"Of course the shortcut isn't easy, if it was it would just be the way" Well this one is.

Despite having used Ubuntu for the past 3 years I have just discovered the coolest feature ever. I wanted to go to my /media folder and without thinking I just typed '/media' on the desktop, I hadn't bothered to open a terminal because I was talking and I wasn't paying attention. Low and behold Nautilus has popped up at my media file.

Turns out pressing '/' when on the desktop brings up an 'Open Location' dialog box. People have really put thought into the way you use a computer and made it as easy as possible, love it.

That horse hasn't been flogged enough!

After the unbearable tedium of my last post I thought I'd make today's short and sweet. Ignorance's old guitarist is involved in a Movement called Youth Fight For Jobs that strives to get, amongst other things, a decent working wage for everyone.

It's something the whole ex-band believes in an we've worked to promote in the past. They are having a fund-raiser/profile-raising event on the 11th March in Trillians Rock Bar in Newcastle and  . . . . . . . . . 

Ignorance is the opening act.

How cool is that? It's our first gig in almost 3 years and no one is anywhere near ready. Cue a mad rush to rehearse and generally get assorted shit together. Awesome!

Rejected titles:

Jumping on the bandwagon

Reunion tour

Getting the band back together

Youth Fight For Rock 

etc.

Going green.

I'm quite the hippy, you know? With that in mind I've been doing some energy calculations recently. My server runs at around 45W whilst seeding some torrents and basically idling, it's usual state. So, to run this thing 24/7 for a month would cost the princely sum of £3.72. Hardly a fortune.

My desktop tends to run around 80W with just the tower running. Adding the dual 22 monitors and the speakers can increase this to 300+ if the processor is digging in but usually even that is usually scaled back to 800MHz/core and as I type this (tower, two screens and listening to music) I'm reading ~130W. Assuming an average of 100W (bearing in mind whenever I leave the room the speakers and screen go off) and 10 hours a day usage this take us to £3.10 a month. To have the desktop running 24/7 for a month would cost £7.44, a not insubstantial sum.

But hold on, currently the server is on 24/7 and the desktop for 10 hours a day, totaling £6.82/month, which is only 62p less than just having the desktop on all of the time. That difference will get smaller when you assume that a greater proportion of the desktop's uptime will be with the screens and speakers off if it became the torrent mule, not to mention the reduced strain on me managing two separate pcs.

My point? Well there isn't one really, it's just I either write this or my bioremediation essay. But I guess you could say that computers don't cost much to run and don't hurt the planet. They will however, hurt your brain if you've actually made it through this blog post. Now if you don't mind I'm off to bed and I'm turning my server off, the desktop can torrent tonight. Far out.

I've been served

Stupid Western Digital. I have quite a nice server, usually. But my 1.5TB Caviar Green drive (an identical one to the storage drive in my desktop) has just failed. Which means I've had to send it away for a warranty replacement. Which means that the main drive in my server is a three year-old WD drive with a whopping capacity of 320GB. With the way my data storage works I didn't actually lose any data as everything that is on the server is on my desktop. (Although the system was designed so that if the desktop ever failed I would have a backup on the server, it's nice to know it works the other way around too!)

My server was going to be my desktop but when I put the Phenom 955 I bought into the Zotac motherboard that I bought I realised the cpu clock speed was stuck at 800MHz per core. After many angry emails with what is certainly the worst customer service team I have ever come across it became clear that, because Zotac falsely claimed that my motherboard supported my cpu when it actually didn't, I was left with a rather underpowered pc. The reason that I bought the Zotac board was that it was the only mini-ITX board that claimed to support that cpu, so swapping out the board for another simply wasn't an option. I was left with the choices of either buying another, much less powerful, cpu or another board in another form factor. That second option would also necessitate a new case and power supply as only the mini-ITX boards would fit in the Silverstone. Obviously I chose the second option (along with some DDR3 memory as it turned out) to build my desktop. The remaining case, power supply, motherboard and memory stayed behind and were joined by the CPU  from my old desktop. Thus, my mini-ITX server was born.

Specs:
Case: Silverstone Sugo SG-05B (With it's original awesome, 80+ PSU)
Motherboard: Zotac 8200-C-E (Integrated GeForce 8200, wifi and lies)
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 4600+ (2.4GHz, Dualcore)
Memory: 2GB Corsair ValueRAM (800MHz, DDR2)
Storage Drive: 1.5TB Western Digital Green (WD15EADS) (Although currently it's the 320GB drive as mentioned)
CPU Cooler: Scythe Shuriken

And the other bits:
Operating System: Ubuntu 9.04
Monitors: Samsung SM226BW
Keyboard/Mouse: Advent ADE-AD2

At least having it offline for a bit allowed me a chance to nab some photos.

