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Headshaving Part Deux [Jul. 25th, 2008|10:48 pm]
[Tags|]
[mood | hot]

So the overwhelming response to my previous question on headshaving was that few of you have any bloody idea what I look like these days. Have some photos of me for your delectation:

me from the front me from the side me from the top

I'm getting fed up with long hair, and can't be arsed to visit a barber to have it shortened, so I'll probably end up shaving it all off anyway. But I'm still interested in your opinion.
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Manchester Geek Girl Dinner [Jul. 24th, 2008|07:46 pm]
[Tags|]

Possibly of interest to [info]saintmaryuk, [info]haggis and others, this recently appeared on the Manchester Free Software mailing list:

Manchester Girl Geek Dinner #2

When: 7:00 PM Friday, July 25, 2008
Where: University of Salford, University House, University of Salford, Salford, England M5 4WT

Who can attend: Girl Geeks! A lady who has an interest, or is involved in the Science, Engineering and Technology industries. Blokes can come too, but you need an invite from a Geek Girl!

Cost: Around £15 (includes 3 course meal, coffee and drinks)

What: For those who haven't been before, it's dinner, wine, talks from inspirational women, networking and discussions afterwards.

Currently two talks planned, if you want to get involved and speak about women in engineering, science and technology, please do get in touch.

The talks: Gemma Cameron - How to get young people interested in Geekery!

Rachael Hoyle - winner of the IET's Dyson Young Woman Apprentice of Year Award. Rachael will be delivering an extremely interesting talk around the stigma of women in engineering. This will cover how ethics and equality are the dominant factors in employment, and whether this is damaging the industry, rather than encouraging diversity.

Links: http://www.manchestergirlgeekdinners.co.uk/
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/859931/
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=22778411401

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Bike Fail [Jul. 23rd, 2008|11:17 pm]
[Tags|]
[mood | pissed off]

When riding home on Monday night (thanks to work deadlines, I hadn't left the office until gone 8:30pm), I noticed that my ride was wobbly. Looking further, I realised that my back wheel had at least two broken spokes. This was serious - I walked it down to the Edinburgh Bicycle Co-Operative, locked my bike to a Sheffield hoop outside, and got the bus home.

I got the bus back in the morning to take the bike in for a service. It's not a long-winded repair job, but they're swamped at the moment and won't get a chance to look at it until 1st August. The bike's not rideable until then, but I've got them to do a full service and fix another couple of niggles (including repairing brake pads) which I've not gotten round to.

The annoying thing is that replacing spokes is not hard; I even have a spoke wrench to do it myself. But balancing a wheel is hard and not something I've ever done before - if I get it wrong, my wheel could collapse under me, and that's not something I want to happen again.

So I'm going a week and a half without cycling, which sucks. I love cycling, it's a great stress reliever for me (something I could really use right now). It's going to be hard to get through this without getting miserable as a result.
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Headshaving [Jul. 23rd, 2008|06:09 pm]
[Tags|]
[mood | bored]
[music |Snog - "Mind and Purpose"]

Should I shave all my hair off and trim my beard to a short goatee? Please leave a comment below indicating your opinions.

It's like a poll, only with thoughts required and words and stuff. It'll never catch on.
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Squat Research [Jul. 23rd, 2008|12:45 pm]
[Tags|, ]
[mood | sore]
[music |Pendulum - "Streamline"]

Just picked this up on the Basement Social Centre's mailing list, I figure it may be interesting to some people on my friends list...

I'm doing a piece of research on squatting in the Manchester area and was wondering if anyone would be available for an interview in the next couple weeks. This includes anyone who was involved in the April 12th days of action, the basement social centre, or residential squatting in Hulme in the 80's. Please write me back at your next convenience.

You can contact Adam Woodhead on Adam.Woodhead@postgrad.manchester.ac.uk

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OpenWRT Failure [Jul. 22nd, 2008|12:30 am]
[Tags|]
[mood | disappointed]

Many moons ago, I purchased an Asus WL-HDD - a little box which can share a laptop hard drive over a wired and wireless network, and do some neat auto-synchronisation with a USB key. I didn't actually want any of this, mind - I wanted it because it was a cheap box with USB which ran the OpenWRT general-purpose firmware.

