Damian Beresford

In the past few weeks, Twitter has crossed over to our living room and is now a part of our TV viewing experience, primarily for Dragons Den. The Irish version of Dragons Den is mediocre in my opinion, but the fun part is when you combine it with the ‘back chat’ on #ddire. For an explanation of how these ‘hashtags’ work on Twitter, see here.

(apologies for the poor picture, but you get the idea

In the picture above, Twitter is running on my media PC box (which I built a few months back) and our TV supports PIP, so that’s a mini-screen Dragons Den with various peoples ‘tweets’ about whats happening in the show in the background.

Dragons Den is the only show at the moment that I watch like this, have tried following twitter groups while sporting matches are on (for example, George Hook live tweeted during last weeks Ireland/Scotland rugby match) but personally I find I’m a bit too engaged in the match and the tweets are too much of a distraction (although I do scan them at half time). I’ve also heard that people live tweet during the Late Late Show, but I’m sorry, no amount of amusing Twitter comments would make me sit though that

I know there are many ways of following Twitter whilst watching TV (i.e. laptop, mobile, etc) but I think it would be really great if it was integrated directly into the TV itself. You could optionally have tweets relating to the show your watching scrolling across the bottom of your TV screen (like a stockticker), or superimposed like you can do with teletext – all controllable from your remote.

I’ve been attending the odd local history lecture in Dunhill now for the past few years, and they’ve rarely disappointed. The two recent ones in particular on the IRA in the local area during the war of independence were really excellent. Here’s the main link for the lectures: http://www.dunhilleducation.com/node/100

which unfortunately doesn’t contain the schedule, so here’s the scanned flyer that I have (and by the way, the tea and biscuits are also excellent!):

I’ve been going through a bit of a fantasy/sci-fi phase lately (well, since I was about 14), and the weirder the better it seems these days. Here’s some of the best of late (listed in order of best’ness):

• American Gods Not sure how this passed me by (considering Sandman is one of my all time favorites) when it was published first but this is really great, fully deserving of all the awards its won (the Hugo & Nebula awards for 2002 in particular).
• Only Forward Definitely in the whacked-out category, this book contains so many ideas that its surprising it’s so small! One for jogging your imagination, I thought it was brilliant. Will be trying out a few more of Mr. Smiths books in 09 for sure.
• Treason An oldie (1979) but a goodie, and also quite whacked out. Oddly, this is the only other book of Orson Scott Cards that I enjoyed apart from the epic Enders Game series, I should really go back and give a few others a try.
• Mockingbird Again an oldie (written in 1980) but also a goodie! Also won a Nebula award. File under ‘when computers go bad’!
• I Am Legend A real oldie (1954) but definitely a classic – don’t let the recent Will Smith film put you off (haven’t seen it myself but heard its not great). Vampires rock.
• Wrath of a Mad God (Darkwar) I’ve been following the adventures of Pug ever since I was given a copy of Magician at some point in the mid-80′s (and which I’ve read a few times since!). I’ve read all of Feists books down through the years and FINALLY (and a little sadly) its all over – this book just wraps it all up – veggie reading but of the best kind, I couldn’t put it down. At least I assume this book wraps it up – how more powerful can he get??

If anyone has any recommendations along a similar genre, please leave a comment!

I recently bought a NAS box for media storage, and now I want to be able to play all our media stored on this box on our TV (over the home WiFi network). There are a few options available to accomplish this (hook up the laptop, buy an XBox, mac-mini, netbook, etc), but given the low cost of computer components these days, I thought it would be a nice little mini-project (and a good learning experience) to build a computer from the cheapest compatible components in order to achieve this. And by cheap, I mean a cheaper option than buying an XBox, NetBook, the cheapest possible Dell, or a Fit PC.

So, basic components wise, I needed a motherboard, chip, fan, memory, case, power supply & WiFi card. Note I didn’t need a hard drive (content is stored on my NAS box remember), the box would boot from a USB key, and I didn’t bother with a CD/DVD drive (although I might at a later stage). I wasn’t sure if I did or not to begin with, but it turned out that I did need a graphics card for playing video (they’re not just for games it seems, despite their marketing

After quite a bit of shopping around, here is the list of components I went for (and overall Misco.ie offered the best deal by far):

• AMD Athlon 3000+ processor and ECS GS-761 motherboard bundle €46.12
• Aluminium heatsink with AM2 retention clips 80mm fan €4.29
• Foxconn DH153B/SB silver and black desktop PC case €32.17
• D-Link Wireless 54Mbps PCI Adapter €16.30
• Kingston Memory 1GB DDR266 SDRAM CL25 €22.61
• PNY GeForce 7300GS 256Mb PCI-Express graphics card €24.91

Total cost: €146.40 (ex-VAT!). You obviously need a few more bits and bobs which I happened to already have (mouse, keyboard, VGA cable, USB key, etc).

