I Have Measured My Life In Server Rooms

Posted on March 21, 2007 by blogmywiki

There we are, title for a slim volume of terse verse about working with computers. By the T.S.Eliot of the IT Crowd. I mean, he worked in Lloyds Bank for heaven’s sake…

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Get down on your knees

Posted on March 10, 2007 by blogmywiki

Both exmonkey and I have noticed this: our jeans used to wear out at the crotch and now they wear out at the knees. Changing nappies, you see.

Cyril Connolly is supposed to have said ‘the pram in the hallway is the enemy of promise’ (although a little googling tells me his book was called Enemies of Promise and the quotation should go ‘there is no more sombre enemy of good art than the pram in the hall’). Maybe he should have written ‘the knee-hole in the trouser is the enemy of promise’, but then one wonders how many nappies Cyril changed himself.

Will have to track down Enemies of Promise, partly because Cyril Connolly is referred to a few times in the commuting book Notes from Overground by Tiresias, and it apparently contains other corkers like ‘whom the gods wish to destroy they first call promising’. I like that. Reminds me a bit of my A-level history teacher Mr Hofton who one day skewered me with this withering remark: “Booth, are you really intelligent, or merely well-educated?”

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Insanely Great Freeware

Posted on February 28, 2007 by blogmywiki

While I’m thinking of it, here’s some of the great – free – software I put on the kids’ computer… most are cross-platform.

MAME – play old arcade games, relive your mis-spent youth, get your kids to mis-spend theirs

Audacity – free audio editor and mixer. Who needs Adobe Audition?

Google Earth – it’s a bit slow on the G3 tower, but it works.

RBrowser – utterly butterly free Mac FTP software.

Stellarium – beautiful program that draws the night sky, shows you what the stars are. In London we can’t see many stars, so I can stare at this for hours.

TuxPaint – kids paint program, a bit like KidPix but free. And you can have fun making your own stamps, cutting out pictures and making transparent PNGs of them, recording sound effects and stamping them like crazy.

Chicken of the VNC – MacOS X has a VNC server built-in, but not a VNC viewer. This is it. I can now watch what my kids are up to on the computer, move their mouse pointer and genrally weird them out, all from the comfort of my sofa.

TextWrangler – insanely great – and free – Mac text editor.

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Innocence lost

Posted on February 26, 2007 by blogmywiki

old g3 tower gets exciting new featuresWith a slightly heavy heart I’ve had to install parental controls on the computer in the back room – which meant upgrading the G3 Tower of Power from MacOS 10.3 to 10.4 (Tiger).

The boys had been looking at some very mildly risque videos on a web site they’d got off some friends – eldest is only 7. The computer is in a shared room, but not a room where they’re very noticable, which is probably a bad thing but there’s nowhere else to put it, and I don’t like their sticky fingers on my PowerBook very much. Makes me nervous.

So, another little bit of innocence lost.

But the nerd in me was quite pleased to have figured this out: I had MacOS 10.3 installed on a 20GB drive that had been partitioned in two. I only have an upgrade installer for 10.4 that requires 10.3 to be installed before it’ll run. But once it’s found a 10.3 installation, you can use Disc Utility on the 10.4 updated DVD to repartition / reformat the disc that 10.3 is itself on. So all the files you need for OS 10.4 must be on the updater DVD. And I only had to spend an hour or two shovelling a spare DVD drive into it and updating the OS, and recreating everyone’s accounts and finding  wallpaper of James Bond and Thierry Henry and worrying about data I might have inadvertantly wiped…

Posted in Apple, children, computers, family life, lowendmac, MacOS X, thrift | 2 Comments

Dreams come true

Posted on February 25, 2007 by blogmywiki

I kept dreaming of a new kind of laptop. I kept drawing it and doodling it.

It would be about the size of an A4 sheet of paper, have Wifi, run some kind of Linux and – crucially – have no hard drive. A Cambridge Z88, an Apple eMate for the internet age.

Turns out the One Laptop Per Child project are thinking along the same lines. The project aims to design and build cheap, robust laptops for the third world. $100 laptops. Not for me, of course, but for children who really need them.

There was some ballyhoo in the media a while ago that the project – whilst still not going commercial, not selling them in Europe or the US – would let you buy one if you bought one for the developing world. A brilliant idea. Buy 2, get 1.

It’s not quite clear from their web site if they’re really going to do this or not. I hope they do. I want one of these so much, it hurts.

Posted in children, computers, hardware, internet, Linux, thrift | 1 Comment