 

 

Nominally the server is headless as all of the functions it performs are administered via the network. Having said that, it is connected to the VGA input on one of my monitors and there is a dongle for the wireless keyboard/mouse kit because sometimes it helps to actually use the machine. Why wouldn't I? It sits right beside my other pc in a cupboard in the desk so it's close enough to use the same monitors as the main machine. Switching between my pc an my server is as easy as pressing the 'source' button on my left hand monitor.

The original memory was 4GB of OCZ Platinum DDR2. When I bought the new system I decided that DDR3 was the way to go so I had no use for the nice DDR2 that I'd bought as it would be way overkill for a server. Thankfully a flatmate was more than happy to take it off my hands for a very nice price. This paid 2/3rds of the Corsair Dominator that sits in my main pc. The server's memory was replaced by the Corsair ValueRAM that used to be in my main pc. The cpu is the one from that old machine too. Just to clarify then, the memory in the pictures is the old OCZ, the ValueRAM looks nowhere near as impressive, although for a machine that sits in a cupboard that isn't a big deal.

I have re-installed the image from a backup I'd made and I'm currently deciding what I desperately need to have on the server and what I can live without should my main system fail. I haven't seen that 'home' percentage useage bar so empty in a very long time.

300 miles, 280 pupils, 6 undergrads, and 5 schools in 4 days.

Cumbria is a rather beautiful part of the world. I've been away for four days as part of my Student Ambassador job I hold with university. Basically, we're a team of undergraduates who promote the university (and universities in general) to the public. Not as bad as it sounds actually, there are no cold calls or leafleting or anything, we get to do some quite interesting things.

My favourite aspect of the job is working on the summer schools that the university runs bit I also get to go into secondary schools around the UK and talk to students about university and university life as well as take things like campus tours and work on open days. There were a stack of schools in Cumbria that wanted visiting so a team of six ambassadors and two members of staff were dispatched to set them right.

Highlights included a school that employed two bouncers, some quick rally driving, sampling one awesome nightclub in Carlisle (and a few terrible ones) and a trip to Royston Vasey. No kidding, there was a certain hotel that was literally straight out of a horror movie. You know when somebody walks into a bar and everybody puts their pint down to glare at the non-locals? Check. The overly-joyous-and-so-must-be-hiding-a-dark-secret manager? Check. The mute and miserable waitress? One of those too. It has since come to my attention that this particular pub is one of the roughest in the area. We left and went to Wetherspoons. Now, I like Wetherspoons. I like it like I like McDonalds, its simple and cheap but who cares? It IS cheap after all and if you go expecting anything else you will be disappointed. But how often has the phrase "This hotel is horrible, let's go to Spoons!" been said? How bad is somewhere for a Wetherspoons to not be a step up but a whole fire escape up?

I slept with my penkinfe under my pillow.

On a more serious note the kids there were awesome. Names of kids and schools are obviously off the menu but I was extremely happy to, once again, prove the people who argue that the youth are a bunch of time-wasting, violent yobs wrong. Schoolkids (like all humans) naturally gravitate towards what they find comforting, in this case their friendship groups. I usually go for the group of rowdy lads. I was one of them at school and I'm hardly one to back down from a challenge. I quite enjoy the peacocking, posturing and the politics that groups of boys get involved in on what I am sure is a largely subconscious level. It certainly beats the boring social interactions of girls. Another, female, rep is even better. We call her the alpha-male and she simply rocks out with her cock out when it comes to taming loud boys. I tried to make that not sound dirty but it failed.

I'll say it again (although to the first time on this nascent blog): People who claim kids are inherently bad do no know how to handle kids. The problem lies with you and your poor social and communication skills, not with them. Just for shits and giggles, go back and replace the word 'kids' with whatever you like. 'Blacks', 'Gays' and 'Women' are fun ones. Funny how it's still just as true, isn't it? This attitude really started to piss me off at Beamish, particularly in the school. Every day I'd hear about how bad the youth of today are and every day I would have to defend them. Victimising and scapegoating a group of people is not a great way to make them feel wanted by society. Why are people surprised when someone whom they have turned their back on turns their back on them? 