Here’s what it all looks like (minus the graphics card, purchased after I took this shot):

Putting it all together is really quite simple, most of the connections can only go in one place so its a bit like a little jigsaw puzzle:

Once all the bits are in place, the next step is to install an OS. I used UNetbootin to create bootable live USB keys. I evaluated Puppy Linux and Damn Small Linux to see what the ‘mini linux‘ distros are like (quite impressive but not without some glitches). However, in the end I went with Ubuntu 8.10 (bit heavy weight for what I need, but everything worked out of the box, and I’m very familiar with Ubunutu since I made the switch to it a few months back).
Booting the box with the Ubuntu live USB key was fine, however, installing the OS from the live USB key to another USB key was a different matter. This was a bit convoluted, but in the end, this is what worked (unlike a lot of the how to’s which didn’t):

• I used 3 USB keys:
  • Key #1: the live USB key created with UNetBootin
  • Key #2: contains the full Ubuntu ISO CD image (downloaded from here)
  • Key #3: the USB key that the OS gets installed to
• Boot with the live USB Key
• Follow the instructions here
  here and point the ‘source disk image’ at key #2.
• Once the OS is installed and booting from Key #3 you don’t need the other two keys any more.

So once its all installed, how does it perform? Very well (its not a bad spec machine after all), once the OS is loaded its really quite nippy. No problems either connecting to the NAS box (via Samba/Nautilus) and playing movies/music/etc, so its far more powerful than I actually need. On the negative side, it’s not exactly silent, not annoyingly loud, but loud enough to know that there’s a computer in the corner! Also, disappointingly, the boot time from the USB key is quite poor. So much so that I’m thinking of either buying a very small cheap hard drive just to boot from, or alternatively buying a very large cheap hard drive such as this 1TB drive for €86 which is big enough to act as a backup for the NAS box.

Finally, the box itself if quite big, which is a bad thing as it looks unnecessarily big (and ugly), but on the plus side, there’s a ton of room in there for expansion, e.g. multiple hard drives, CD/DVD/Blue Ray player, etc. Also I just have a spare mouse plugged into it at the moment, and plug in a keyboard when needed. Going to shop around for a wireless keyboard/mouse combo which would be ideal, or look at installing some form of wireless remote.

Btw I’m connecting to our TV via our TV’s VGA connection and standard 3.5 audio ‘jack to jack’ cable, so the TV is effectively acting as a monitor. If your TV doesn’t have VGA input, there are a myriad of other ways to connect your PC to your TV:
http://www.letmegooglethatforyou.com/?q=how+to+connect+your+pc+to+your+tv

Also, I also have XBMC installed on it (so when the box boots it loads directly into full screen XBMC). Kudos to the team behind XBMC, it really is shaping up to be a very cool piece of software. I really like the video and music libraries (which get music & movie thumbnails and information from various places on the internet) – it really makes your media collection really feel like a collection rather than a bunch of files on a drive.





So overall this was a nice little exercise, you do get quite a bang for your buck using cheap components, building a box yourself (and obviously free open source software). Not planning on doing this any time soon again, but taking what I’ve learned from this I’d try and try build something smaller/cheaper/better possibly by scrounging as much second hand components as I could.

I also like having a full PC box as part of our TV unit in the corner. Our TV has PIP feature, so we can do things like keep an eye on a show while having a web browser open as well (handy for tweeting about something your watching!). It would also be cool if this type of system was built into either your TV directly (would you pay an extra €100 for a TV which had a build in mini-PC? ) or into the set-top box, although this is probably just a matter of time before that happens, if it hasn’t already!

Late night last night developing the first version of the 2009 Budget Calculator for Tax123.ie, you can run it from here:

https://tax123.ie/Budget2009Calc.php

Harsh budget this year, don’t expect to be better off!

We will be improving it over the coming days, the main omissions at the moment are the changes in Mortgage Interest Relief and also the Car Parking changes.

I attended the first Transition Town Tramore (t3.ie) event back in September and was very impressed by it, not having heard of the Transition Towns movement before. It was a very informative presentation from Dave Philips from the Cultivate Centre in Dublin and was quite well attended.

What impressed me most is that we hear a lot about how doomed the planet is, etc but very little about what we can do about it at a local practical level, and the Transition movement has plenty of ideas here. It’s also heavily based on the idea of community involvement and transition at a community level, and anything in my view that promotes community spirit and getting to know our neighbors better should be supported by everyone.

