Foreign Perspectives

Archive for the ‘Science & Technology’ Category

Wendy’s laptop downed tools a few days ago. Completely downed tools in fact as it wouldn’t even boot from the Ubuntu live USB flash drive that I keep for such situations.

Ubuntu was unhelpful in diagnosing the problem as it just went into the Grub menu and no further. However, it’s a dual-boot machine so I had a go at starting it up in Windows which threw up “PXE-61E media test failure check cable”. Not overly helpful given that it’s a laptop and doesn’t have a drive cable as such. Even more interesting was that a) Grub loaded and b) it was able to access all the files on the disk (you can try this via Grub’s ls and cat commands eg cat (hd0,6)/boot/grub/menu.lst).

Anyway, I thought I’d have a go at reinserting the drive. No luck, but since Grub could see the drive contents I thought I’d have a go at copying off the files. Nothing doing re booting the machine via the live USB flash with the drive in. However, it booted up fine with the drive taken out which in turn opened up the option of installing Ubuntu on a USB drive. That worked just fine.

Wendy’s laptop downed tools a few days ago. Completely downed tools in fact as it wouldn’t even boot from the Ubuntu live USB drive that I keep for such situations.

Ubuntu was unhelpful in diagnosing the problem as it just went into the Grub menu and no further. However, it’s a dual-boot machine so I had a go at starting it up in Windows which threw up “PXE-61E media test failure check cable”. Not overly helpful given that it’s a laptop and doesn’t have a drive cable as such.

Next step was booting the system up from the USB drive that I’d just created but with the old disk attached. That worked fine too and I figured it was off to buy a new drive. Last thing software-wise worth trying was to run the Ubuntu disk-utility on the old drive which sorted out whatever was the problem with it and it’s working fine now.

So minus a day or two of messing around but plus a fully bootable Ubuntu drive and fresh backup.

There’s just been more and more stuff that simply didn’t work on 10.10 with the last straw being VirtualBox which I’m going to need in a couple of weeks.

So time to work out how to downgrade. The easy way is to backup everything, install 10.04 and restore everything which is what I did on the baby computer a month or two back. Well, I say easy but it takes me a couple of hours to do the backup on the main computer, another couple of hours to restore and then there’s all the software to install and configure.

The backup is a “good thing” so if nothing else it forced me to prepare a full backup which I’m not as diligent with as I should be. The reinstallation and configuration I can’t avoid. Which leaves the hassle of restoring the thing so I had a look around to see how to avoid that.

It turns out that there’s a feature that’s been in Ubuntu for a while now that allows you to install over the top of another version (newer or older) though you need to have a think about what you’re doing as you go rather than just clicking on everything. Well, in theory the feature is there but in practice it doesn’t work for everyone (more testing required I think) and didn’t for me. Worth trying though as it only takes about 10 minutes: just install as normal to the point where it asks about partitioning then select manual partitioning, select what was your old root file system and set the properties (don’t click the “format” box!) and that’s it. Takes a little longer than a normal install as it needs to delete conflicting system files (but apparently doesn’t do this entirely correctly).

Anyway, ’tis off to reinstall and reconfigure everything. First up being the annoying window control boxes on the left which is fixed as follows:

1. alt+F2
2. gconf-editor
3. Go to apps->metacity->general and change the button layout to: “menu:minimize,maximize,close”

It doesn’t seem so long ago that people were debating about whether mobile phones should be banned from restaurants.

Nowadays, many people make the assumption that they can call you at any time. After all, if you’ve got a mobile, then why shouldn’t they call you? Of course, at the other end of the line this leads to the habit of never turning the phone off and of answering it no matter where you are.

So it confuses people when I don’t have the phone switched on all day. Why would it? I don’t want to be called all of the time. It’s not so much that I switch it off in the movies  but that I only have it switched on when I want to be reached on the phone.

Probably more annoying to those who feel that I should be contactable 100% of the time is that I don’t even pick up the voice mails more than once a day. In this instantly-reachable age my record so far is one person leaving seven voice mails over the course of a single day asking me to call them. It must have been urgent then? Well, no, it would have been OK to leave it another week that time.

Regain your freedom: switch off your mobile!

One of the big hassles with the ipod touch is that it’s very much a closed system. But it doesn’t need to be. So for those who’d like to run it without needing to bother with iTunes, here’s how…

1.  Enable USB tethering:

sudo apt-add-repository ppa:pmcenery/ppa
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install ipheth-utils

2. Enable mobile device support:

Go to System>Administration>Software Sources, click on Add and select

ppa:pmcenery/ppa

Click on Reload then Close.

Go to System>Administration>Synaptic package manager, search for libimobiledevice0 then install it.

At this point you are able to drag and drop MP3 files onto your iPod.

3. Enable Rhythmbox sychronisation:

sudo apt-get install amarok

If this doesn’t work, then:

rm -r ~/.kde/share/apps/amarok
rm -r ~/.kde/share/config/amarok*

Which should have you all set for an open iPod.

The best place to do this is in a technology shop because the majority of people aren’t on solid ground in respect of knowledge of the product.

This lack of knowledge makes it difficult for them to place a value on the products being sold. Added to this is the fast changing nature of the products which often leads to illogical pricing whereby better products can cost less than inferior ones.

I saw a great example of this in PC World (always an excellent hunting ground for this type of thing) at the weekend. A couple were in to buy a netbook for their daughter. The netbook cost £239 but they were talked into paying over £600 for it and that wasn’t even counting the software that they were subsequently talked into as well. All of this stemmed from the “small” payments of £25 a month and the potential to get another “free” laptop at the end of two years. Of course, by that time, they could have bought at least three laptops with the money.

The other problem that’s particularly noticeable in the netbook market niche is that a large PC shop can have anything up to around 20 different netbooks ranging from £170 through to around £370 with seemingly little to distinguish them. I question whether a normal customer would be able to tell whether having an N270 was any different than having an N455 or N550 and in reality few people would notice the difference in processing power. Even the battery life is a very iffy means of distinguishing between models as one shop can have a netbook with a 4 hour battery life at the same price as another shop with the same model but an 8 hour battery life.

The fast moving prices also creates anomalies with newer and better models quite often costing less than the older model even when discounted. Thus the “massive discounts” that were previously available on the Sony 300 and 600 readers barely brought them down to the price of the much improved 350 and 650 models.

So, lots and lots of ways that you can be ripped off!