Slingbox

Slingbox have now launched in the UK, with integrated DVB-T tuner, PAL and 16:9 goodness.

Now, as soon as someone works out how to get them to stream to more than one place at a time, I might thing about buying one. Oh, and when they cost much less than £180.

Posted by Alex at 4:23 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Server move completed

That's all of Apache, MySQL and the FTP stuff moved now. The old box has been decomissioned and the new server promoted to the name of purple :)

There's still some administrative stuff to do (like reinstall Munin) but all the user facing stuff should now be done. I'm sure there'll be some teething troubles, but I guess I'm only going to know about those when they happen.

Now then, time to look for some proper server hosting!

Posted by Alex at 10:22 AM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New server

My new server is now at home and I've started the migration process.

So far, all the mail stuff has been ported (Exim, Dovecot, SpamAssassin, ClamAV & Mailman) without too much of an outage.

As I've altered the port forwarding on my external router, there should be no need to update any settings :)

I'm going to to decide whether to do the Apache / FTP migration today or leave it until tomorrow or Monday. Probably the latter.

Posted by Alex at 3:48 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Office 2007 Beta 2

Well, here are my gripes that had better get fixed before the final version:

- In the far top left hand corner where a double click would cause the windows to close is now the "Office button". No matter how much clicking I do, it doesn't close the window. I get options to create new messages or save the message and stuff; even to close the window but the double click doesn't work. Dumb, stupid and infuritating.

- Worse still is the new "ribbon" toolbar - don't get me wrong, they look quite funky but take up a huge amount of room. You can't customise the ribbon or close it (apparently because some idiot users mess their Office installs up too much - FFS...) but you can hide it by double clicking. Great! But when you close the window and start a new message, the ribbon's back in all its gigantic glory. GAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAH!

Fix it, fix it, fix it!

Other than that, looking quite fine so far! I like the calendar overlays, categories and a few things that are fixed in the IMAP handling. But, I aint going to use it until those bloody menus get sorted.

Posted by Alex at 8:32 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Dima Bilan

At least Russia's Eurovision entry featured a pretty boy - if only he'd shave and remove his mullet.

You can find more of him on his own website or on Famous Males.

Posted by Alex at 3:07 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

5 days in France

I'm just back from a few days at my parent's house near Bergerac in south west France.

Some pictures for you are up in the gallery

Some highlights:

An anatomically correct strawberry

A coal powered machine for making booze out of prunes

Posted by Alex at 5:56 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Munin

I've just discovered Munin - a fabulous monitoring and graphing tool (you know I'm addicted to server stats don't you?).

It's taken a little bit of effort to get it to do all the things I wanted (like monitor the bandwidth usage on my Speedtouch 716 router), but it's pretty much replaced MRTG for all my system monitoring. And it does prettier graphs :)

Just in time to migrate it all over to another server... <sigh>

Posted by Alex at 9:27 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

New server

Well, I've ordered a new server. It's a HP DL140 - nothing fancy, but more than adequate horsepower to replace my ageing 1Ghz Athlon.

Hopefully it'll arrive in the next week or so and then the horrible process of moving things over will start - more details nearer the time.

Once the migration is complete, it'll be off to a lovely cold data centre rather than being in my hot study on the end of a flakey ADSL line!

Posted by Alex at 9:18 PM| Permalink | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Skypey Wipey

Up until now, I've never been a big user of Skype. For one, it uses a close-source and proprietary protocol rather than SIP; although this does have the advantage of working over HTTP/HTTPS which means that it's difficult for hotels to block it (and force you to make calls using their expensive in-room telephones instead). Second, you're always tied to a PC either with a headset or at the very least some USB wireless telephone (which still needs you to use the client to make changes to contacts etc.).

This is going to change with Netgear's rather swish, mobile phone style wi-fi Skype phone. No PC. No software. Just wi-fi needed for Skype-to-Skype and Skype-out calling. Buy me 10 when they come out in July:

Posted by Alex at 10:19 AM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Site update, part 3

And now the blog gets a makeover as well as being mashed together with my normal site (instead of being at aerobitches.co.uk).

Nice :)

Posted by Alex at 2:27 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Site update, part 2

The gallery's had a face lift as well now :)

Comments welcome!

Posted by Alex at 3:45 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Site update

My main site - alexlomas.com - has undergone a bit of a face lift.

It looks much fluffier and has undergone some under-the-bonnet changes that make it easier to look after, including some nice custome server side Perl stuff.

There are some more tweaks to come with the look of the gallery and maybe the blog.

Posted by Alex at 9:21 PM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

If Darth Vader wanted a wireless router

This would be it:

[From Engadget]

Posted by Alex at 10:08 AM| Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)