Cornell Finch

A few days ago my parents mentioned that a friend (steve Cole) had photographed some Albino Blackbirds. Dad was going to send me a link to the pictures…

Anyway, surfing the the BBC news website tonight I noticed a small link that said “Albino Blackbirds spotted”.

It didn’t register in my tired mind immediately, but I clicked through to look at it anyway. I turned to Rach and mentioned the that my parents were talking about it. I scrolled through the post, quickly, and noticed Steve’s name, Gosport, Hampshire, in the text.

Nice one Steve!

The article, to see the video of the “whitebirds” is here.

Leave my bin where it is!

My bin is usually located right behind me where I can swing my chair round and drop something in it. This morning it got moved to my right hand side in front of my draws.

I reached round to drop a horrible Riveta covered in Philadelphia cream cheese and let go.

So, I now have a white stain on the carpet. Not that kind of stain you dirty b******! The Philadelphia.

So, LEAVE MY BLOODY BIN ALONE!

I am still playing with Ubuntu and loving it more every time I switch the machine on.

I have installed a couple of extra applications, one called Liferea (LInux FEed REAder) for reading the RSS feeds. I took the opml (XML) file from Google Reader and imported into the application with no trouble whatsoever. Generally it works beautifully, but I would really like to see the name of the blog on the unread posts page so I know which blog/site I am reading. Currently it only takes the title of the post until you click on it which is a little confusing.

The second application is one courtesy of Tombuntu (who was introduced by Donncha in my previous post!). It’s called Cairo-Dock and gives functionality similar to OS X’s dock/launcher that sits at the bottom of the screen. It’s a great little app and makes my desktop even more OS X like. More information on the application is available in Tombuntu’s post How-to Install Cairo-dock. The only other thing I wanted to do was to get the application to start automatically on log-in. Another quick Google search turned up this post from Adventures In Switching [To Linux] which told me exactly what I needed to know. Thanks!

GIMP Image editing, whilst a steep learning curve (I’m used to Photoshop CS2) is as good as PS, with all the same functionality. If I’d thought of it I would have resized the two images above (taken with “take screenshot”) before uploading them.

What I am struggling to find right now is a RAW converter for Linux. I know there are a few out there and some of the reviews I have read say some of the are really good. Others however are suggesting to use Google’s Picasa application and from what I can see I would have to use WINE to run it as it’s Windows only. Any suggestions for a RAW converter? Maybe a plugin for GIMP?

Something I have just noticed while typing this is that Firefox (V.3 Beta 5) has gone grey whilst editing the post:

I think it happened when I tried to use Wordpress’s new media uploader for the images. Have to look into that one I think. I don’t know if it’s WP, FF or Ubuntu that has caused this to happen.

A couple of years ago I had a spare PC sat doing nothing.  At that time I decided to install Ubuntu Warty Warthog on the machine and have a play with it.

Unfortunately, I ran out of patience with the OS. Having always been Windows based, the switch to Linux was just too much. Trying to figure out how to get the audio running, get the machine to display in widescreen, get the wireless working - it just wasn’t friendly enough for me to achieve it and I gave up.

Since then, every so often I have tried to have a play with Ubuntu as a new version came out. I tried to install it on my laptop, but with only 128mb installed and no capability for upgrades, I failed miserably. Reading Donncha’s post about updating Ubuntu to 8.04 Hardy Heron reminded me that I have a spare machine in the garage.

Well, it’s a spare machine no more. With no more than a little grumping from my boss, the PC is now in the lounge, running Ubuntu 8.04 Hardy Heron.

The system automatically detected my sound card, wireless network card, video card, wired network card and everything else I would expect it to. The actual install was so much more simple than the previous attempts I’d had too, taking just over 20 minutes to install on an Athlon XP 2800 with 512mb RAM.

I had huge issues with trying to get on the ‘net. After much searching and believing it was a problem with the install, I remembered that I have mac address filtering set on my router. I added the mac addresses of both NICs to the router and voila!

I haven’t played much yet, although Already I am loving “GIMP”, a pre-installed open source image editing application (similar to Photoshop but free!). The above image was created using “take screenshot” (Applications > Accessories > Take Screenshot) and resized simply and quickly using GIMP.

I guess it’s the closest I’m gonna get to a Mac for the foreseeable future so I will keep playing and let y’all know how I get on.

If you use Ubuntu, please give me some suggestions for interesting stuff I can do with it, otherwise it’s mostly gonna be used for surfing (using Firefox 3, beta 5 which also came pre-installed).

CERN relinquishes all intellectual property rights to this code, both source and binary form and permissions is granted for anyone to user, duplicate, modify and redistribute it.

These are probably, singularly, the most important words user in the last two decades.

Why? On 30 April 1993 the two directors of the CERN particle physics lab signed a document that meant the internet was born and free to use to all.

Just stop for a second and think where we’d be without the internet.

Dialup to Bulletin Boards, no blogs, forums, information sharing would be almost nil, and (possibly a bonus) no Facebook.

Pete mentioned that he was leaving facebook behind a few days ago and I really can’t blame him. If I could delete my account I would. I don’t even use it for Poker any more.
There’s also an interesting article on the BBC dot.life blog about privacy and Facebook.

Anyway, this wasn’t meant to be a rant, just a wish for a belated happy birthday to the internet.

What would you miss if you had no internet access? What would you be doing instead?

Me? I can’t imagine. When I was at school all I wanted to do was work with computers (sad huh!) and guess what. I do. And I play with them when I’m not at work. I’m not a nerd though. Geek is fine, just don’t call me a nerd.