For ages it's just been acting as a wireless access point. The plan was eventually to connect one of my Alcatel SpeedTouch USB modems to it, have it connect to the Internet directly, and share the connection via the wired and wireless interfaces. Chances are I could have stuck in a hard drive and run rtorrent as well.

To cut a long story short, when [info]flooks moved out, I stuck with what I know and set up my old laptop as an Internet router, figuring that I could get round to sorting out the Asus box at a more leisurely pace. This is just as well - after a couple of evenings messing around with cross-compilation toolchains, and begging for help on IRC and a web forum, I've determined two things:

  • I need to run a 2.4 kernel on the device to support the Broadcom wifi
  • I need to run a 2.6 kernel on the device to support PPP-over-ATM for an ADSL connection

So it looks like the Asus box is useless to me. At this point, I'm likely to just buy a Linksys-type ADSL router, and use that with the standard firmware; I could probably scrounge up some old hardware to run another IPCop box but it'd be unreliable and noisy.

Update: I have purchased a Linksys WAG200G which should arrive soon.

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"Military Pride" and the Imperial War Museum North [Jul. 20th, 2008|12:15 pm]
[Tags|, ]
[mood | sleepy]

I suppose while I'm lying in bed it makes sense to scribble something about last weekend's trip to the Imperial War Museum North. Thanks to a lift with [info]haggis and [info]fluffyarmadillo, we arrived there with relative ease. The bag search at the entrance was a little disconcerting, though they didn't complain about my crisps and tuna mayo sarnies which I'd brought along to save a little cash. We obtained a natty purple wheelchair for [info]greyeyedeve, and headed off into the museum.

The first exhibition was the Horrible Histories Frightful First World War which was aimed at kids but entertaining nonetheless. Being a big kid myself, I could have spent hours at the interactive projected trench floor where you could splat rats by stepping on them; Eve's wheelchair was particularly good for this. The exhibition tries to engage as many senses as possible; the olfactory exhibits were a bit too much for my delicate sense of smell.

Afterwards, we tried to find our way to the Military Pride exhibition. It wasn't mentioned on the leaflet we'd picked up at the front desk, and didn't seem to be signposted anywhere. Eventually Daz stumbled across it while looking for the loos. The Waterway is the name of the 20-foot-long corridor leading from the main exhibitions to the café. The exhibition was painted on the walls of a busy gangway. All in all, it was horribly disappointing; it concentrates almost exclusively on history since the 1967 Sexual Offences Act, has very little content other than a timeline of LGBT reform with a slight emphasis on military regulation, and a small number of short quotes from service members.

As you might expect from an exhibition created with assistance from Stonewall, the B and T words were almost entirely missing - the B word popped up in someone's quote, the T word with reference to a specific case of trans discrimination by the MoD. All in all, it was short on detail, short on inclusion, and short on historical depth. I was hoping to learn more about life in the trenches for gay and bisexual soldiers (I can hear [info]apiphile drooling from here), international perspectives, the blind eye turned to homosexuality among the Allies in World War 2, compared to the gay-hating Nazis, or even the Americans in Vietnam.

On 16th August there's a chance to go to the IWMN in the evening and question the curators of the exhibit; if somebody wanted to go and call for a more in-depth and inclusive exhibition on a larger scale, that would be great.

In the shop afterwards, I bought a WW2 UK National Identity Card for myself, and a postcard for [info]ms_saffie. We went up in the viewing tower (leaving [info]v15u4l_3rr0r downstairs) and caught a wonderful view of Salford Quays and the Lowry Centre in the sunshine.
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Debian GNU/Linux Lenny on Lenovo 3000 N200 [Jul. 20th, 2008|10:45 am]
[Tags|, ]
[mood | pleased]
[music |Shriekback - "Nemesis"]

So far my experience of this laptop has been good. I installed Debian GNU/Linux amd64 "Lenny", which is still the testing release, using the "beta 2" installer. This is a slightly older version of Lenny than currently available (it's a moving target until it's released).

