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Friday, October 19th, 2007

WPBN - The Firkin

IMG_2821

Originally uploaded by mobocracy

So yeah, Last Saturday was a blast …

I was kind enough to give the guys who make up “When People Become Numbers” A lift to a gig in Stafford they had booked.

The Venue was kind of strange, it was only a small pub like, but there were some pretty cool bands there and the crowd seemed pretty happy.

Anyway, check out the pictures!

Friday, July 6th, 2007

Berlin ist schöne

So Berlin was awesome. I was only there for a week, but it really is one of the best places I have ever visited. So much so that it has strengthened my want to move over to Germany in the next few years.

I wish I had bothered to write a diary of some sorts, but here’s a little taster of what I did:

• walked lots and lots. So much to see in Berlin, and what better way to walk around the city getting a feeling not for the normal tourist haunts, but what the suburbs are like too.
• took lots of pictures of random things [1]
• visited the Jewish history museum (stunning architecture, as well as an incredible insight to the torments the followers of this faith have had in the past few thousand years in Europe)
• visited the communications museum
• visited the old point where checkpoint Charlie stood, and the museum that overlooks it
• visited countless other museums giving quite an extensive history into what Berlin and Germany as a whole has looked like in the past, the present and plans for the future.
• more walking
• Drank beer (Berlin wießbier is now my favourite beer, lets see what I think when I get round to visiting Bavaria

I didn’t really get chance to see everything I wanted to in one short week, so probably will want to go back some time in the future (probably a few times) and try and plan more constructive plans to actually do things. What will prove invaluable in this endeavour will definitely be my “rough guide to Berlin” which proved to be a brilliant source of information whilst I was out there, along with my handy map of Berlin, purchased from WH Smiths, and my BVG rail system map).

Not being a travel writer, or writer of any kind, it is difficult for me to attempt to put into words how good I thought Berlin was, the German people and just how polite and helpful they are (as long as you at least attempt to be polite yourself!) the excellent public transport in Berlin, basically the entire city is great!!

Anyway, expect more posts when I have time, going into specifics

[1] http://thefraggle.com/germany/

Thursday, June 21st, 2007

cheap portable hard disks a go go

I decided to buy a portable hard disk this week for my trip to germany, so that I can ensure I don’t run out of CF space.

It’s a vosonic vp2160, and at £109 for a 60gb model I’m pretty happy. It happily reads my CF card fresh from the camera, and copies over all the images pretty speedily.

The interface is super simple and easy to use, it doesn’t play music or anything like that, but all I wanted it for was to store pictures on till I get home and can process the images.

The USB2.0 interface is speedy enough to copy over files i’ve copied to the disk, and also allows you to use the device as a CF/MMC/whatever reader for your PC, which is handy. It’s pretty handy too how you can charge the Li-ion battery via USB too (you have to plug two usb connectors into your pc, but that’s no biggie really)

What really impressed me the most, however, is how it actually seems to suggest you should be fine upgrading the hard disk at some point. They include (amongst the power adapter to charge it up and the install cd for win98 drivers etc) a mini screwdriver to uncouple the back off it, which reveals a bog standard fujitsu 2.5″ hard disk. So if I decide 60gb isn’t enough in this little device I will be able to have a good go at upgrading the hard disk!.

I also purchased a Creative Zen Vision:M 30gb today too today to tide me for my trip to germany, but will druel more at that when it arrives tomorrow

Friday, April 13th, 2007

the number of servers you run …

Well reading popeys blog entry on how many servers he has, and what he uses them for made me feel a bit better than I did previously, about running more than one server of my own for personal use. I only have three servers, and a workstation and a laptop; maybe I don’t waste as much electricity as I thought I did

• etch.thefraggle.com - Debian etch, xen vps from bitfolk; general webserver for www.thefraggle.com, and master mail server.
• sarge.thefraggle.com - Debian etch, xen vps from bitfolk; run’s IRCd’s for blitzed.org and nixhelp.org and tertiary mail exchanger.
• beastie.thefraggle.com - FreeBSD-6.2-stable on an old p2 400mhz 128mb ram; used to run an ircd for nixhelp, and thefraggle.com website, but now has been retired to being a development machine and tertiary mail exchanger.
• laptop - centrino duo 1.7ghz 1gb ram; work laptop with winxp / debian etch for work stuff

There’s actually another box there, my dads p4 3ghz, that I have pretty much nicked off him for day to day internetting :). I suppose the fact that I have three servers kind of means I am pretty geeky?

Would be interesting if anyone reading this also commented with what they use :).

Tuesday, April 3rd, 2007

cat can have some handy features too.

Another nifty thing I figured out a while ago, whilst having to upload a script written by one of the guys we support, in a windows editor, was how to check quickley and easily with cat(1)whether it had silly windows CR/LF’s :

cat -ev /path/to/file

Would output something like the following if the file had silly line endings…

This is some text written in windaz^M$
And another line edited in windaz, woo^M$

cat suffixes the end of line with a $ and shows any special characters that have been inserted, in our case here ^M is the windows special character for new line, so all you need to do is remove that, which is again pretty easy:

sed -i.bak -sed -e "s/r//g" /path/to/file

Should remove the windaz file endings from the file, copying the file with a .bak suffi as a backup.