So the next event is on this Thursday, 8pm in the Grand Hotel Tramore, brief as follows (more information can be found at http://t3.ie/):

Transition Town Tramore Presents

The Power of Community: How Cuba Survived Peak Oil

In the second of a series of events to raise awareness about the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change, the Tramore Transition Town Initiative is showing the award winning film The Power of Community on October 16th at the Grand Hotel Tramore.

When the Soviet Union collapsed in 1990, Cuba’s economy went into a tailspin. With imports of oil cut by more than half ‐ and food by 80 percent ‐ people were desperate.

This film tells of the hardships and struggles as well as the community and creativity of the Cuban people during this difficult time. Cubans share how they transitioned from a highly mechanized, industrial agricultural system to one using organic methods of farming and local, urban gardens. It is an unusual look into the Cuban culture during this economic crisis, which they call “The Special Period.”

The film opens with a short history of Peak Oil, a term for the time in our history when world oil production will reach its all-time peak and begin to decline forever. Cuba, the only country that has faced such a crisis ‐ the massive reduction of fossil fuels ‐ is an example of options and hope.

“Global Oil production has not grown since May 2005” says Stan Nangle, a member of Transition Town Tramore ”and we have been on a plateau of about 85 million barrels of oil a day since them. We know that sooner or later total daily production of oil will start to reduce ‐ as it has in individual oilfields such as the North Sea ‐ and this is going to have a major impact on how we live and how our economy works.”

The Power of Community offers an insight into how Cuban society adapted to meet the challenges posed by Peak Oil, often without support from the Authorities, and how the Cuban people turned the situation around by using their initiative and working together to achieve a common goal.

“We are constantly hearing and reading about the problems we will face from Climate Change and Peak Oil, but nobody in authority is telling us what we need to do to overcome these difficulties” says Edel Jennings of Transition Town Tramore. “This film shows very clearly how Communities can pull together to find solutions to the problems they face and it gives people a positive example of what can be achieved.”

Background:

The Tramore Transition Town Initiative is a community group which is actively working to find answers to the question: “ how can our community respond to the challenges of Peak Oil and Climate Change?”

The Tramore Initiative is based on the Transition Town model developed in Kinsale Co Cork by Rob Hopkins, and currently being implemented in more than 800 communities worldwide.

The Tramore steering committee is currently working to build awareness of the issues of Peak Oil and Climate Change in our community by running a series of public events, and through direct contact with community groups, clubs and societies in Tramore. The series of awareness events will run on a monthly basis from September 2007 to February 2008 and will be followed in March 2008 by the setting up of working groups to look at how we might mitigate the effects of Peak Oil and Climate Change in the areas of food, energy, transport, health, heart & soul, economics & livelihoods.

I have need of more storage space, I currently have two portable hard drives which contain a mix of movies, music, photos, etc and are filling up fast. They’re small (500G in total) also a few years old now at this stage. I’m not worried about data loss if they fail (anything important is backed up in multiple places, including the cloud) but it would be an inconvenience if one were to die.

So I’m looking for something:

1) big’ish (capable of storing a few years of data)

2) networked access (so we can access content from any machine in the house)

3) somewhat reliable

4) cheap

There’s a bewildering amount of choice when it comes to Network Attached Storage (NAS) devices for home use when you start looking into it. There’s the high end of the personal market there’s the likes of ReadyNAS and Drabo, both of which sound fab and have really good reputations (and have great expansion options), but are a bit outside of my budget. At the other end of the scale there’s the option of building your own, and I think long term it would be a great pet project to build a ZFS system (something similar to what Søren Ragsdale has built).

For now however, I’m going to go cheap and cheerful with a 1TB Western Digital MyBook, reasonably good reputation and very good value at €190 from Misco.ie.  Will see how it works out, should do for a few years and hopefully it won’t be a case of “at that price, they’re sure not to last long” (as the old adds for Quinsworth used to say!

Also, thanks to John & Aman (via twitter) and James & John (via lunch time chats) for guiding me through the selection process!

The ‘madra’ of all food festivals is happening this weekend in Waterford – TerraMadra Ireland 2008 is on from the 4′th – 7′th of September. See the full schedule of events here. While all the events sound great, three events in particular stand out for me personally:

- The Slow Food Feast (could be be best 50 quid you’ll ever spend on a meal!):

- The Picnic and Sports day in the park: the Poeples Park in Waterford is great for kids, it’s got a big playground (and a terrific little coffee shop for the parents!) – but this slow food picnic and sports day sounds like a fantastic event (lets hope the weather is good!):

- The Farmers Market on Sunday:

So there should be something for everyone, where ever you fit in on the food chain!

Best of luck to Donal, Don, Paul and all the organisers, I’m sure the event will be a fantastic success!

