Chronofile

I got a fon router last year, one of the early ones a WRT54GL. I found it frustrating having to go through the FON login screen, and guests needing a FON login to use it, and in reality I never used another FON hotspot in the whole year I had it, which involved a fair bit of travelling.  I flashed it ( although I did step 6 differently just uploading a standard firmware into the web dialog )  as it has come to the end of its 1yr term.

The modem I bought to go with it a Linksys ADSL2MUE I bought for price. Its an unreliable piece of hardware, I found some upgraded firmware for it not officially released by linksys, which allows you to do port forwarding on it and seems to work more reliably with the WRT54GL.

Tried installing Xubuntu on an aging 9 year old computer tonight. Its a Celeron 400Mhz with 192MB of ram and I chucked a new 160GB hard disk in.

The installer ran kind of slow on it and unfortunately the partitioning part of the Xubuntu installer has a crucial bug init which causs it to crash at 15% of Installation while ‘detecting file systems’.

I had an Ubuntu Fesity CD so I ran the installer on that and it eventually installed, took the best part of an hour. Everything worked apart from the network card which is an old ISA D-Link DE 220p so I had no connectivity initially on the machine but managed to search for help on the problem and it works fine now.

Have updated Dapper on my Vaio to Feisty now, had to go through Edgy using Update Manager, don’t notice a lot of change, apart from some icon changes and better wireless connections.

Having been using Dell Precision, with its high resolution 17″ screen going back to 1024*768 feels cramped, enabled autohide on the top bar in Ubuntu and would like to do the same with the bottom.

Also downloaded qSynaptics which solved the tapping/clicking problem I had with the trackpad, you have to edit xconf.org and then run qSynaptics.

Noticed the Nokia 770 is for sale at Expansys for £75, kind of tempting would like an internet tablet but might wait till the N800 comes down in price.

Think I will get a Neuros OSD currently on sale from Expansys for £140.25

Really like the philosophy of the company, and it will be useful for ripping some stuff from the PVR I have stored and some stuff currently degrading on VHS and will be interesting to see how YouTube and other video downloaded off the net look on the TV.

Bought a Buffalo 500GB USB external hard disk ( £86 ), for freeing up some space on the VAIO and backing up photos across multiple laptops. Hopefully it should hook up to the Neuros ok. Thinking about getting a Linksys NSLU2 ( £58 ) for accessing the drive from the laptops.

The Nokia N95 is a respectable video recorder ( 640*480 resolution ). The default orientation of recording with it is holding it horizontally, as opposed to vertically with the N70. Rotating videos is a bit more challenging than videos, for one thing many video application won’t accept imports of .mp4 files, so you have to convert it to something like mpeg 2.

I tried using ffmpeg and mencoder on Ubuntu to convert it, but never managed to get it working, eventually I came across Super by eRightSoft which has an extrememly dodgy looking site, but is a free frontend to the same codec tools.

I then used VirtualDubMod where you can add a variety of filters including rotate and save to xvid.

Picasa web albums not support video uploads as well, you can do a right click on a video thumbnail in Picasa and upload to web album, which is quite neat. I think the video elements still need a bit of work ( they distort the aspect ratio on the vertically shot footage ) but its nice to see the direction they are heading in.

A Gaelic to English bookmarklet, if you right click on the Bookmarks toolbar in firefox and click new bookmark. Type name as Gaelic to English or similar and paste the line below into location, choose g as your keyword ( provided you haven’t assigned this to another bookmark )

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/faclair/sbg/lorg.php?facal=%s&seorsa=Gaidhlig&tairg=Lorg&eis_saor=on

Now if you type ‘g ceic’ ( without quotes ) into the address bar you get all the stor data translations of the word after g.

For an English to Gaelic bookmarklet use the location below and an appropriate keyword.

http://www.smo.uhi.ac.uk/gaidhlig/faclair/sbg/lorg.php?facal=%s&seorsa=Beurla&tairg=Lorg&eis_saor=on

Found this handy and thought  it was worth sharing

Came across Tir nam blog couple of weeks ago. A nicely setup install of wordpress that aggregates a collection of selected Gaidhlig blogs.

Its well done, I like reading the voices ex-pat Scots around the world and others that have learned it.

It came from the Cumrish blog site, Blogiadur which operates in the same fashion.

I was thinking about something like this for a while, its great to see it done so well.

Saoghal Gaidhlig that Michael setup complements it well from a Scottish Gaelic organisation perspective.

I enjoyed the interviews with people on Alan Yentob’s Imagine on the world wide web.

But there was something intensely annoying about his own pieces. Especially the way he had set pieces with a 23 year old helper who set up his livejournal for him.

His helper Tony said he didn’t even own a TV and Yentob said ‘thats nothing to be proud off’ well Mr Yentob there is nothing to be proud that you need to have a 23 year to setup your blog.

I’m sure it was designed to appeal to an older generation than me but I still found Yentob very annoying.

I phoned a hotel in Tallinn via Skype, and recognised the accent?

Having never spoken to an Estonian I wondered how this could be, then I thought for a second and realised it was from the Skype Test Call.

I never thought of her as Estonian.

Weird calling with Skype to its home.

I was at a conference last week designed to make connections between Gaelic, Gaelige and Welsh organisations.

One of the points was translation, it was suggested there should be an effort too create Gaelic-Gaelige-Welsh dictionaries.

The taken approach to this was a University funded project. This jarred with me, having experiencing the sucess of open collaborative projects like the English Wikipedia.

The Wiktionary is a sister project to the Wikipedia which features ~300k legitmate articles compared to the million plus of the wikitionary.

The Gaelic, Gaelige and Cumrish wikipedias are all about the same level of 5k articles. With their sister wiktionary projects are in infancy.

Theses projects are built to allow you to navigate easily between languages. I believe that if a community can be formed around these projects, it would be of greater benefit than a traditionally University led project, as the content would be openly licensed and I believe that it could be achieved with little capital investment

The question is how to stimulate activity?

I’ve been playing about with video from DVD for work and have realised that Ubuntu is far superior compared to either Windows or Mac for built in software or free to download.

iMovie and Windows Movie Maker just chokes on VOB files and have no built in conversion software and Movie Maker only outputs WMV

Compare this with the powerful ffmpeg on the command line with Ubuntu and Kino for editing.

I would like it if ffmpeg had more output options but I suspect that is because I don’t know how to add codecs?

Any of the video I exported and tried to play with Quicktime in OS X - it complained of errors. So I installed VLC on OS X which plays it straight off.

Dear Angus MacNeil,

Thank you for the response to my previous letter. I would have
appreciated it more if you had responded to my email with an email
especially as my subject was conservation.

As you agreed with me that their is much much we can do in practical
terms, through energy saving light bulbs and insulation, I am now
writing to ask for your signature in support of the Early Day Motion
2656 ( detailed in full below ) which 42 of your fellow MPs have signed
including your party member Mike Weir.

I think that this small step will have large positive effects and help
to bring about a situation where our power requirements are better
satisfied by renewable sources. I look forward to reading your response
via email.

EDM 2656: That this House notes the problems caused by increasing
energy demands, including rising energy costs, reduced energy security
and climate change; recognises that improved energy efficiency is the
cheapest way for the UK to reduce energy demand and carbon dioxide
emissions; welcomes the Ban the Bulb campaign, which aims to increase
the use of compact fluorescent light bulbs; and calls on the Government
to help main-stream energy efficient lifestyles by granting energy
saving goods and services the same 5 per cent. VAT rate as condoms,
strengthening UK building regulations and making energy efficiency a
key criteria in all Government procurement.