Category: General

The new version of the most popular Linux distribution – Ubuntu – is brilliant. However there is one small problem I’ve come up against which is an annoyance. I rely a lot on external USB hard disks – for instance three video projects of mine recently required 200Gb of storage – more than you can fit inside a laptop.

When it comes to unmounting (i.e. safely disconnecting) a drive, the latest version of Ubuntu (called “Feisty”) seems to have an issue. It simply tells me it “cannot eject volume”. If I go behind the scenes and issue a “sudo umount /dev/sdb1” it’s fine, but (a) it’s annoying and (b) regular users wouldn’t have a clue about this.

There appears to be an unofficial fix for this. If you have the same problem, try entering this in a terminal (all on one line):

sudo mv
/usr/share/hal/fdi/policy/10osvendor/10-storage-policy.fdi ~

Seems to work for me. I assume this will get fixed fairly quickly in an update.

Hmmm… I wrote earlier to say that Opera 9.2 seems broken for Google Maps, and hence the Marengo Route Planner too.  However, playing around with the “encoding to assume for pages lacking specification” setting seems to have fixed it.  To be honest I can’t remember what the initial setting was, but I set it to “iso-8859-1” and stuff sprang into life.  The thing that gave me a clue about this was the fact that, when trying to find out what the problem was, all the Google javascript was coming up in Chinese…!  Odd.

I get loads of spam on this site in the comments. Thankfully a marvellous WordPress plug-in called Akismet filters it all out, and all I have to do is check the quarantined stuff occasionally in case there’s been a false positive. So far it’s worked perfectly, with no false results.

I’ve noticed recently that some of the spammers, instead of putting meaningless crap in the comment body, have now started putting jokes instead. Which is nice, because it gives me a chuckle when I’m clearing them out. I thought I’d share a few with you…

Continue reading “Blog Spam”

The GPS Route Planner seems to have been well received by a LOT of people… but to date I’ve had TWO donations for this… not a lot of beer, people!  If you haven’t seen it, there’s a “donate” link up in the top right of the main screen to this blog.  If you don’t feel that the GPS Route Planner is worth buying me a beer or two, at least get clicking on the Google advertisements littered around this site.  I get a few pennies each time you do.

Go on, motivate me to add the exciting new ideas I have!

I’ve been running Firefox 2 on my Macbook at home, and on Windows XP in the office (where I don’t have a choice of OS). Today I noticed something odd on the Mac – neither GMail nor Google Calendar would display…

Continue reading “Firefox and GMail / Google Calendar Blank Pages”

I recently bought an M-Audio Keystation 88es MIDI keyboard (I’ve wanted to learn to play piano for years, but strangely have always been drawn to strings – electric guitar, acoustic guitar, bass, violin, and, for a short while, cello).

It works brilliantly with Garage Band, but the speakers in the Macbook are small and tinny.  So I plugged it through the hi-fi.  It sounds fantastic.  However, I really wanted to leave the keyboard set up in the spare room, where there’s no hi-fi.  So I started to think about getting some computer speakers…

Continue reading “Logitech V20 Notebook Speakers”

We’ve had record heatwaves here in London, apparently even beating the droughted summer of ’76. This sparked some pretty ferocious thunderstorms on Thursday evening, which caused me to get soaked to the skin on my 26km ride home from work (I was also worried about getting hit by lightning in Richmond Park). When I got home there were house alarms going off all over, and in my house half the circuits were blown. And worst of all my ADSL modem was fried. No internet! Continue reading “The Outage – and a Rant”