Today I am mostly playing with the BBC iPlayer, Flickr and YouTube on the free Boxee media centre software on my netbook and listening to Gaggle… and yes, thank you very much to the person who said I should stick to Pixie Lott. You know who you are…
Monthly Archive for February, 2010
Channel 4 used to show stuff like this - Robert Ashley’s ‘opera for televsion’ called Perfect Lives. In 1983 this blew me away. I watched every minute. I think I might have to get the DVD - even on YouTube it looks like the remastering has worked well.
Mind you, they also had Countdown. And now, ironically, New Countdown has become a regular fixture on the office TV.
If you want OS X running on your Lenovo S10 then a retail copy of Snow Leopard and the Snow Leopard Enabler are clearly the way to go. So far pretty much everything seems to work except sleep and ethernet (though I’ve not tried the latter) on my S10-2. Crucially, sound does work. The web cam even works in PhotoBooth if you crank up iChat first and tick the menu option to show video effects first.
I previously had a triple-boot thing with OS X, Windows XP Home Edition and Ubuntu Netbook Remix going on, but I realised there wasn’t much I wanted to do in Linux that I couldn’t do in OS X or Windows - so I decided to simplify it a bit and make the machine a bit more elegant. Instead of a text menu I would have a machine that would boot into OS X without delay unless I told it I wanted to go into Windows - as I will be using OS X almost all the time.
An easy, elegant way to switch between Windows and OS X is to use Apple’s Darwin bootloader - but when I wiped the disk and reinstalled both operating systems I found that the OS X bootloader couldn’t see Windows, only OS X. Configuring the Darwin bootloader seems to be a dark art, and there’s not much info on the web. But I discovered that the order you install them in seems to matter. Here’s how I got it working.
1) Wipe the whole hard drive clean. Do this by booting off your OS X install USB stick, use Disk Utility to partition the disk in 2 parts. I have a 250GB hard drive in my IdeaPad. I made the 1st partition 160GB OS X, HFS+ MacOS Journalled, using Master Boot Record. I left the rest of the disk blank and I did not install OS X at this point.
2) I booted off a WindowsXP Home Edition install CD and made a 15GB NTFS partition in the free space and installed Windows on it. (I found that making FAT32 partitions in Apple Disk Utility seemed to give me disk errors when it came to installing Windows, even if I made it NTFS later, so it’s best to get the Windows installer to make the Windows partition.)
3) I then booted off the OS X install USB stick again and installed OS X on the OS X / Mac-formatted 160GB partition.
4) When you reboot the machine will go into OS X unless you press F8 on startup - just after the Lenovo splash screen and just before the Apple logo.
And you get two logos - cursor left or right to choose the OS you want to boot from.
Next I plan to use some of the spare space to make a FAT32 disk I can use to swap data between OS X and Windows. And maybe leave a sliver free for Linux in the future…
The other day after 2 hours helping to keep a radio show on air, I stepped out for a breath of air and some shopping.
In Tesco’s a man was struggling with the coffee vending machine whilst barking into his mobile phone: “Yeah, right, the thing was Barry, I had a f***ing cluster bomb, right, yeah a CLUSTER BOMB, all ready and you’ll never guess what this c*** did…”
Then I walked along Strutton Ground. This post may seem like a gratuitous attempt to mention Gabby Logan, but it’s not. It’s a gratuitous attempt to mention Strutton Ground. I like saying ‘Strutton Ground’. Try it yourself.
Anyway, I was walking along the street and a gust of wind caught a market stall with lots of glassware hanging up. It fell over. Smash. Smithereens. Shards a plenty. (There’s another word I’m using gratuitously - ’shard’). Then a man in his 60s walked past barking about God and Satan and the other market stall holders (the ones not mourning glassware) parodied his gutteral voice and barked back that he should effing well be quiet.
There’s a street near Strutton Ground with an even better name. More on that soon. Continue reading ‘Random lunchtime oddness’
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