Dragon's Blog

I don’t know about you, but I bet most people have a set of core apps or services that they rely on almost everyday, The kind of apps that you will install either right after reloading your computer or shortly afterwoods almost without fail.

I thought I’d share some of mine with you.

1. Antivirus (Windows) – This is one of the first things I install Currently I use VIPRE on most of my own machines due to sunbelts licencing policy. (They offer an unlimited home licence)

2. Firefox – Love it or hate it, It’s still my browser of choice, namely becuase I love the ablity to customise it with plugins.  Feedly is a good one if you like to stay upto date on news.etc without visiting all the sites yourself.

3. Outlook (Windows) – Some people probably hate it, but I find it to be a very good PIM, it’s probably worth noting I do use it in conjunction with an exchange server, but having the calender sync OTA with my phone is quite litreally a Godsend.

Update: Since i’ve posted this, gmail has started supporting push email I’m converted especially as it seems to sync my calender just as well and it’s Free

4. Mirc (Windows) Xchat (Linux) – So I can talk to people, i tend be on the Be Usergroup (irc.beusergroup.co.uk) Irc quite a lot.

5. Spotify – Love it for the fact I can just decide I want to hear a song and then listen to it for free.

6. Livedrive – Online Storage Service, Very handy for working across multiple computers.

7. Jungledisk (Only tend to install on Desktop) – Backup to the rackspace Cloud (Or amazon S3)

8. Paint.net (windows) – Handy image editing tool, Simple yet  Powerfull

9. Msn Messenger – Alot of friends use it so it’s handy to have, Have used 3rd party clients in the past but quite like the UI of the official client.

I’m sure there’s probably a couple of other thing’s I’ve missed but that’s the ones I can think of from the top of my head. If anyone wants to tell me theirs feel free to leave a comment (That’s assuming of course anyone actually bothers to even read this)

In the past week or so I think my netbook (Asus EEE 900) has had more changes of OS than i’ve had hot dinners…. Well not quite but it’s pretty close

So far I’ve tried the Windows 7 RC , OpenSuse, Easy Peasy (Ubuntu-EEE) and Ubuntu 9.04 Netbook Remix on here.

I’m primarily a windows user on the desktop and on of the Apps i use regularly is outlook, the reason I think I prefer outlook to any other client is becuase I use an exchange mail service, and as most people know exchange doesn’t really play nice with linux.

However it was so slow as to be silly, I often use the netbook on the train into work and I was finding I got there before I got everything I wanted to do done, Infact outlook was often still trashing the disk trying to sync my mail most of the time. (doesn’t help that there is intermittent 3G coverage on the route into work and the connection will often drop at least once)

I think the bulk of the problem is not the CPU or RAM in the eee but rather that secondary SSD, it’s so slow.  I can understand why Asus did it, after all it’s supposed to be a low cost machine so sticking a performance SSD isn’t going to do them any justiace.

Yesterday I was running OpenSuse, however I was finding a couple of niggles that really started to bug me, mostly getting my dongle to work properly seemed to require me to use UMTSmon, which I a great program btw, however becuase Network Manager wasn’t managing the connection I was finding that quite often the machine wouldn’t relise it was online in some apps (Firefox mainly)

Now I know there are work arounds for this, but at the end of the day it’s my netbook, I want to just turn it on and connect to the internet on it without faffing around to much.

There also appears to be a bug in the installer for opensuse 11.0 that if you enable encryption on the homedir then pick KDE as your desktop it will fail to mount /home during the autoconfiguration and not setup your profile correctly.

Last night I blew the Opensuse install away and put easypeasy on, which after connecting to the internet offered to upgrade to ubuntu 9.04, Stupidly I hit yes (it was about 11Pm by this stage and I was tired)  Then whist it was upgrading I looked around the internet on the other computer and quickly relised this probably wasnt a good idea.  Liking to have the newer version (don’t really know why i’m just like that)  I decided to download the Ubuntu Netbook remix.

It installed fine and appears to be working ok so far, although I’ve only put it on there last night, It’s a lot faster than windows on this machine (Not really that surprising).

So far It seems pretty good on this system, the only regret is that it’s not possible to easily encrypt the FS on the standard install, (I know there are ways to do it) Given the portablity of netbooks I’d have liked to seen this an option during install.

