Tag: internet

Destroying Kitchens!

Oh what fun!!
The past week we have been ripping the old kitchen out of our new house!

The amount of plaster that came off of the walls is shocking! In some places we have managed to get right back to the brick wall!

We have attempted to re-plaster some of the smaller holes, which went ok, but we are now stuck with the larger expanses!

To make matters worse, we have the new kitchen cabinets lying in flat-pack form on the dining room floor, and we have our new fridge freezer being delivered tomorrow, and no kitchen for it to go into! Lol!

I have plenty of photo’s but I have had no time to get onto the Internet to upload them.

I have only come home to eat dinner, and nick more tools, and have only had about half hour on my computer a day! (Which is more than my girlfriend thinks I should be on here for! Lol!)

To top it all off, I have no car, as it is making a really loud grinding noise. We hope it just another wheel bearing, but it sounds nothing like last time!

But it’s not all bad news, as we have managed to get the lounge/front room painted, and we have a dining room table and chairs! We have also got a bed!

But we have no mattress, so we’re sleeping in a sleeping bag on an air mattress.

But it has been so hot at night we have just ended up on top of the sleeping bag!

It’s time to go now, we’re only here to look for a spanner and to check the delivery time for our fridge freezer!
More soon

Upgrades & Updates

Has it really been a month since my last post!?

Since then and now, Christmas and then the New Year has been and gone. All the turkey has gone and the Christmas chocolates have been eaten, and the last few Christmas nibbles and pickles are still being shared around!

My sister has moved out and is renting a place with her boyfriend. We’ve not noticed much difference, because before she was hardly home anyway!

 
Last week my trusty 17 inch monitor gave up the ghost, so I had to make do with an old CRT while my new 19 inch wide screen monitor was delivered. Interestingly, the screen is just a little shorter than the old one, but boy, does the width make a difference! 1440×900 pixels baby!

Also, after a forced upgrade to my monitor, I also decided to bite the bullet and upgrade my operating system. I went from Fedora 7 to Fedora 10 in a matter of two days!

After going down the doomed upgrade current installation path, I then tried the old delete-it-and-install-a-fresh route, and it worked!

But like all new things there were teething problems, I would loose network connectivity if I tried to assign a static IP address, but I had no problems getting onto the Internet if I used a dynamic IP address. I found a solution on the Fedora forum, which didn’t work, but I did find a solution that works.

I had another problem with Firefox, or more specifically with Fast Dial. When getting a website preview, it would cause the whole system to just hang.

My problem with Pidgin was solved by setting my public IP address, or I could of solved it by configuring a STUN server, strange how this didn’t affect the last version!

I still haven’t been about to mount CD’s, but I’ll work on that when I get more time, I just need to edit the fstab file, I don’t know why it wasn’t set automatically!

Other than that its been great, KDE 4 looks and works great, I’m still getting used to the changes, the main menu set up is a little weird, but it’s cool!

I have a spare partition on the hard drive which I was going to install Windows XP, but I might install another distribution I was looking at, Foresight Linux.

 
I have also updated my website, last year in December I upgraded my installation of WordPress to 2.7, and moved a few things around so that (eventually) the whole website (will) run on WordPress. The only two pages not currently running on WordPress is links and photos.

I have also updated the design, but there’s still a couple of areas that I need to sort out, like the home page, comments and the footer, but, overall I think the design is all finished, it’s not a complete redesign, but I think that it improves the overall look and feel of my site.

Playing with old Computers!

These past two weeks since I last posted I’ve been showing some old computers the “free” way!
I sent Windows 98SE to the recycle bin, and installed Linux! Or more specifically I first installed Puppy Linux, and then Zenwalk Linux

I got Puppy running on one, but the x windows system wouldn’t start up, so I switched to a second computer, and got it installed and running! The wireless network worked straight out of the box, except that it I had to unhide the network SSID for it to connect!
I ditched Puppy because I just couldn’t get the wireless started on boot-up!

