Mum: “Where on earth is your kinder bag?”
Beccy: “I’m on earth, and I don’t know.”
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Author: Mark
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Calculating Pi by throwing food
I happened upon this from my google home page, and had to post it:
How to Calculate Pi by Throwing Frozen Hot Dogs
I have to say, on the laptops, that two finger clicking is more intuitive than finding a right button.
In fact, I never use the button on my Macbook at all, I just use 1 finger tap for left click, 2 finger tap for right click and two finger dragging for scrolling.
I\’s even supposed to work under Bootcamp, but not for me yet, though it does in Parallels
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New MacBook
System Updates
Installed: Firefox
Google Browser Sync for Firefox
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Gadget Years
Having been working with some older technology recently, I got to thinking about how long a gadget year is.
Basically a dog year is supposed to be about 7 years so that when a dog is say 13 years old, it is basically equivalent to a 91 year old human.
Well, in tech it’s even worse. Using some business logic of a working life drawing to a close around 75, and the working life of a computer being up around 5 years, It is my hypothesis that a Computer year is about 15 years.
Gadget years are even worse as the average life is probably more like 3 years, so I’m saying 25 years
1 Computer Year = 15 years
1 Gadget Year = 25 years.
So when someone asks me to fix a 10 year old laptop, I can safely say it’s about 150 years old and probably due for retirement, or at best a new life as a digital picture frame.
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First Cache Find!
On holidays visiting my sister &:: brother in law in Tawonga (Mt Beauty) I was surfing the internet and decided to find out if there were any geocaches in the local area.
There are a number, including one that I guessed was at a lookout we had passed on the way in.
I decided to take a look while Jen &:: Bern and the kids watched The Sound of Music.
This will be the first of lots finds (hopefully)
Stopped at the spring on the way down for a lovely drink.
I even managed it with only a Navman ICN-320 (totally designed for road use only. It allows me to enter street adresses only, which is not much help for geocaching.. All it will give me is my current position and I have to work things out from there.)
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What is Geocaching
Geocaching is the free high-tech treasure hunt where you use your GPS receiver to find caches hidden by other players. It’s a great way to be outdoors and enjoy the thrill of the hunt!
For more information see: Geocaching Australia
Bec decided to pack for herself for our weekend away to Mt Beauty.
Bern had a look in the case, and found:
7 Skirts
4 Pairs of shorts
3 Pairs of jeans
2 Pairs of pants
5 Pairs of Socks
6 T-Shirts
&:: 2-3 long sleeve shirts.
but no undies. (out of sight, out of mind)
At least she travels light.
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Linux on the Laptop
I’ve tried a couple of times to run Linux as my main OS, but always ended up crawling reluctantly back to Microsoft Windows.
I’ve run a couple of machines as dual-boot, and while at DE&::T I actually had one of each on my desk and swapped between them with a KVM
This time I think I’ve cracked it. I’ve been 3 weeks on my laptop (which I take out with me to clients and basically use everyday) without rebooting into Windows.
The Solution: Ubuntu Linux 6.06. Code named: Dapper Drake
It hasn’t been a perfect transition, but it’s one I’m happy with. There was trouble with WPA secured wireless networks, which I fixed by installing network-manager, and there were a couple of other teething problems I cant remember.
Outstanding issues:
Hibernation: doesn’t work but I’m usually relying on my laptop when I’m using it, so messing around shutting it down is counter-productive.
Printing to the Xerox Colour Photocopier at CCCW: requires me to enter a dept number, which seems to only work from the Windows driver.
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Remote repairs
It’s been a week of remote repairs, with varying levels of sucess.
I managed to remote control my Sister’s machine in Mt Beauty (3 and three quarter hours away) to help her with a confusing install.
Then I completely failed to be able to get a remote control session on my parents machine in Lakes Entrance (3 and a half hours away) to help them with what what looks like an IE spyware problem. (I really wish they would listen to me and use firefox…) If there are major problems, I’m going to set them up as a power user so they cant install anything!!
I think we finally got Mum &:: Dad’s machine working a bit better though.
Then my sister rings me to tell me that the keyboard just stopped working on her laptop!! We tried a few things like restarting &:: tapping all the keys with no luck. I told her to try and vaccuum it while brushing the keys with a pastry brush and hung up, expecting to have to spend another hour or so on the phone to her tonight walking her through taking the keybord out of her laptop to check the connection.
she sent me an email 5 minutes later with the subject:
"::It’s all ok! the vacuum did the trick – thank you – thank you – thank you!"::
Yay.
Dont get me wrong, I love helping my family, but that was already 4+ hours spent on the phone or Skype, when I really need to get some business background work done, and some sleep!