Wine Update

Getting pretty busy on the wine making front. Bottled the Banana wine earlier this week (a quick tasting confirmed that it is a "good one"). Got a bucket of plums on the go in the kitchen at the moment and a tray of red grapes in the shed which will be started at the end of the week (an advantage of working in a supermarket is that I get a lot of cheap out of date fruit).

Looks like the grape wine is going to be interesting. I've printed a bit of info from various websites and I'm think I'm going to add a bottle of over-sweet blackcurrant wine to the brew, and possibly do this with the plum wine as well. At the end of the day this stuff is costing me next to nothing to make so I can't see any harm in experimenting a little.

Oh, and opened a bottle of the tea wine brewed in January this year. Wow! Great taste and rather potent, I was light headed after a glass and half. Good job I've got five bottles of that one left

Broadband Speed

Now, this has got to be wrong. I thought I had a 20Mb connection...

New DVD/DivX Player

The Toshiba DVD/DivX player died last week. Unable to read any disks it was time to look for a new one.

I needed at the very least a player that could handle DivX and Xvid, HDMI output and upscaling to the HD television. A look around the various electrical retailers showed a vast choice of machines but not many that met my specifications. Eventually found the LG DVX492H at Argos which could play DivX, had a HDMI connection, upscaled to 1080p and as a bonus, had a USB socket at the front. For just under £40 this was perfect for my needs so I reserved it and collected it the next day.

It took about five minutes to set it up and I quickly inserted a DivX movie to test it out. Very fast loading time, clear menus and the picture quality and sound is very good.

Popped a movie onto a USB stick and that played instantly, perfect for the odd TV episode that I don't really want to burn to DVD. I've got a few files that the old player had trouble playing, a couple seem to be in some sort of HD version of Xvid. I don't really expect them to play but you never know.

I've not made it multi-region yet. I've downloaded the files which look to be a firmware hack. Not a priority as I very rarely play DVD movie disks but I'll get around to it shortly.

Overall I'm very happy with the purchase. It looks good, plays my video files perfectly and I can certainly recommend the player

Mint Linux - First Steps

I decided to install a different version of Linux on Machine 2 and settled on Mint Linux as it appeared to be geared up for the multimedia experience. Machine 2 is an old Dell P400 2.8 Ghz machine with 1Gb of RAM and a reasonably sized 82Gb hard drive.

The install from CD went well but my first problem was I was stuck with a resolution of either 640x480 or 800x600. No really much to work on and since the old LCD monitor would support up to 1024x768 I really wanted to change this. Graphics card is an onboard Intel 865GL with 8Mb of system memory allocated to it in the BIOS. The monitor is an old Relsys TL565 15" flat screen LCD model.

A first look around the various forums suggested that I need to edit xorg.conf in /etc/X11 - only problem is I didn't have this file. After a bit more looking around I desided to create this file and have a play around with it.

First steps were:
cd /.
cd etc/X11
sudo gedit xconf
and paste in a generic xorg.conf
I then entered a depth of 32 and a resolution of 1024x568

This achieved nothing so I thought I would change the monitor settings. My first few attempts resulted in a black screen so I used a "Live" CD to change the settings further. As I changed the figures I eventually got a display and even though it was corrupted I knew that I was going in the right direction.
Eventually I go a slightly corrupted display but the Display Manager in the Control Panel allowed me to select my desired resolution of 1024x568. Result!
Relevant portion of xorg.comf is shown below:

/etc/X11/xorg.conf

Section "Monitor"
Identifier "Monitor0"
VendorName "Monitor Vendor"
ModelName "Monitor Model"
HorizSync 40.0 - 60.0
VertRefresh 50.0 - 60.00
EndSection

Section "Device"

Identifier "Card0"
Driver "intel"
VendorName "Intel Corporation"
BoardName "82865G Integrated Graphics Controller"
BusID "PCI:0:2:0"
EndSection

It's Snowing!

Lot's of snow today. As at 16:00 it has started snowing again.

Looks like an early start tomorrow to get into work...

Winemaking

I have started making my own wine. A colleague at work very kindly gave me a couple of demijohns and wine making equipment. My first couple of efforts were a couple of wine making kits from the “Shop with no name” and although these turned out ok I really fancied trying wine making the traditional way with real fruit.

