Recent Posts

I had enough of the wetness and the wind for one day. So, when I sobered up it was all better.



I used to dismiss all this kind of stuff as old wives' tales, but this morning I felt totally hungover and knackered and I'd nowt to drink last night. Checking the weather sites (xcweather.com) I saw there was a massive deep depression right over me - bbuger. As it moved away, I picked up.
I never really took seriously, all those older ones who'd complain about their joint pains and the weather, but it's all true - dammit.

One of the trials I put in was a slightly old Mint - I rather liked it, but it wouldn't play nicely with the graphics card, although that may have been sorted in the current release.
I'm also in the process of building a HTPC out of an old HP Pavilion box with an Intel Duo 5700 (and might upgrade that to the most the motherboard will take), so now I'm wondering whether to stick W7 with XBMC on that or go for XBMCbuntu. It's a toss-up, because that one needs to be fit and forget, unlike the desktop here, where I can meander away at it to my heart's content.

VM will definitely be going in, as I need it (or wine) for Photoshop. I was using VM on the W7 box on occasion, and had a hard time getting it to see the USB ports (another reason for change - if it had done that and operated the printer, I would have halted there), but this time around it is only necessary for box-internal use and won't have to talk to the outside world.

About ten days ago, I discovered that my old Oki LED printer wasn't supported by Win7/64 - no driver for it, anywhere, and nobody had successfully tried, either. This was doubly galling, because apart from being a great old compact 'laser' it was really cheap to run, as parts for it have now got dirt cheap as New Old Stock is being sold for peanuts. I only use it once in a blue moon, and it's really economical to have it there, as it can sit for months between uses and not clog, unlike inkjets.
That was the start of it. Just to see if it was supported in Linux, I bunged in an old Ubuntu CD and ran it as a trial - it recognised the printer straight away and spat out a test page. Great.
I installed that version, then found a couple of days later that it was no longer supported and I really should be running the latest one - ok, so I did that, and the printer still worked.

Could I get the satellite card to work? Of course not.
So I installed a more TV-card-friendly version - Mythbuntu, which is supposed to recognise TV and sat cards and just work - of course it doesn't - that would be too much like pure luck. The printer didn't work either, but that was easily fixed.
The card works in VLC, but only for one mux at a time and when I want to change a channel, I have to enter the various parameters all over again. However, this shows the card is working and some level of driver is in there.

It's like knitting your own string vest, all this pissing around with stuff in Linux and I'm getting to the stage of seriously considering ripping it back out, going back to Windows and simply configuring one of the old PCs as a printer mule. I was trying to avoid that, as it's a bit of a waste of space most of the time.

... learn to logroll and vape.
www.salon.com/2013/12/29/sciences_obsession_the_search_for_a_smart_pill/

Aha; now that rings a bell. In the analogue satellite days, I was too tight to pay for Sky to watch loads of repeats, so tuned into the German sat a lot. In the wee small hours many of the regional German sat channels would have filler progs on, some of them fascinating (some just awful, of course), but mostly worth a watch.
One of the best was SpaceNight, but you'd find one of various journeys filmed in-car videos as a driver ambled his way around different parts of Germany. Others would be, for example, an anonymous journey along endless miles of forested railway line, or even a recorded blazing fire in a hearth. That was strange, but interesting to have on as background.