, where we camped at a campsite that was a quarter of a mile from the M3 and simultaneously in the Heathrow flightpath.
Despite these two (three, if you count camping just outside a town) apparent disadvantages, we had a great weekend. Amanda and Matt Bartlett stayed with us in our sort-of-futureproof six-man dome tent, but unfortunately ended up in the inner-tent whose hooks (they hold up the inner-tent by attaching to the inside of the fly-sheet) were a bit stretched and therefore kept pinging off in the middle of the night. Never mind. By his own admission, Matt isn’t keen on camping, but we bought two sheets of two-inch foam which made the beds much more comfortable than they would otherwise have been.
What amazed all of us was the sheer amount of wildlife on the campsite: foxes, squirrels, rabbits, ducks (they waddled right up to the tent, so we felt obliged to feed them). The M25 is such an artificial barrier that its naturelessness seems to apply to the area that it encircles. It doesn’t, of course (and being right by the River Thames helped), but it’s interesting how our perception of urban areas is coloured by seeing them from the confines of a car. Of course animals and plants still live and thrive in urban areas (right next to the motorway as well) – it’s just that we rarely see them.
So, while the idea of camping within the circumference of the M25 didn’t appeal at first, it’s been an eye-opener…
Listening: Rae and Christian – It Aint Nothing Like (Featuring the Pharcyde)
I mentioned a couple of weeks ago that the upgrade to Mandrake 9.1 hadn’t gone as smoothly as I would have hoped.
But after the rain, comes sunshine: we can now connect to the internet (albeit via a Windows box on the LAN), print, scan, listen to music and even do the accounts, in Windows while Linux is running, thanks to the magic of VNC. VNC, which is free software, displays the desktop from one machine on the display of another. It’s as simple as that. Until we get a screen switch (which allows you to switch the keyboard, VDU and mouse between different computers) it seems to be our best option for running Linux for the important stuff (web, email, word processing, graphics etc) and Windows for the stuff I can’t do in Linux – namely Intenet connectivity, MS Money and Quicken. No I’m not ready to use Gnucash yet.
A tip for Zonealarm users: if you want to be able to share your internet connection (via Windows Internet Connection Sharing), the Internet Zone security level must be set to medium – visible but protected mode. It’s either that or upgrade to Zonealarm Pro, which costs cash money.
Oh , did I mention that VNC is free?
You wait ages to see a film with Anna Paquin in, and two come along at once. Actually it was a coincidence that she was in the last two films I’ve seen: 25th Hour and X2.
25th Hour is the first Spike Lee film I’ve ever seen. I was impressed, as he refuses to let his films be formulaic jelly-mould cash cows. Edward Norton, as always, gives a fantastic performance – this time as a drug dealer who has one more day of freedom before being jailed for seven years.
His character, though undoubtedly a person who profits from others’ misery, comes across as a generally nice bloke, something that John (Hen Night Lorna’s fiancé and my cinema companion for the evening) found to be a little unbelievable. A reviewer at IMDB.com thought the character, Monty, was rather like Norton’s character in Fight Club. I don’t know, as I haven’t seen it. I thought it was like his character post-imprisonment in American History X, not the soulless, apparently evil pusher of most people’s imaginings.
Last night we saw X2, which sounds like a bus route, but is in fact a very good film. There are so many sequels out at the moment or coming soon, and they usually fail to live up to the first film, but X2 succeeds in continuing an impressive, action-packed storyline with a thinly-veiled message about xenophobia.
While in the first film the delineation between the good guy and the bad was quite clear, in X2 there are more shades of grey. Lacking this moral absolutism, and with the death of one of the main characters, the film is much darker than its predecessor, and there is more violence, more senseless-yet-sanitised killing. This doesn’t make it a bad film, however; the filmmakers wanted maximum reach, so the violence isn’t graphic. But by hiding the grim reality of what guns and bombs do to the human body, do we just produce society to think that there is no consequence to violence?
Anna Paquin: go see. Twice.
I’ve been telling everybody how great Linux is for, ooh, the past 4 years or so. Admittedly, it doesn’t crash as much as Windows, and individual software crashes rarely bring down the whole machine. But perhaps I am suffering from overfamiliarity: I want things to work, not just not crash.
Before last Monday (when I installed Mandrake 9.1) we had a working machine, except that we had no sound or scanning. Now we have a working machine, except that we have no internet connection or printing: two rather more serious omissions, I think you would agree.
I have the external modem from Chris, which should sort problem number one. But the printer used to work, and I can’t figure out why it doesn’t work now.
The computer, which is meant to be my servant, a means to an end, has made me its slave, an end in itself. I spend more time trying to make it work than actually doing some work. It’s doing my head in. Oh, and it looks like I’m not the only one frustrated with the upgrade cycle…
So Apple have been busy little bunnies. Not content with ramping up the iBook to 800/900 MHz, they have launched a slimmer, sexier(?) iPod and launched the iTunes Music Store, which is browsable from anywhere, but only open for business in the US, so far.
Many good things have been written” about the service so far, so much so that Windows users seem to be either (a) jealous and sarky, or (b) salivating at the prospect of the launch of the service for Windows, due later in the year.
Must save up for an iBook (repeat ad infinitum)