Just checked my AIR Journal to find the last entry was July 16th!
Since then I have been reading avidly.. both crime stories, a number of new authors, and then in September the financial crisis took off, which resulted in my ordering a bunch of books that enabled me to build up a good background of the causes of the miserable mess...
Tuesday, 6 January 2009
Wednesday, 16 July 2008
Catching up after the eye op...
Just after my last post I had the eye op. in Drammen. Susan drove me and all went well, but it was uncomfortable reading and writing for the rest of the week, partly due to the salve I had to use 3 times a day til the following Friday.
Anyway, now I'm back in business and there's quite a bit to mention.. first I updated Suse to KDE 4.1 RC1. That went surprisingly smoothly, though at first I didn't realize where you could select it, i.e. on the login page which normally is bypassed. Nvidia is working well and the fonts are better now, so Suse is really looking good when you compare its 1280x1024 resolution, approx the same as the Macbook, with the iMac which is much higher definition. There was also an update which included a kernel update. Luckily I had read the 'new posts' and noticed a grub error thread, as it hit me too. The new kernel entries were made in menu.lst, but slightly wrong.. hd0 instead of (hd0,1) in a couple of places.. made a new Eltorito CD and backed up using both Paragon and Macrium. The latter is distinctly faster on both the XP drive and the Suse drive.
Next was a Firefox - Dropbox fiasco. Oddly enough I had returned the PC to its normal profile a few days earlier without trouble, but both Macs refused to let me in after the change, saying there already was a copy of FF open. In the end I had to bite the bullet, Zap FF and reinstall from scratch. This went fast enough, but I had forgotten it would zap the passwords too.. so now I have clean copies which keep asking me for old passwords, until they have been re-entered :(
Next was July 11th, another of those absurd Apple days with people actually queuing up overnight for the privilege of buying an iPhone 3G in a store - that was the only way you could buy one! That I'll never do! And of course the systems crashed, the queues took ages to move as the servers were down, people were sent home to complete the activation through iTunes and had to sit there hitting a key for 4 hours or so in order to complete.. of course Apple gets a tremendous amount of attention as a result and even negative factors seem to benefit them! I'm waiting for the first Android, about which it has been very quiet lately, but I think an HTC model will be out in a couple of months ;)
MobileMe was updated at about the same time as above, and even that was a screw up, so much so that everyone is getting 30 days extension of their agreement! I'll try it again early one morning and see how it like updating my iTunes folder now.. bet its still running at 15-20KB/sec.
That's about it.. I removed Acronis True Image totally from the PC and am keeping both Paragon and Macrium images in easily recognized folders on the combo drive. Really must take 2nd level backups to the new REDNTFS partition.
Anyway, now I'm back in business and there's quite a bit to mention.. first I updated Suse to KDE 4.1 RC1. That went surprisingly smoothly, though at first I didn't realize where you could select it, i.e. on the login page which normally is bypassed. Nvidia is working well and the fonts are better now, so Suse is really looking good when you compare its 1280x1024 resolution, approx the same as the Macbook, with the iMac which is much higher definition. There was also an update which included a kernel update. Luckily I had read the 'new posts' and noticed a grub error thread, as it hit me too. The new kernel entries were made in menu.lst, but slightly wrong.. hd0 instead of (hd0,1) in a couple of places.. made a new Eltorito CD and backed up using both Paragon and Macrium. The latter is distinctly faster on both the XP drive and the Suse drive.
Next was a Firefox - Dropbox fiasco. Oddly enough I had returned the PC to its normal profile a few days earlier without trouble, but both Macs refused to let me in after the change, saying there already was a copy of FF open. In the end I had to bite the bullet, Zap FF and reinstall from scratch. This went fast enough, but I had forgotten it would zap the passwords too.. so now I have clean copies which keep asking me for old passwords, until they have been re-entered :(
Next was July 11th, another of those absurd Apple days with people actually queuing up overnight for the privilege of buying an iPhone 3G in a store - that was the only way you could buy one! That I'll never do! And of course the systems crashed, the queues took ages to move as the servers were down, people were sent home to complete the activation through iTunes and had to sit there hitting a key for 4 hours or so in order to complete.. of course Apple gets a tremendous amount of attention as a result and even negative factors seem to benefit them! I'm waiting for the first Android, about which it has been very quiet lately, but I think an HTC model will be out in a couple of months ;)
MobileMe was updated at about the same time as above, and even that was a screw up, so much so that everyone is getting 30 days extension of their agreement! I'll try it again early one morning and see how it like updating my iTunes folder now.. bet its still running at 15-20KB/sec.
That's about it.. I removed Acronis True Image totally from the PC and am keeping both Paragon and Macrium images in easily recognized folders on the combo drive. Really must take 2nd level backups to the new REDNTFS partition.
Sunday, 6 July 2008
Trials and tribulations as they say
Not sure if I mentioned the work done and time spent in front of the PC, but Gentoo copies have gone and now there is quite a snazzy uptodate OpenSUSE in their place! I ended up with back pain of course..
Then there has been the search for a better backup app than TI 9 (and 11 which is being returned) which only want to backup the Linux drive at very slow, full disk (298GB) only. No way or space!