I’m however also considering changing the netbook to one of the ATOM based machines and if I change anytime soon it will probably be to a HDD based model as I feel that Netbook SSDs aren’t quite there yet due to the higher costs that would be involved in using faster SSDs (Which kind of detracts from the point of a netbook, not that some manufactures seem to be getting the concept that a netbook should be a small Cheap machine).

I’m nearly at my destination now, so that’s the end of this post….

Taxpayers money hard at work….

Metro Link (PDF)

So After the pub I headed back to the train station to head home, I took the tube to waterloo and decided to stop in the burgerking to grab some food (I hadn’t had any dinner).

Queued up for what seemed like an enternity but got served without any hasstle.

Went upstairs, and ate the meal drank about 1/4 the drink, (coke no ice)  then decided i’d better head off to get the train.

I’d intented to take the coke with me but turns out in making sure I’d gotten everything else I forgot to pick it up, didn’t even notice untill I was standing there in the station looking at the departures board…

Oh to top it off , there appears to be a thunderstorm outside  hopefully there won’t be one when I get home (On a train currently)

Only in England…

Photo(s) of the BeBroadband Team Taken @  ISPA

Please excuse the quality they were snapped with an iphone…

Be Didn’t get any awards but our friends in o2 did

I’m an artist……
not really it’s the child within getting out someone said express yourself and gave a load of paints so I did

I’ve now signed up on Twitter.
You can my Twits… err tweets at http://twitter.com/dragon2611

Well My xbox went pop about a month or 2 ago, it would display artifacts on the screen and then freeze but typical sods law it wouldn’t RROD.

(Actually I also got home to an unhappy housemate who’s 360 has just died refusing to output any video, his is one of the newer one with HDMI, although it’s not displaying an RROD We suspend the GPU has fried, as to if Microsoft will fix his for free who knows )

Oh and it’s just over 3 years old to boot so that’s 2 reasons why Microsoft probably wouldn’t fix it for free

Decided to give one of those X-CLAMP kits a try from ebay (I’ll dig the seller details out later if someone wants them), pulled the thing apart, changed the x-clamps for some nice bolts and put it back together…Turned it on and RROD, damn i’d killed it.  I assumed that perhaps i’d overtightened the retaining bolts on the heatsink.

For some reason… Probably some bizzare idea that it would magically fix itself I left the thing running on the RROD for a couple of minutes then restarted it, Surprisingly it came back to life.

Early days yet as i’ve only run it for about 30minutes or so, but it’s possible I didn’t kill it after all   Oh and no more artefacts/lockups during those 30minutes either (where as before it would start displaying graphical artefacts after about 1 minute and lockup with the first 5)

Only problem is I don’t think i put it together quite right, or I misaligned something ever so slightly as the top of the front (silvery) cover on the dvd tray is rubbing on the plastic front panel for the 360 stopping the drive from ejecting properly…  Although I suspect that won’t take to much effort to fix.

Someone suggested that I should start bloggin, I have no idea WHY anyone would want to read the crap I write, but hey bandwith and diskspace are cheap enough so what the hell…

Why here?

Well many years ago this is a very (Basic) site that had a few dragon pictures on, Most of them were pretty crap and just stuff that seemed to be available in millions of places on the internet so they got added to the gallery.

I did have a few rather decent pictures, for which I’d gone to the trouble of gaining the artists conceit and these had their own pages, but the design of the site itself was to put it bluntly woefull, I’m not a coder by nature and the only thing I really knew how to do was IFrames *shudders* also I was young then… (Is that an excuse?)

I took the site down probably almost 2 years ago with a nice V3 “coming soon” message, however soon never came, and thesedays I really don’t have time to put the effort into getting permissions to put pics of various dragons up.

That and since then deviantart came along and is a very large repository for dragon images

I keep the domain though, as It’s still used for some stuff.

I also managed to get the original domain firebreathingdragon.co.uk back which I lost when changing hosts (They wanted £25 to renew it, at the time it wasn’t worth that to me, the rule there is not to register your domain through your host…. That is of course unless you happen to be your host, then you might have problems not involving your host in the registration proccess.

Hey don’t I type some crap!