The lack of a middle button for the touchpad is annoying but liveable with. The placing of Page Up and Down next to the arrow keys is very neat, and it's pretty simple to hit the function modifier to turn them into Home and End too. Annoyingly, the volume up/down/mute buttons don't Just Work like they do on my ThinkPad; I'll have to get that sorted because they're very handy.

The main reason I bought this laptop was for its 1680x1050 widescreen display, and this worked straight out of the box, with the free nv driver for nVidia chipsets. I could get some 3D acceleration with the proprietary driver, but I don't want to do that. I'll keep a vague eye on the Nouveau project though.

The wired ethernet works just fine, and the wireless was simple once I remembered to turn off the "kill switch" on the laptop. It's an Intel 4965AG, which according to Intel has drivers in kernel 2.6.24 and up; I just needed to install the firmware-iwlwifi package.

My current niggle which I will be attempting to solve today is that the touchpad's "tap-to-click" function is way too sensitive. It seems to be a Synaptics-type device which means it should be pretty configurable.

I've also been playing with PowerTop and need to find some way to disable the Bluetooth adapter (which uses the same killswitch as the wifi, annoyingly) by default - it seems to be a pretty major power drain. I've not measured battery life as yet.

The webcam seems to be supported by Linux UVC. This isn't included in Lenny's kernel by default, but can be compiled in with module-assistant auto-install linux-uvc. However, the current Lenny version (r193) is not new enough to support the webcam; I had to use an upstream Subversion checkout (r238) to get it working with luvcview. To work with Ekiga I need to install libpt-plugins-v4l2 - currently broken in Lenny. However, libpt-1.10.10-plugins-v4l2 works as a workaround for now.


TuxMobil - Linux on Laptops, Notebooks, PDAs and Mobile Phones
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[Jul. 15th, 2008|07:08 am]
[Tags|, ]

Thanks to feedback on my post, particularly from [info]softfruit, I ended up buying the Lenovo 3000 N200 laptop. I ordered it on Saturday night, with the free five-day delivery option, and it arrived this morning which is pretty impressive.

First impressions are good - the construction is pretty solid, and getting the hard drive cover off took more force than I expected, without anything snapping. The screen is just gorgeous, and I'm really looking forward to using this on a day-by-day basis. Going from the 1024x768 of my T42 to 1680x1050 widescreen is quite an experience! The main gripe so far is that the DVD drive is particularly noisy - when using System Rescue CD, I've ended up just copying the entire contents of the CD into RAM to shut it up. Even with no power-saving enabled in the LiveCD's kernel, the CPU is warm rather than hot.

The keyboard is wonderfully chunky, with a decent travel and satisfying click. The laptop is large enough for a good size keyboard - it's no EeePC, but not too heavy or bulky either. Lack of a clitmouse is disturbing to a ThinkPad fan, but I'm getting used to the trackpad. Accidentally clicking on the trackpad is annoying, but when I have a full GNU/Linux distribution installed, I should be able to tweak that. Having the Page Up / Page Down keys next to the arrow keys works surprisingly well.

The laptop uses Broadcom BCM5906M wired Ethernet, and an Intel 4965 wireless adapter. Neither of these have free drivers without firmware. I was anticipating being able to use my Gigabyte wireless card, but had forgotten that newfangled laptops don't take PCMCIA cards, instead using an ExpressCard interface. This has fairly comprehensively knackered my plan to use gNewSense on the laptop, and I probably owe Lucy from Manchester Free Software a pint. I'm quite tempted to put Debian GNU/Linux Lenny on ahead of its release in a few months, to save me a bit of hassle upgrading on release and take advantage of better laptop power-saving features.

I'm a bit disappointed that the BIOS only seems to allow you to boot from DVD, hard drive or network; it says that it'll boot from USB with "Legacy USB Mode" enabled, but I enabled this and it still doesn't give me the option. I was really hoping to be able to boot from an SD card in the integrated reader and use full disk encryption, so I'll have to re-think that plan. I'm in the process of copying an image of the hard drive over the network to my desktop, in case I need to restore the Vista installation and return the laptop.