I came across Paragon Drive Backup 9 Personal, a fairly new release, but I think they forgot to update the Recovery CD options.. their Bart PE plugin solution is not a solution! Its too complicated for the average guy to do, and it doesn't work. I spent days on it :( Their Recovery CD loads OK, BUT the Normal mode reaches a blue Paragon screen with nothing on it.. Failsafe mode works, but the mouse drive is from 1995 and only works for me if I wiggle it during all activities... laughable, but it came in useful when I tried another app ShadowProtect and ended up screwings Windows - finger trouble ;) - and restored a 4th July archive. had bought it by then btw.
Next on the list was the Lifehacker tip, Macrium Reflect Free. I downloaded it and managed to backup XP to the F partition on hdb, check the Bart PE Recovery CD worked - the Linux CD hangs at the firewire drive section - and then thunder stopped play, both for me and for my recording of the Williams sisters battling out at Wimbledon. Happy to say Venus won! I don't like the look of Serena, or perhaps its the name, or both.
Thats it for now.. looks like I'll end up with three Backup apps!
Then there has been the search for a better backup app than TI 9 (and 11 which is being returned) which only want to backup the Linux drive at very slow, full disk (298GB) only. No way or space!
I came across Paragon Drive Backup 9 Personal, a fairly new release, but I think they forgot to update the Recovery CD options.. their Bart PE plugin solution is not a solution! Its too complicated for the average guy to do, and it doesn't work. I spent days on it :( Their Recovery CD loads OK, BUT the Normal mode reaches a blue Paragon screen with nothing on it.. Failsafe mode works, but the mouse drive is from 1995 and only works for me if I wiggle it during all activities... laughable, but it came in useful when I tried another app ShadowProtect and ended up screwings Windows - finger trouble ;) - and restored a 4th July archive. had bought it by then btw.
Next on the list was the Lifehacker tip, Macrium Reflect Free. I downloaded it and managed to backup XP to the F partition on hdb, check the Bart PE Recovery CD worked - the Linux CD hangs at the firewire drive section - and then thunder stopped play, both for me and for my recording of the Williams sisters battling out at Wimbledon. Happy to say Venus won! I don't like the look of Serena, or perhaps its the name, or both.
Thats it for now.. looks like I'll end up with three Backup apps!
Wednesday, 25 June 2008
A brief test from Diablo
Very surprised to find a new version for the N800 today! I downloaded a copy and tried to install it on the PC, but the FlashGui just crapped out. To cut this short, I got it to run in 256 colours... And now I'm using it. It seems faster, has a slick theme, and most important, future dl's will be more Mac-like - YES!
Tuesday and its Gentoo
Started the day with some sunshine on the balcony, having been up since around 3am! I sorted out the partitions on hdb drive and deleted hdb11 thro' hdb17. I should have stopped there and got on with life, but the brain is a canny device.. before I knew it it was 3pm, I had moved Portage to hda8, and I was updating it with 'emerge --sync' on the hdb Gentoo copy. This alone took over 30 minutes! I should have stopped there too, but having updated portage I just checked to see how many things an 'emerge system' would want to update.. it didn't look bad - updating my profile to 2008.0 and sorting the blocks with help of forum search and away it went updating system :) That went surprisingly fast until just before the end when there was some trouble with PAM that has been semi-deprecated. I should have copied the comments out to hdb10, there were some things to do with authenticate - as logwatch output shows, PAM is involved with root starting sessions. I sorted out the block, something to do with udev IIRC, and finished the system update, logged out and in again ok (not a restart) and thought I would leave it at that..
However... when I rebooted the machine the screen was blank as it proceeded for a while before giving up. F2 showed nothing.. I wasted another hour searching the forum and tried a couple of small changes to files updated by etc-update, but nothing helped. So, I have promised myself to use no more than an hour or so before either wiping the hdb Gentoo off the disk or restoring hdb8 from my pre-update state.
Curse OpenSUSE and Linux!
However... when I rebooted the machine the screen was blank as it proceeded for a while before giving up. F2 showed nothing.. I wasted another hour searching the forum and tried a couple of small changes to files updated by etc-update, but nothing helped. So, I have promised myself to use no more than an hour or so before either wiping the hdb Gentoo off the disk or restoring hdb8 from my pre-update state.
Curse OpenSUSE and Linux!
Tuesday, 24 June 2008
Re: testing gmail from iMac
It must be a Blogger problem
On Tue, Jun 24, 2008 at 7:55 AM, gerry fraser <gerald.fraser@gmail.com> wrote:
will this get through ok? if so its a Blogger problem..
Firefox and Dropbox sync
I was surfing the Dropbox forum posts the other day, and came across an interesting one in which one could set up a Firefox 3 profile on Dropbox/Profiles (iMac's) and sync not only the two Macs, but also XP once it was updated to FF3 :)
It works well.. I also use Dropbox after downloading an XP app on the Mac, so its ready on the PC when next its booted up.
It works well.. I also use Dropbox after downloading an XP app on the Mac, so its ready on the PC when next its booted up.
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