A few months ago I took a trip down Rudheath canal behind Morrisons depot and discovered loads of elderberries. That wine has been in the shed for a while and although it needs another 4 months to really mature I was tempted to open a bottle on Christmas Eve. A little light but still a nice wine.

Currently in the shed I also have grapefruit wine and apple wine. Both should be ready in time for summer and I’m looking forward to sitting outside on a nice sunny day with a glass in my hand.
Currently on the go in the Kitchen is tea wine. This has been bubbling away nicely for about five weeks and I have high hopes for it.

My next project is going to be blackcurrent wine – the main ingredient being a bottle of Sainsbury’s Blackcurrent Hi Juice!

Thundersprint Bike Show 2009

It's Thundersprint weekend here at Northwich so I made an early start today to visit the Saturday Bike show. Rather than being held at Winnington Rugby Club, this year it was held just outside the Memorial Hall and on the nearby car park next to the river Dane.

I personally did not feel that this venue was as good as in previous years. It seemed to be a lot smaller and the range of bikes did not appear to be outstanding, none of the really interesting customised bikes had made an appearance. Still, it was an interesting walk out.

Hoping that tomorrows main event, the Thundersprint, is as good as it usually is.

Thundersprint Bike Show 2009 Photos

Computer Building

Spent all afternoon putting together another couple of computers. The old Athlon is ready to go, it just needs an operating system installing.

On the Dell I decided to go for Debian 5 and the install went so smooth it was unbelievable. No problems with the install, which took about 60 minutes. Video card and the network were all detected and set up fine. Slight problem with the audio which stared working when I changed the Intel device being used (Though it still doesn't work in VLC for some reason - I'll investigate that a little later this week). Debian even detected a very old Philips webcam that I had found in one of my boxes of computer bits.

Installed Firefox and had a few problems getting Flash working but it is now fine so I will be able to get my iPlayer fix on the machine.
It finds the Windows network and can access the shared folders on the XP machines, that did kind of surprise me that it did it "out of the box".

It looks like it's going to be a good machine to work on.

More Computers

Managed to get a few more computers on Sunday. A couple of Dell 2.8 Ghz systems and a huge Compaq server. My Dad's PC has been running a bit slow recently (It's an old AMD Athlon) so I decided to see if I could put him a faster one together.

I selected one of the Dell's and upgraded the memory from 700 and odd Mb to a gig. Replaced the CD writer with a decent dual layer DVD writer. Popped in a 200 Gb hard drive and did a fresh install of XP. Thankfully all the drivers for the video card and such were easily obtainable from Dell's website and while there I also got hold of a file to flash the BIOS to the latest version.

The only slight problem I had was the fact that until you install Service Pack 2 XP will only recognise 130 Gb of the hard drive. This meant that I had to install some partitioning software and reclaim the unused space on the disk.

My Dad is very pleased with the result and keeps telling me he can't believe how fast it is.

Looking at the other Dell I was originally going to install Debian on it but now I'm wondering Hackintosh or even setting it up as a multimedia machine downstairs with the TV.

New Computer

I bought a new PC last week. Work had one on offer for £199 and after the VAT reduction and staff discount this worked out at £175. For my money I got an Intel Pentium Dual Core unit with a 19" LCD Widescreen monitor.



It came pre-installed with Vista which I'm not over keen on so my first task was to make a note of all the installed hardware and carry out a fresh install of Windows XP. Inside the case there was only one free ATA connection but this was enough for me to pop in my data hard drive. Had a bit of fun getting webcam number 3 working but after reinstalling the driver it started to work ok. The major problem was getting the Playstation game controller working. For this I had to carry out a search on the web - turns out that XP installs it's own drivers for this, which don't work... After deleting drivers and performing a number of restarts the pad came to life. I was surprised the the USB video card and second monitor worked fine.

So far, I'm very impressed with the machine. Though I'm not a big gamer it is nice to be able to run some of the more recent games and I'm sure all my emulation stuff is going to run just fine. The widescreen monitor is fantastic. I watch a large amount of TV and movies on the PC, and the picture quality cannot be faulted.

After a week I'm finally getting the software side of it just how I like it. Fortunately the majority of my software was on the data drive so the installations went like a dream.