Following on from my recent move to Ubuntu, here are a few tips you might find useful if switching from XP/Vista to Ubuntu:

- use the Live CD to try Ubuntu out: download it, burn it, and run the ‘demo installation’. This lets you try out the operating system without actually installing it. For me it was a great peace of mind to find that the wifi & network settings just worked out of the box (and with access to the internet any potential problem could be fixed!)

- trust the dual boot steps: the Ubuntu installer does the job of partitioning your hard drive, I found the whole dual boot install process was incredibly straight forward. Although on reflection, given how little I need to boot back to windows (only a handful of times), a better option would of been to create a VM image of my windows machine (store it somewhere), not bothering with the dual boot setup (format the machine for Ubuntu only) and just use the VM image directly from Ubuntu if I ever needed to run Windows.

- use synaptic package manager to find and install applications: synaptic is a great tool (the ‘multiverse’ repository option found everything I needed), a comprehensive guide on using it (and other methods of installing software) can be found here.

- install ‘nvidia-settings‘ (if appropriate to your hardware obviously): took me some time to get the dual screen setup working until I stumbled across the nvidia-settings tool, which makes multiple monitor setup a breeze. Would of been nice if this was installed by default by the installer. (Use Synaptic to find and install nvidia-settings)

- finally, don’t let this happen (thank you xkcd!):

I recently installed Ubuntu on my home laptop (and subsequently on my work laptop also, but thats a different story). The primary motivation for this was to get Vista off my home laptop (a Dell Vostro 1700). So why ditch Vista?

Well for starters, I never wanted it in the first place. When I went to buy a laptop last December, the best deal by far was for the Vostro, but, there was no option to get it with XP, it had to come with Vista (damn you Dell!) Secondly, Vista really is as crap as everyone says, here’s a summary of the problems I had with it:

• blue screens: I thought blue screens were a thing of the past, but no, happened about once a month or so, for no apparent reason.
• explorer really unstable: this happened quite a bit, explorer just bombs out and restarts itself, quite annoying as you loose all your open explorers, etc..
• no improvements: ok fair enough I thought, the first version is bound to have some teething problems, I’m sure a lot of things will be fixed in SP1. Nope, SP1 came and not a single noticeable difference. I also have zero confidence that it will ever improve. I also have zero confience that Micrsoft will ever do anything innovative on the desktop either after my Vista experience, XP will be around forever.
• slow, slow, slow: I bought a pretty kick ass machine (dual 2.4GHz processors, 4G memory) and I was quite disappointed with its performance under Vista, it just felt sluggish.

Now that I’m up and running and fully migrated all my apps/work over to Ubuntu, how has it worked out? Quite frankly, it couldn’t of worked out better! I did have some installation issues, which I’ll blog about again, nothing major just a few things that cost me some time that really shouldn’t of. I also should point out that I have used Linux on the desktop in the past and had to take an 7 year break as such (as the last company I worked for developed software explicitly for windows) so I’m not a complete linux novice (although close enough at times!)

The most notable difference is a general increase in productivity, which is what I had hoped would happen. The Vostro performs so much better under Ubuntu, its sharp, its snappy. It’s also incredibly stable, and I’m finally feeling happy about the machine and seeing some bang for my buck in buying a slightly higher spec machine.

I should point out what tools I use to do my work and their equivalents on Ubuntu (as there isn’t that much difference between the two operating systems from a tools perspective):

• Emacs, Eclipse and Firefox: I spend most of my days flicking between these 3, all work identically on Ubuntu as they did on windows. My personal email is Gmail/Google Apps so all browser based.
• lots of command shells: Gnome Terminal replaces both Putty on windows (which is a great tools but sucks when you spend a lot of time in it) and the default windows command prompt, its so superior to both its not funny.. This coupled with the workspace switcher is where my biggest gain in productivity has come from.
• the odd presentation & word/excel documents: Open Office has done the trick here so far here. Just about though, some really screwed up word formatted docs just don’t appear right. This hasn’t be a real issue so far, but its for this reason that I still have a windows partition to boot to on the off chance that Open Office can’t handle some critical word document at some point in the future.
• on a slightly negative note, the one tool I’ve yet to adequately replace on Ubuntu is the Tortoise windows shell for Subversion. I’ve tried kdesvn and rapidsvn but both fall well short of the simplicity of Tortoise (who knew Tortoise was a killer app, eah?). I find myself using subversion from the command line on Ubuntu more and more (which feels like a step backwards). I use subversion a lot (both at work and for personal projects, and I also use it as a backup of sorts for stuff I don’t want to loose) so I need to spend a bit of time figuring out what works best for me now on Ubuntu.

So now that I’ve moved, and never going back, how do I get my ‘Vista tax’ back from Dell? (and Dell if your listening, note that I’ll never buy a machine from you again thats preconfigured with any flavour of Windows!)

(Creative commons, courtesy of Hannes Pasqualini)