A middle-aged lady once latched on to me when I was walking from Chester-le-Street station to my parent's house. When I asked her why she was following me she said she wanted to talk to me as she didn't like walking by herself. With a little further pressing it seems she was afraid of everybody under 25 as they are all rapists and muggers. Everybody apart from me, but by this point it was quite clear the woman existed in a constant state of dread so maybe she wasn't thinking straight. She literally just didn't feel safe walking through her hometown without an escort. Most people, on hearing this, would invariably think that she was the victim of some great social injustice where a small minority ruin it for the rest of us. Or perhaps she had been mugged or raped and was understandably worried about a repeat performance. But no, she was just a headcase. "There is nothing to fear but fear itself." If you tell yourself that a place and it's inhabitants are scary then you will be scared, but if you pull your head out your arse and visit some schools and talk to some kids you'll realise that, at worst, they remind you of you.

I'm all for local industry, but c'mon.

So I got this as Christmas present:

And, to be honest, it was a nice gift. Except there were a few small flaws. Whe I first opened it I remarked that, for a 'World Beer Selection', an alarming percentage of them were lagers. On closer inspection however another alarming inconsistency was noticed.

You might have to click on the image and full screen it to read the text.

So, not entirely beery and not at all worldy. Well, at least there is a selection. Or rather there was. I don't think I've drunk the Carling yet anyway.

HAL 9000

It's no secret that one of my main interests is computing. In fact, other than playing bass, I'd say it's even a hobby. Because of this, I'm active on a couple of online forums (fora?) including the excellent bit-tech and eeeuser. Rather than post my specs in my signature and in a myriad of different topics I'd like to have everything in one place.

To that end, this is my main pc as of the time of this writing.

Specs:
Case: Antec 300 (with 2x Sharkoon 'Golfball' 120mm fans in the front)Motherboard: MSI 770-C45

Processor: AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition (3.2GHz, Quadcore)

CPU Cooler: Zalman Flex

Memory: 8GB Corsair Dominator (1600MHz, DDR3)

Graphics Card: XFX GTX280

/ drive: 30GB OCZ Vertex Turbo SSD

/home drive: 500GB Western Digital Black

/storage drive: 1500GB Western Digital Green

Optical Drive: LG Writemaster DVD Writer

Power Supply: Corsair CX400

And the other bits:
Operating System: Ubuntu 9.10
Monitors: 2x Samsung SM226BW (22” 1680x1050 each)
Keyboard: Saitek Eclipse II
Mouse: Logitech RX720 (on a Razer Exactamat)

This system is pretty new to me actually. I had originally planned to build a Mini-ITX system that eventually became my server (due to the evil Zotac's lies!) My original aim was for the most powerful system possible that was both quiet and not super expensive. I mean, yes, I could have bought an i7 and some more, triple channel, RAM. But what are the performance gains really? I have no doubt that my system is twice as good as a pc that costs half as much. But is something that costs twice as much (or more) as mine really twice as good? I have always believed in buying slightly behind the curve. Cutting edge always costs proportionally far much more for a few percent performance gain. And next year it won't be cutting edge any more, and it will have dropped tremendously in price. Yes English people, that was a sentence that began with an 'And' and then I had a comma followed by an 'and'. And I don't care.

The quad core seemed pretty necessary, I do a fair amount of multitasking and there are several linux programs that make use of two or more cores. The memory was simply because I know Corsair Dominator to be good and because at the time I bought it, all RAM was ridiculously expensive so I thought as might as well buy good stuff. The HSF is easily the loudest thing in the PC. I would like to replace it sometime soon with the Titan Fenrir, especially now that the limited edition is out. But that requires money and time to remove the mobo. I can't get any more memory until I swap coolers as the low-but-wide Scythe blocks the first two DDR3 slots. (NOTE, as of April 2010, I have solved this problem!)

The GPU pretty much had to be a nVidia because I wanted to use vdpau. Originall I bought a 9500GT but then I started gettin into pc gaming again. Result: GTX280. Oh well, at least it won't need upgrading for a while.

Another indulgence I allowed myself was in the storage department. SSD's have really taken off since 2009 and are fast becoming mainstream. The advantages they provide as a boot drive are numerous and can be found all over the web if you don't know already. Suffice it to say that a good one is an order of magnitude faster than any hard disk. Expensive per GB, the sensible solution seemed to me to be a small SSD as a boot drive and then a big HDD for storage. There's a performance-orientated 500GB 'black' drive as /home for day to day use and a cool and quiet 1.5TB 'green' drive for internal backups and bulk file storage. Those 1080p movies aren't small files you know.

Screenshot and a close-up of conky:

 

 

In other news, my dissertation is finished! I'll be looking to try and update this blog more often now, also look out for my server details and the 'why I need a new laptop' post.