linux blog, music and life. a day in the life of wayne ward…

Well its been a while …
Ive been doing quite a lot of personal blogging in the new journal software I got called macjournal
I found most of the stuff I write about is people i know and them being assssholes! and I didnt really want to make it public!! ha ha… Im going to try and spilt my journals up so I at least get some interesting posts up daily. Ive also split my personal blog with the linux meeting minutes and added the linux minutes to the lancaster linux user group website. Its been hectic over xmas with gigs It all started last week i did my first gig on my own as jimmy usually does it with me as a duo which was pretty darn good I have to admit i liked to hear my guitar but having that second person does bring it along! then the night after i did a gig in carnforth with a old mate and had a great night! I then did the bobstock on the monday with natural thing for macmillan charity best day ive had in ages it was quite nice to see some other bands and realise we aint that good nowadays! but im thinking 15 years is enough time for the band now…..
The night went out with a bang with local band from the ashses – some damn good shit. Shamone.
The next gig was with jimmy at the bowerham which was a stormer apart from i noticed the lights werent switched on half way through the first set so i switched them on only to trip the power :-O
then some drunken prat decided he would try and pickup the guitars and after being told over the mic he proceeded to try and get back on the stage and then stood on the table! knob. He decided to growl at me which was funny as he would have been growling through his wired up jaw if he carried on as the strat was ready to connect to his head. nice
Anyhow the next and last gig was at the yorkshire house with promethium we was supporting d.a.m.
We got to the gig for five but couldnt get into the six to get the gear in so i decided to drink 2 / 3 hoegarden lagers which was fun then proceeded down to ali babas for a cheese burger with noooo mayo (thats another story..) got back and sound checked – sounded shit hot!
Got back home got changed and got the video camera as we was getting this gig on multiple video cameras! went on about 9.15 to about 40 punters and went down amazing!! I was slightly put of the gig for reasons i dont want to get into but it was still 100%
It was a shame for d.a.m – as the punters that came to watch were our following and dispearced when we finished so i stayed and give the lads some support!!
We dropped craig of who was being a pissed pain in the asss and promethium went back to dans to watch the video and drink some wine!! I rolled in around 4 – I cant wait till the next time we play – im going to watch rossi isnt in sweat wiping range haha!
The next gig is new years eve at the moorlands should be a stormer!!!

xmas …
Has been a chill plenty of films and books plus my dad has been round a lot. Fiona got me a burl watch box which im loading with new watches and also got me a pool table which me and dan have made plenty of use of!!

Sad loss to the year was a good friend great friend and drummer for years – R.I.P

Been talking to richard stallman for the past couple of weeks which has been pretty interesting he is the creator and maintainer of the GNU – kind of nice being in touch and talking to someone who has so much status in the open source community – I have a lot of respect for him and some of the things he stands for.

As for work and computers im starting to look more at getting websites and SEO in the new year and im going to run a local campaign to get some more web based work. Computers are a nightmare no ill refrain that computers are great its just the users who get there hands on them – they are basicaly undereducated idiots and are being issued with a tool that is far to powerful for them… and most of them when they break it wreckon they never did anything and its the person that sold them its fault its just a big joke!!

Anyway i wish you all a happy new year!!!
This year im starting new all grudges dropped a nice to fresh start
So anyone who has pissed me off is now officially of the hook
Adios

Just a quick test from MacJournal! to my personal blog
Ive decided ro do a personal blog aswell as a online blog

Take a look here around 24 quick for a licence

http://www.marinersoftware.com/

this is a handy little bit of kit for your mac dashboard

todo that ties into ical

take a look here

to do widget rocks

this is the mag safe cut off and resoldered and witing to be re – connected

this is the magsafe end stripped ready to be resoldered

the end re-aplied – and works perfect

my next blog about this is when i have found something that makes it look like this!!

