A friend of mine emailed this to me this morning. It took 18 days of work, but it’s all kinds of awesome!
More photos: http://englishrussia.com/?p=2487
Monthly Archive for April, 2009
My friend (and one-time American Football team-mate) Emmet Ryan has been nominated for this year’s Irish Internet Association NetVisionary Awards in the Journalist category.
When he’s not doing whatever it is that journalists do, Emmet also runs marathons for a cystic fibrosis charity. Not bad for someone who played on the offensive line!
So if you’d like to vote for Emmet (and I can’t think why you wouldn’t), you can do so by following the link below. Thanks.
Before I went travelling I installed Ubuntu 8.04 on my EEE because I wanted something relatively stable and that I was familiar with. Now that I’m back, I want to hack around with it a bit so, so yesterday I installed Arch Linux on it.
There is a pretty comprehensive guide to installing Arch on the EEE which I followed for the most part. Between that and the beginners guide, the installation and initial configuration were relatively straightforward. I installed from the 2009.02 FTP USB image, using a wired ethernet connection to download the required packages during the installation phase, but the EEE wireless card was supported “out of the box” on the first boot (after selecting the wireless-tools and netcfg packages).
The base installation was simple enough after a bit of reading. However, configuring Xorg almost drove me mad! After spending most of the day reading through the ArchWiki Xorg article, I finally came upon the (partial) solution of ignoring the xorg.conf file completely and relying instead on the startx command and the hal daemon. This left me with a couple of problems related to the keyboard layout, but did give me an X11 environment capable of supporting Gnome.
Installing Gnome was as simple as typing pacman -S gnome, but I’d recommend installing the gnome-extra package too while you’re at it, as the gnome package is pretty minimal to say the least!
I had no problems with sound or the internal microphone, and following the ACPI section of the guide enabled the hotkeys, OSD and power button to function correctly.
I’m still tweaking my setup here and there, but the system seems stable so far. It was a lot more work than simply installing Ubuntu or Fedora, but I think it was worth it to get a smaller, faster system running on the EEE’s (quite limited) hardware.
A few months ago, my laptop suffered a filesystem crash and I had to perform a complete re-install. I had back-ups. No big deal. However, while I was in Australia, the back-up of my GPG key was on an inaccessible system in Scotland, resulting in me having to generate a new keypair.
Now I’m home and have access to all my files again, and seeing as (almost) everyone is using my new public key anyway, I thought I’d be as well cutting down the confusion and properly revoking the old one.
This is simple enough provided you know your passphrase or generated a revocation certificate before you forgot it! In my case, I issued the following commands:
$ gpg --output revoke.asc --gen-revoke 1A27C8BB
$ gpg --import revoke.asc
$ gpg --keyserver pgp.mit.edu --send-keys 1A27C8BB
Easy.
One the most common arguments I hear from my Mac-loving friends is that OS X is better than linux because it “just works”. Bollocks! I’ve just spent the last day and a half trying to get my 2nd generation Mac Mini to talk to a wireless router on the other side of my bedroom wall.
For the most part I’ve had no issues with hardware or software, and I’ve grown to actually quite like OS X, my wireless issues over the last day or so are just taking the piss!
The trouble started when I set up my Mini again and tried to connect to the router in a room across the hall. Apparently, the router didn’t exist. This would be puzzling even ignoring the fact that my EEE was sitting on the same desk while reporting 83% signal strength. Dropping all encryption allowed me to connect for long enough to download 9 months of security updates, but the signal strength was so low that it barely registered, and after a restart the network “disappeared” for good.
After exhausting all the usual WiFi debugging tricks, I began searching various Mac-related forums for a possible solution with no great success. Moving the Mini to the same room as the router was not impossible, but is incredibly impractical. One suggestion to drill holes and run cable across the hall struck me as being particularly stupid. That is until I remembered a strange email I received while I was travelling.
For reasons unknown, my parents came to be in possession of a pair of powerline Ethernet adapters, which I had read about but never actually seen in the “real world”. A quick rummage in a drawer turned up a couple of Comtrend PowerGrid 902 adapters, and five minutes later (Truly plug-and-play!) I was negotiating an Ethernet connection over the mains power cables in the walls!
Ethernet over powerlines always struck me as being expensive and not all that reliable, but so far everything seems to be working at a similar speed to CAT5, and to be honest I’m just glad that I’ve got this thing connected to the internet again! I’m not really sure what’s happening to make it work (It seems a little like magic at the moment!) but hopefully I’ll get time to investigate it soon.
Osaka is only about half an hour from Kyoto by train, so we decided to spend today there and visit Osaka Castle. It was first built in the late 1500’s, and even though it has been rebuilt and restored a number of times since then (The castle itself is actually built of concrete!) , it’s still one of the most impressive buildings I’ve ever seen!
I went for a walk around Kyoto today and visited Nijo Castle and Kinkaku-ji (The Golden Pavilion). I took some pictures.
I’m lucky enough that I’ve never been subjected to the UK rail network for more than a couple of hours, but still, I try to avoid it where possible!
The Japanese rail network is totally different! It’s spotlessly clean (even the Tokyo underground!) and runs to the minute. If the timetable gives a 14:03 departure, the train is leaving the station at 14:03:01.
Today I travelled to Kyoto on the Hikari high-speed train. The interior was set out more like an aircraft cabin than a train car, with everyone given an assigned seat in forward-facing rows. One very cool thing about that: The seats all face forward. What happens at the end of the line? Does the entire train turn around? Do the passengers just have to travel backwards instead? No. A team of cleaners rushes on board between services, and as part of their duty, spins each row of seats through 180-degrees! It’s brilliant!
Akihabara is Tokyo’s “Electric Town”, and as a self-confessed electronics geek, this is somewhere I wanted to spend a good bit of time.
Akihabara is the sort of place that could easily take up an entire day. I wandered around the 9-story Yodobashi Camera store for a couple of hours yesterday afternoon, but wanted to check out the rest of the area and see the place light up once the sun had gone down.
I found Akihabara a little difficult to get around, but mostly due to Tokyo stations having similar but slightly different names! The station to aim for is JR Akihabara, rather than the Hibya line Akihabara subway station. If you have plenty of time to explore the area it might not matter, but the JR station exits directly into the “Electric Town”, simplifying things a bit.
Once in Akihabara things are a little easier. The best thing to do in my opinion is just to walk around the side streets. Those who are interested in Anime and the like will probably find something of interest, but for me the best part was the variety of electronic component stalls. Until now I was completely unaware of the vast number of different brands of copper wire, insulation and solder, but Maplin will never seem quite the same again.
Today we went to Miraikan (Japan’s National Museum of Emerging Science and Innovation) and were just in time to see ASIMO come out of his* cupboard and run around for a bit!
ASIMO was only out for about 15 minutes, but he was pretty impressive. He did a bit of running in a straight line and managed to kick a football across the stage to one of the museum staff. He didn’t attempt any stairs though!
*ASIMO is so awesome that I often think of it as a tiny person in a suit. A kind of Turing test I suppose.