Overall, it's not a ThinkPad - the awkward hardware and the lack of diverse boot options give that away, though the build quality seems fine. But for about 60% the price of a Stinky, I can live with that.
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Imperial War Museum North [Jul. 12th, 2008|08:27 pm]
[Tags|, , , , ]
[mood | tired]

[info]greyeyedeve and I will be heading to the Imperial War Museum North tomorrow for their Military Pride exhibition. We're planning on being at the IWMN for 1:30pm, and it'd be nice to see other people there.

You can get the 250 bus route from Piccadilly Gardens via the Phoenix (Manchester Uni) to the Trafford Centre, stopping at Elevator Road, or the Metrolink to Harbour City and longish walk past the Lowry Centre.
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Laptop Purchasing [Jul. 10th, 2008|09:51 pm]
[Tags|]
[mood | confused]

A while ago, I was thinking of buying a new laptop, and I was looking at a ThinkPad R61i. This is a mid-range laptop, around £350.

However, I've been thinking about spending a bit more on something closer to a desktop replacement machine, that I can use for video processing (possibly in conjunction with my new camera), and with hardware virtualisation support for playing with different distributions of GNU/Linux. I was attracted to the Lenovo 3000 N200 also - it's £450, for a high-end Core 2 Duo laptop with a 1680 x 1050 resolution screen, which is pretty amazing.

[info]nunfetishist says that I shouldn't look at a non-ThinkPad laptop, but the equivalent ThinkPad R61 8918 is £310 more expensive, and I'm not sure I (a) can justify spending more than about £500 in total anyway, and (b) that it's worth paying 68% more for a laptop from the same manufacturer just for the ThinkPad brand name.

The simple option here is just to give up and buy the laptop I was originally considering, but I'd welcome any thoughts on the issue.
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"Wanted" [Jul. 5th, 2008|11:54 pm]
[Tags|, ]
[mood | annoyed]

I was going to have a long rant about Wanted, but it'll have to wait because I've been watching The Matrix to take the bad mental taste away. I'll just have to repeat that Angelina Jolie really needs to eat more pies.
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New Camera [Jul. 5th, 2008|02:31 pm]
[Tags|, ]

Having prevaricated for a while about getting a replacement mobile phone with a decent camera, I found myself urgently needing to acquire some mechanism of taking photographs. parag0n from #manlug suggested going to Empire Direct who have a shop just off the Kingsway Roundabout.

I did a little research and settled on their Canon PowerShot A580. My old camera was a PowerShot and did almost everything I wanted; this new one was complete overkill and only a hundred quid. I double-checked the specifications to make sure that the arbitrary 3-minute restriction on shooting video has been lifted - provided my SD/MMC card is fast enough. Fast SD cards seem to be cheap, so I can basically use this camera to shoot 640x480 resolution video for webcasts etc.

Off into town now to try again to get an insurance claim form for my handset.
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Open Tech 2008 [Jul. 3rd, 2008|05:03 pm]
[Tags|]
[mood | blah]

I can't spare the time or money to go to Open Tech 2008 on Saturday, but it looks really interesting and you should definitely go.
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Birthday [Jun. 29th, 2008|11:45 pm]
[Tags|]

This weekend had its ups and downs. I was feeling tired and stressed on Friday night so wasn't great company at [info]flooks' BBQ. Still, everybody else seemed to have a good time.

Having so many people crashing over meant a bathroom queue in the morning, so I was late for the Delga meeting in Stockport - despite being the closest person to the venue. Still, the meeting was productive - not just in terms of decisions made, but also just getting people together, having a bit of a rant about things. We're certain to do it next year, and people are happy to do it in Manchester which saves me travel.

After that, the Mancunian contingent headed up to Canal Street while some of the southerners dropped off suitcases in their hotel; our intended venue of Taurus was full of people attending Sparkle, so we ended up sat outside Queer, drinking their over-priced, short-measured, short-changed beer. The southerners rejoined us, and we geeked politics and bitched until [info]haggis and [info]fluffyarmadillo turned up. Then we headed to Chinatown for a meal. I'd been expecting to head back to the Village after that for more drinks or clubbing, but everybody else was knackered so I jumped in a taxi back home.