So I went with Zenwalk Linux. It installed without a hitch, the desktop runs a little slow but I’m going to see if I can get another one installed instead.
But wireless didn’t work, so I had no connection to the internet, and the kernel module for the wireless card wasn’t installed by default. I managed to get the files needed onto the computer, but it stopped compiling with an error.
Luckily the NDIS wrapper program was installed so I could use the Windows driver provided with the network card on Linux.
I downloaded the install program from the Belkin website
~ $ cd Download/f5d7000v3_2.2.7.0
f5d7000v3_2.2.7.0 $ ls -l
total 23796
-rw-rw-r-- 1 anthony anthony 24333824 2008-06-01 20:26 f5d7000v3_2.2.7.0.exe
f5d7000v3_2.2.7.0 $ unzip -a f5d7000v3_2.2.7.0.exe
Archive: f5d7000v3_2.2.7.0.exe
inflating: start.exe [binary]
inflating: files/._setup.exe [binary]
inflating: files/rt2500.cat [binary]
inflating: files/Rt2500.inf [text]
inflating: files/Rt2500.sys [binary]
inflating: files/Rt25009x.sys [binary]
inflating: files/setup.exe [binary]
inflating: manual/._manual.pdf [binary]
inflating: manual/manual.pdf [binary]
inflating: other/.DS_Store [binary]
inflating: other/._.DS_Store [binary]
inflating: other/._ar500enu.exe [binary]
inflating: other/._flashmain.swf [binary]
inflating: other/._icon.ico [binary]
inflating: other/ar500enu.exe [binary]
inflating: other/flashmain.swf [binary]
inflating: other/icon.ico [binary]
inflating: AUTORUN.INF [text]
f5d7000v3_2.2.7.0 $ ls -l
total 27104
-rw-rw-r-- 1 anthony anthony 45 2004-10-25 18:45 AUTORUN.INF
-rw-rw-r-- 1 anthony anthony 24333824 2008-06-01 20:26 f5d7000v3_2.2.7.0.exe
drwxrwxr-x 2 anthony anthony 4096 2008-06-03 12:43 files
drwxrwxr-x 2 anthony anthony 4096 2008-06-03 12:43 manual
drwxrwxr-x 2 anthony anthony 4096 2008-06-03 12:43 other
-rw-rw-r-- 1 anthony anthony 3343706 2004-08-24 10:41 start.exe
f5d7000v3_2.2.7.0 $
And it worked! I got it connected and onto the internet in no time at all, and the best bit, it connects to the network while its booting up!

I haven’t decided yet, but I might either go back to Puppy, or install a different distro, maybe DSL or Vector Linux

The Great Car Hunt Part 3

What a disappointing weekend.

Saturday I took the day off, so that we could go and look at cars all day.
In reality, we only found four or five cars in the paper, and on the Internet.
One of the cars that we saw in the paper was the one that we saw last week, the tatty P reg Clio. It said immaculate condition in the advert, and it wasn’t until we got the address that we realised it was the same car. Immaculate! HA!
Two of the cars had already been sold, and the others were answer phones, or they didn’t answer.

Sunday was/is no better!
We managed to get through to one of the adverts we saw on the Internet Saturday, and arranged to go and see the car.
We turned up, and we couldn’t get any one to answer the door. We tried phoning them, but it went straight to Orange answer phone.
So, while we were in Yate, we decided to try the other advert that we saw on the Internet.
Surprise! We managed to get through to him, and the address he gave us was the address that we had for the other car.
We told him we were outside. He hung up. Or the line went dead.
We saw both cars parked in the little car park next to his neighbour, and his neighbour confirmed that the cars belong to that house.

We believe that the two cars, and the other cars in that car park all belonged to him, because all of them wasn’t taxed, and all of the tyres was shiny black.
He was some sort of trader, and he had set up multiple phone numbers to point to the same phone so that he doesn’t get caught out.

Here are the links to the adverts in the Trade-It
www.trade-it.co.uk
www.trade-it.co.uk
I am now suspicious of any adverts coming from Yate now.

We have seen no other cars Sunday afternoon.

Will I ever get a car?