Blogging to Nowhere
I just learnt about this whole Section 92A thing and the campaign against it that’s going on. Needless to say I signed the petition and set my identica and facebook avatars to blacked out. I find this whole thing completely wrong and see it as a capitulation to an industry that has wholly failed to ‘get’ the Internet. If you want to learn more or help out goto http://creativefreedom.org.nz/blackout.html
Went to see Top Gear Live last night. It was awesome! If you get the chance you have to see this show! I won’t write any more, otherwise I may spoil it for anyone who hasn’t yet seen it 
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I spend a lot of time working on my EeePC 901 using it’s external monitor support, it’s great, I have this little netbook, but when I plug it in to an external monitor, keyboard and mouse it pretty much turns into a desktop PC. The only drawback I’ve found so far is that there was no way to switch between the monitors in Ubuntu without going through the Screen Resolution configuration dialog. That was until I decided it had annoyed me for long enough and got Googling.
I found this page, which documents the Xrandr, which can be used to configure monitors and screen resolutions from the command line. Some of the code snippets on the page got me into writing a script, which could toggle between the displays and be assigned to a hot key. I also added a mode to switch back to the laptop screen when there is not external screen (just in case my external monitor dies as happened in the power cut the other day!).
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Since posting this article I have found a much easier way to do this. This article is still great background information and goes into more detail if you want to take this further, but you should consider reading my new article.
Well, I promised something technical and here it is. It’s turned into a bit of a mammoth post, but the end result is pretty cool!
The idea of being able to install your favourite Linux distro over the network and so do away with burning CD’s (which ultimately get used once and then thrown away) is tantalizing. Not to mention the serious geek points for anyone who has a boot server on their network.
I started out using this article as a reference, as the process seemed relatively simple. However, I soon found out that this article wasn’t strictly accurate and didn’t explain some things too brilliantly! So I decided to see if I could do better.
The following is my account of setting up my own boot server on a spare box I had lying around (though you can just as easily do it on your main computer). I started from a base install of Ubuntu Server 8.10 (Intrepid Ibex) which I installed in the normal way (i.e. from a CD).
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There was a power outage today across most of eastern Auckland and stretching into the central city. Having realised that we were all basically useless without our computers we went home early. The NZ Herald is now reporting that the power is mostly back on.
Apparently this whole thing was caused by the failure of one transformer at one sub-station. I amazes me that this should affect such a large area! Why is there no redundancy, even if (as in this case) one of the other transformers is down for maintenance? There should be backups to cope and even if an area goes off it shouldn’t affect half the city.
New Zealand still has a long way to go in getting to grips with this whole ‘electricity’ thing.
Not that I’m complaining about an afternoon off!