Today has been quite busy and stressful, but ultimately productive; I've had some conversations on topics which have been stressing me out for some time, and I feel better partly for just broaching them, and partly for the conclusions reached. [info]greyeyedeve and [info]taimatsu have bought me some Alan Garner books, which I loved as a child and again as a teenager; hopefully they will help me keep middle age at bay.
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Co-Op Czech Lager [Jun. 28th, 2008|12:08 am]
Very tasty, almost on a par with Budvar. And vegan-friendly.
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Stop the BNP [Jun. 27th, 2008|11:37 am]
[Tags|]
[mood | worried]
[music |Freeland - "Mind Killer"]

So looking at the results of yesterday's Henley by-election, the most worrying thing is that yet again the Bad News Party have achieved a pretty healthy result. Usually this only happens when there's a rubbish incumbent party with no credible opposition,(which is why they've done quite well in the old Labour heartlands in the North. Henley however was a strong fight between the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives, so the 3.58% swing to the BNP (the highest swing in the election) is pretty inexplicable using the traditional analysis.

It looks instead like the BNP are actually succeding in getting support, when they're not the only credible opposition. They seem to have started to clear up their act in terms of the external behaviour and appearance of their candidates, and also to be campaigning on more community-led politics rather than explicit talk of immigration. Underneath the spin, they're still the same bunch of nasty racist scumbags, but they're hiding it better and getting more people to consider them worth voting for. It looks likely that the next elected Mayor of Stoke-on-Trent will be from the BNP.

Labour's politics of fear, scaremongering over foreigners, terrorists and immigrants, is playing into the BNP's hands here. I think I'll take out a subscription to Searchlight and possibly donate to the Stop the BNP fighting fund - stopping these hatemongers from reaching positions of power clearly needs a bit of a helping hand.
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Friday Woes [Jun. 27th, 2008|11:23 am]
[Tags|, ]
[mood | blah]
[music |Trauma Pet - "You Cannot Feel This"]

You know it's been a long week when you turn up to work and learn you've left your trousers at home.
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One for [info]emma_b79 and [info]greyeyedeve... [Jun. 26th, 2008|11:51 am]
[mood | bored]
[music |Radiohead - "Scatterbrain"]

Penny Arcade on Anita Blake.
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The Week Ahead & Weekend Plans [Jun. 23rd, 2008|01:16 pm]
[Tags|, , , ]
[mood |busy]
[music |Arkam Asylum - "Psychosurgery"]

First off: [info]flooks' housecooling party is this Friday evening. There will be beer, bikers and BBQ.

The weekend was pretty quiet. I went to Burnley on Saturday to do identity activism at a Northern Anarchist Network meeting. Getting there was a pain in the bum - it's a 2 hour train journey and 13 quid train ticket to go from Manchester to Preston to Burnley, or Manchester to Bolton to Blackburn to Burnley. Throw in additional delays, missed connections, and being told to get on the wrong train, and I was fundementally pissed off by the time I got there. Still, the company was good, and it looks like some Burnley locals are going to organise an identity activism stall at an upcoming local festival. On the way back, I got the X43 bus - only an hour between Manchester and Burnley, direct, and a six quid return. I'll be using that in future.

Saturday evening was spent chilling out with [info]greyeydeve and eating fajmeatas. I ended up watching This Is England which was really powerful as a film, especially on the back of the earlier discussion on how to halt the rise of the BNP in the North-West. Well worth seeing. Sunday was spent vegging out; [info]v15u4l_3rr0r had a friend round for muppet-hairing, so Eve and I retreated upstairs to watch the final 3 episodes of Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles. This series has gone from strength to strength over its run, showing character growth, tension, an ever-expanding backstory and other hallmarks of good storytelling. I can't wait for the second series to start screening on 8th September.

The week ahead promises to be busy - this Saturday is DELGA's strategy conference, and I've got a fair few things to sort out before that including getting our membership list up to date and finishing mailing UK local parties about upcoming Pride festivals. Also, I'm on Liverpool radio on Wednesday, the 95th anniversary of George Orwell's birth, to talk about how far out his vision of the future has proven. I'm currently re-reading Nineteen Eighty-Four and actually taking notes. I'm not very good at this sort of thing, but it's proving entertaining. Particularly Ingsoc's claim to stand against everything that socialism stood for, in the name of socialism - shades of New Labour much?
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