Its easy enough to remove the outer casing with some cutters and remove the inside – the connector has two wires which is soldered to three parts on the internal pcb.
Ive seen posts that say you can kill yourself doing this – but i never!! ha ha. All you need is a low wattage soldering iron and a steady hand, de-solder the old wire and re-solder as shown in the pictures to the right places.
I just need to find or invent a external fitment which will replace the old casing which one will look good (so no tape) and another be easy to take off to fix if it needs re-soldering again – plus it would be nice to gain extra strength and still show the LED light……

Im just moving service providers and phone provider and have a 20 day switch over – so I purchased a mifi adapter which I blogged about below. One of the problems stated was it wont let email relay out for my domain name. So ive had to use webmail provided to me from my hosting company. The choices i have are Horde – SquirrelMail and RoundCube. Ive always used horde as being a kolab user it comes bundled with it.. horde it pretty lean and has other features including mail – tasks and its very configurable probably a bit over the top for someone who isnt very technical – one of its good points is a white list and blacklist for killing spam now SquirrelMail on the other hand is very cut down and very lean it comes with address book and you can see your imap folders, you can add a signature and thats about it! id say not very nice to look at but does the job fast. Roundcube now this is basically the same as squirrelmail very cut down with the same features address book and signature and access to imap folders, no tasking or calendars but it looks great – i like the option Focus browser window on new message! so if your looking for lots of features go for horde if you want cut down go for squirrelmail if you want it more pleasing on the eye without all the tasking and other productivity addons roundcube is great. Check out the main sites for more info:

Horde
SquirrelMail
RoundCube

Sat up late last night and did some linux installs in virtual boxes to brush up my skills!! In virtual box I installed arch linux which was very nice to install and pretty straight forward, I installed some packages using pacman which was pretty straight forward and got xfce4 installed in a breeze make sure you have hal and dbus as it needs it and gnome extra icons package to fix menu items – nice lean bit of kit!
i then went on to install gentoo mmmmm now i got the new gentoo 10 which is a 2.5 gig dvd? crap – tried it in my virtualbox and it never started up crap! ill try again as i think its something to do with not pressing alt + f1 ??!! anyway got the older 2008.1 install in a flash booted of that followed the handbook as its been a while built the OS in a hour with everything built into the kernel and ripped all the crap out – rebooted 100% – then went on to do a debian 5.0 netinstall this just installed in a breeze i must say gentoo just has this feel about it yes it takes a time to build but on todays hardware and with the price of memory why not build your own OS ??? you want power id say go gentoo defo.

while trying this i was talking to gareth on skype and we was screen sharing we noticed my macbook was running with the 32 bit kernel – you find this in apple sign top left of screen – about this mac – more info – left hand side – software –

64-bit Kernel and Extensions: ??

mine read no – so i rebooted holding down the keys 6 and the key 4 for 64!! and hey presto i got a 64 bit kernel!!! yum yum!!!!

linux is cool and so is my mac

Just got my hands on the new version of mac osx – snow leopard, awsome bit of kit. I decided to go for a clean install as there was so many changes to the core – one being full 64 bit otherwise i might have gone for a upgrade – anyway the install is very slick and simple much easier than any windows install! anyway cleared the drive and 20 minutes later im in snow leopard, first thing i noticed how much snappier it was! from then on it took me a hour to setup all my apps which wasnt bad – most of the apps are snow leopard compatible now I ran into 3 apps !! which aint bad. I use codeweavers games to run GTA vice city and a few other doze games that run badly in a ciderized wrapper so i got the new version 8 down and this also failed? so i downloaded crossover pro and this works 100% – one of the others was smallimage2 which to be fair stated it on their website when i downloaded it but i found imageresizer which i have to be honest is more what i wanted in the first place! and last but not least the real pain in the ass is artisteer which i just payed like 70 quid for! this creates my wordpress and joomla themes except it doesnt until they fix it!! and it turns out its not down to them its more the mono wrapper it sits in! as its basically a .net proggie!! how dare they charge me 70 quid for a non native app?? i hear they are working on it and have working patches…
anyway some nice features built in to many to list but all i can say is its worth the upgrade specially for 40 quid for a 5 user pack! knocks the socks of any windows operating system 100%
if you havent got a mac .. get one

ive been using clipper for a while now on mac osx but they have changed it for the worse!
I found another simple tool called jumpcut works with snow leopard and is available from here
Its is simple and free

Just found a quality free little app for making images the correct file size – shrinks them from like 4meg to under a meg just drag and drop and specify a output folder easy
its called smallimage2 – anyway took a look at the snow leopard link on the site and this app dont work on snow leopard – damn im getting that this weekend
now i got to go on the search again till it get re coded

take a look here

just working on the lancaster linux user group website please take a look and if your interesting in joining the group please feel free to join the mailing list
the site is here