Saturday 1 August 2009

And so it goes ...

... and so on it goes ...

3 weeks of idleness. Actually I've been busier than I have been for a while. All sorts of stuff. Pruning trees, spraying weeds, new computer, installing various operating systems, cleaning, cooking, eating. Getting fat(ter).

Well. I made some pasta by hand, and liked it so much I bought a machine to help. Not that it really makes it any easier to make, it does however make the product a bit more consistent.

I found a shop that sells my new-favourite super-hot-sauce.

I recovered my rear speaker drivers from being repaired, and wired them up. They'd been in the shop for nearly 6 months(!).

I installed a couple of desks I acquired from work, from my very generous boss. And the bar fridge.

Bought the previously mentioned 'new computer'.

Tried lots of operating systems. Solaris (hence to be known as 'f*n slowaris', Arch-linux 'it's just too much effort, and i couldn't get X to work', gentoo 'it's just too much work/waiting around', and finally settled on GnewSense - it's an awful lot prettier than ubuntu, and it comes with Emacs AND a f*n compiler. I also had a good look at haiku ... hmm, interesting. It inspired me to revisit my own 'os', although all I managed was to recompile it on the new machine.

Also looked at mythtv. I have an old PCI card that does analogue TV capture I thought i'd use as a test. mythtv is a weird application. Anyway, managed to get it build from source - although for some reason, initially it would only run remotely* (* for some reason, now it also runs locally and no longer aborts with an X error). I also tried getting some other capture programme but unfortunately only mythtv managed to keep audio/video sync. Also unfortunately - recording and viewing seems to crash my box hard once in a while (the dreaded blinky keyboard L.E.D.'s.) - so I caved in an ordered a USB digital tuner unit.

Hmm, what else. Baked an apple cake. First recipe I found on the internet. Apart from the cooking time, which was wildly underestimated, it produced a rather decent result.

Oh, and pruned a tree out the back. Made a big mess of it but I think that was what was needed for it. It'll grow back. If the weather keeps improving like it had been for the last few days I might even manage to get back out there and clean it up ... and then prune the mandarin tree as well.