I came downstairs this morning to find that my Sky+ box had died. The normal green light was absent and no number of tries would persuade it to turn on. I’ve had the box for a number of years (over 5 I think) and it has been on my list of things to replace for [...]

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For anyone else having issues getting gmplayer to run and reporting it can’t find a skin, the option to add to the gui.conf file (yep, not config) is gui_skin = . With this small change it now starts and runs correctly so I can stop using the commandline to watch movies!

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Just after parking my car at work on Weds I noticed that the indicator on the front nearside wing was hanging out. It was still attached via it’s cable, and still worked, but it wasn’t correctly attached and could just be pulled out!
I’ve had teh car a few months and so decided to take it [...]

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Surprise offer of free tickets, so at the game!

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After a bit of playing with the sound setup on the laptop I’ve now gotten to a point where I can run skype alongside other users of the sound system (xmms and so on). I do this using the aoss script, which uses the aoss shared lib to intercept the open() call in the same [...]

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When recording the feathercasts I’ve been using a program under windows, but ideally I’d like to be able to record under Ubuntu as well. Looking around a solution using the JACK server seems as though it should work, but it requires oss2jack for Skype is still stuck using OSS for it’s sound when the rest [...]

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Driving to the Ben Lawers starting point yesterday I was listening to probably the most amateurish radio station that I’ve heard in a long time, Heartland, when they played a track that had me laughing out loud. Yep, it was the unofficial Trinidad and Tobago world cup anthem. It probably won’t be funny to anyone [...]

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At the summit of Ben Lawers. Sun is shining. Sky is blue. Not much wind. Fantastic views. Does it get any better?

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Another late night waiting for a train home on platform 13. Unlucky for some!

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Visited Ben to record a piece for an upcoming feathercast and scored supper!

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Frank told me a while back that I should look at OpenWengo for voip. At the time I was running FreeBSD and on AMD64 it just wouldn’t compile. I tried a few fixes and had a discussion with one of the developers, but it basically didn’t get far enough to compile, let alone run.
Recently frank [...]

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I recorded the second episode of feathercast this afternoon. The interview (with Geir) took 25 minutes and the subsequent editing another 3 hours. That’s a lot quicker than the previous one and setup I used worked a lot better this time. The quality seems better and I’ve been more careful with the editing. Audacity is [...]

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No, don’t fret, it’s nothing to do with DaVinci No, this particular code is one that helps to keep you safe when near the roads when England are in any form of soccer competition.

vehicles flying one flag should be treated with extra caution
those with 2 should be avoided and given a lot of extra [...]

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Arrived in New York to find a wet evening.

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ubuntu still doesn’t have sunbird available as a package It’s a shame as it’s an application I had started using mroe and more on FreeBSD. Having a timetable that could best be described as “variable”, the ability to publish for friends/family was one that had long made sense, but until the advent of sunbird [...]

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After reading that the next version of Ubuntu had been released and finding the page that detailed how to upgrade using the graphical update manager I decided to try it. Once more my faith in Ubuntu has been affirmed. It took just under 2 hours to downlaod the 1172 files it needed, then effortlessly upgraded [...]

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