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.
BT Hub Repeater
I'm not really impressed with the range of the BT hub. It's located upstaires and while it does cover the entire house the signal downstairs is reported as "low". I managed to get hold of a second BT Home Hub and thanks to the information
here I have configured it to run as a repeater. Placed the second hub in the conservatory and I now have excellent signal strength even in the garden.
Webcams
Running new software for the webcams. Webcam XP5 - nicer user interface and is supposed to use less system resources than the previous versions. So far so good. The output from the webcams is hosted on this site but they are mainly intended for visitors to the
"Welcome to Northwich" website.
Desk Tidy
One of the sites I visit every day is
Lifehacker. This evening they are running an article on tidying your desk space. Looking around me it's probably time that I gave that a go. As well as my two desktop PCs I've got three laptops sitting here, piled with papers and CDs and basically not doing much at all. I think I need to get my space organised and put these machines to use.
The older one needs to be running an OS like Linux and I really need to get an Apache server set up so I can test stuff like PHP code locally. I can't believe that I've got more machines than I've really got use for but hey, that's the fun of being a computer geek!
Twitter
I decided I would give this Twitter thing a go (
twitter.com). I originally had a look at it a while ago but didn't really do much with it. It now seems that almost everyone is using it, celebrities like Jonathan Ross and Stephen Fry both have Twitter feeds so I thought it was about time I revisited it.
First course of action was to install a javascript bookmarklet (
twitlet.com) onto the Firefox bookmark bar. This created a bookmarklet which, when clicked on, allows me to make a Twitter post without leaving the Firefox browser.
Next step was to grab hold of a Twitter "badge" so the Twitter feed can be posted on this blog. It's basically a short piece of HTML code that grabs and displays the last five posts from my Twitter account. It was easy enough to embed it in the left hand column on this site.
I'll see how it goes and whether I quickly get bored of the whole thing...
The Dangers of the Internet
My sister sent me this card on my birthday. It even has my name on it!
Charlotte, The New Kitten
We have a new kitten called Charlotte. She is a pedigree colourpoint persian and at the moment is a little ball of fur. She spent the first couple of days hiding behind the setee but overnight she became more adventurious and emerged from her hiding place.
She has spent the past two days exploring her new home and playing with her vast collection of toys - the toy fish on a piece of string is one of her particular favourites.
The other two cats, Krystal and Merline have reacted very differently to Charlotte's arrival. Krystal is not the slightest bit bothered and is just carrying on as usual. Merlin is living behind the settee in the front home, only venturing out when it's meal time.
When I get some more pictures I'll upload them to my Flickr account and post a link here.
