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I just spent a rather odd day in Germany. You’d expect with the World Cup just round the corner that you’d find the country in the grip of World Cup fever, German flags flying from every shop window and car windscreen.

Well, not in Dusseldorf, and not any place else in Germany either, I expect.

It’s odd because on the surface, to a Martian, England and Germany look so similar. The people look similar. Many years ago my brother was stopped by some Americans in a hotel in Los Angeles and they said “don’t tell me, you’re either from England or Germany.”

There were a few football shirts on sale in the airport, from different counties. Argentina, Australia and, yes, Germany. But they were hard to find amongst the alchohol, cigarettes and – best of all – Micro Magnetic Playmobil boxes (my boys got one each).

On the flight home I flicked through the Lufthansa in-flight magazine, and found this wonderful photo and caption: “Football and beer are the perfect combination”.

I just can’t work out if this is a sly dig at the English, or if it’s just naive.

Apple are making it hard for me to love them at the moment.

I’ve been spending a huge amount of time fixing up my mother-in-law’s Bondi Blue iMac; decided early on to cut my losses and wipe the hard drive and re-install OS 9.2. But even though she told me not to bother, I decided to try and back up her data.

Big mistake.

You’d think it would be quite easy to get an iMac with the newest version of OS 9 talking to a Powerbook with the newest version of OS X, right?

Wrong.

After much frustration, and yes, shouting at the screen, I found out that Tiger only supports Appletalk over TCP/IP. It won’t talk Appletalk direct. Which explains why I was going nutzoid trying to figure out why the OS 9 iMac and the OS 10.4 PowerBook would talk via my WiFi router, but – amazingly – not if I join their two ethernet ports together with a bit of CAT5 cable.

Next time: the Exciting Story of the MacMinis that Cannot For The Life of them Remember What Screen Resolution They Should Be In.

Hoppipola by Sigur Ros is a great song.

I kept meaning to get the album it’s on.

But then I keep hearing it on TV. It was on all the ads for Planet Earth on BBC1.

I turned on the radio to BBC 6 Music three times last week and Hoppipola was actually playing as I switched on. On two other occasions they played it within 5 minutes of me tuning in.

And today they used it on BBC1 for the coverage of the London Marathon. Need a bit of soul-strirring gravitas for your TV show? Crank up the Sigur Ros!

Which is a shame. I won’t be buying the album now. I can’t get Hoppipola out of my head and it’s driving me mad.

We need another computer, but can’t afford one right now.

So I thought I’d try and make use of an old laptop that was going spare – a Toshiba Tecra 8000. It had Windows98 on it, but was so slow as to be unusable. I don’t have a copy of Windows98 to do a clean install from, so I thought I’d try some Linux… Ubuntu seemed like it might be a good bet for a newbie like me – I’ve run Ubuntu and SuSE from ‘live’ CDs, but never attempted an installation before.

Installing Ubuntu was okay, I spose. Couple of false starts – first go I plugged a serial mouse in druing installation and that crashed the installer out to a command-line, and the second time I tried to repartition the drive – that caused it to hang. But with wiping the drive and just doing as I was told, it was ok, took about an hour to install… then I reboot to log in for real… and I should have gone to bed. The machine was in configuration hell for another hour or so – no human intervention required, it just tweaked and configured every damn bit of software on the installer.

Next morning I had a machine that worked – just about. I was very impressed that getting on the internet was so easy. The Tecra8000 doesn’t have built-in ethernet, but I did have an old 3com PCMCIA ethernet card, and Ubuntu just got on and worked with this. My router has DHCP enabled, and again Ubuntu just talked to my router and it worked without me having to tweak any settings either on the laptop or my router.

But the screen would only work at low resolution, 800×600 or something, but filling the screen in a yucky, blocky way. Quick look at the Bugzilla for Ubuntu revealed a fix, but this would mean diving into the command line… well, I’m up for that. Only, could I get it to work? Could I feck. More lost sleep and frustration.

Got it sussed now, though. Obviously the Ubuntu bugzilla guys aren’t writing instructions for newbies, they’re trying to make Ubuntu better, and the next release is intended to offer insanely great laptop support…

If you have a Toshiba Tecra 8000 and want to run Ubuntu, here’s how to get the screen to work at 1024×768 pixel resolution:

Run the Terminal (Applications > Accessories > Terminal)

Type

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup

Note that X11 has a capital letter X. You’ll be asked for a password, use the one for the account you created when you installed Ubuntu. (This line of code makes a backup of the config file – if you mess things up you can rename the backup to xorg.conf and you should be up and running again.)

Then you need to edit this config file, so type

sudo pico /etc/X11/xorg.conf

This opens it up in a text editor, page down until you find the monitors section which should look like this:

Section "Monitor"
     Identifier     "Generic Monitor"
     Option         "DPMS"
EndSection

Edit it adding two new lines so it looks like this:

Section "Monitor"
    Identifier      "Generic Monitor"
    Option          "DPMS"
    HorizSync       36-52
    VertRefresh     36-60
EndSection

You need to press the tab key to get the text to line up.

Then press ctrl-o and enter to save the file, and ctrl-x to exit. Then reboot. All being well, Ubuntu will start up its graphical environment in lovely 1024×768 pixels.

As I say, it works for me – but it’s very very slow, espcially if you try to do more than one thing at once. I tried writing this in Firefox, cutting and pasting from other tabs or the terminal, and it was so sluggish that I gave up, and am now typing it in a simple text editor – gedit – instead. Maybe more memory would help, or perhaps there are other tweaks to strip Ubuntu down a bit… maybe another browser? Although Firefox is happy enough to do plain browsing and I’m posting this in Firefox ok – without any other tabs or apps open, though.

Got a free CD-ROM with the newspaper yesterday, advertising Sony Bravia TVs. You know the one with the cool ad with all the colourful bouncing balls bouncing down hills in San Fransisco.

The CD-ROM said Windows-only, but I looked at it anyway in case it had an MPEG of the advert and I also wanted to know what the dreamy music was.

Funnily enough, the CD-ROM plays just fine in OS X, it has its own Mac part of the disc – so it’s a bit weird the disc says Windows only…

The other odd thing is that I thought that some of the bouncing balls were real but most we’re CGI’d. They’re not. They’re all real. Amazing.

(The music by the way is ‘Heartbeat’ by Jose Gonzales)