bazza.blog

not a good photo day

went out to take some photos yesterday, I knew I'd two films to finish off (lots in the automatic SLR, and only a handful left in the manual one). Somehow, in my wander, putting the cameras in my backpack, or taking them out, the back cover of the auto one had popped open ... great, fogged film, so I thought I'd make sure to get the ones I wanted on the manual one too, reached 36 on it, kept winding on, and on, and on ... film hadn't been seated right, so I'd taken 20-odd the last time, and whatever to get it to 36, and had none of them ... fuck. Opened the back, adjusted the film, and tried again, another 36 shots, same thing, bloody helll, still not wound on. I gave up at this point, whatever way I'd been kneeling to take low shots (as I was taking photos of interesting paving work), I think I've managed to pull something in my leg. Got home, and found out that paddy was on his way over to process film too, as he'd just been doing stuff with the old russian rangefinder he'd picked up, so I could process the film I had, the one I thought fogged. Of course, it was indeed fogged, I'll have a couple of pictures from it later, but not many, and who knows how well I'll even be able to get those. Much fun though black and white is a 20D will have to be got soon, and at current rate, it should be, so that'll be a bonus, and mean I can get back to work with some other things too.

more musak

so in addition to audioscrobbler, I set up icecast this evening, think I've got the streaming stuff to a safe enough level that sounds alright, and isn't overloading my outgoing bandwidth on the dsl here (though I didn't stop the torrents, so could probably do better if I tried)

so you may soon get to listen to all the crap I listen to, never mind just reading what it is :)

food!

Beer Batter

Ingredients

1 12 oz can light Beer

1 1/2 cups Flour

1/2 tsp Salt

1 Tbsp Paprika

1 cup Flour

Pour the beer into a large bowl. Sift the flour, salt, and paprika into the beer, whisking until the batter is light and frothy. (The batter may be used immediately or stored in the refrigerator for up to 1 week, but be sure to whisk it occasionally). Heat at least 2 inches of oil in a frying kettle or electric fryer. Just before it reaches 375F, quickly dredge the fish and shrimp with flour, shaking of excess then dip in the beer batter, coating well, and drop them into the hot fat (do this in 2 batches). When they are brown on one side - less than 1 minute - turn and brown them on the other side. Drain on paper towels.

I didn't have stuff to measure cups, so it was kinda fudged, will maybe add more flour next time, make it a bit thicker, so had cod with chips done from scratch, very good, best meal I've had all week, not that that's saying much

the desktop and mp3s

updated ye old screenshot on my site now that I'm running ubuntu on my laptop, and actually showing an in-use one for a change, so can't see much of the bg etc, also signed up and have been playing with that audioscrobbler thingie, using a plugin for rhythmbox. This involved making sure all my mp3s were available in rhythmbox, which caused a bit of a shock

*cough* visible here too

Debian/Ubuntu

After quite some time of threatening to do it, last night, I backed up the debian install from my laptop, inserted an Ubuntu CD, and booted from it ... here's the installation process and random thoughts on it all

warty install cd inserted and booted from
hit enter at the nice little splash screen
select english, united kingdom, and confirm you want british english keyboard

it then finds network devices, in my case, 3, but that's neither here nor there, select which you want as your primary, and it'll try to dhcp configure it (if you select a wireless device, even if it's one you normally need to sort out firmware for, it'll work too, it'll just ask you about the wireless info too)
when DHCP fails, I configure the network manually, as I'm not running dhcp here, and it gets the hostname from dns, but lets you change it, if you want

next comes disk partitioning, as mine's already partitioned, I chose to manually edit the table, and just reformat the linux partition that's already on there

off it goes installing stuff

it asks if you want grub installed in the master boot record, ejects the cd, and reboots

you're then told that root is disabled by default, and you have to use sudo to do stuff

you're asked time zone info (Europe/Belfast!)

it asks real name, username and password for a normal user, and if you want to download software from the 'net, then it installs the rest of the packages it'd already copied over from the cd

the screen flashes once at one stage when X gets installed

you get a "Thank you for choosing Ubuntu!" message to hit "Ok" at, and you're presented with the gdm login screen

I should've timed this, wait, I'll do it again, it's that painless

h:mm:ss
0:00:00 hitting enter at splash screen
0:00:50 configuring network
0:01:30 partitioning
0:06:50 base installed, copying remaining packages
0:13:14 grub
0:13:48 eject
0:14:08 reboot
0:15:25 installing copied packages (told it to not download from the 'net this time)
0:24:21 flash (setting up xserver-xfree86)
0:27:55 "Thank you for choosing Ubuntu!"

so, what do we get for under 30 minutes of install? we get a gnome 2.8.1 desktop, in the full proper res for my laptop, we have firefox, gimp, evolution, openoffice, vim, emacs, gnomemeeting, terminal server client, xchat, irssi, gaim, rhythmbox (itunes-a-like), sound juicer (cd ripping prog), totem for watching media, cups for printing, and samba client stuff

after this, I'm upgrading to hoary, cos I want the really shiney new gnome stuff, and there were issues with the build of the hoary installer I used related to esound and dependancies, that I couldn't be bothered figuring out.

Overall, I'm well impressed, though it would've been nice to get the hoary installer working, and be straight in at gnome 2.9.91 and kernel 2.6.10, I can live with apt-get dist-upgrade-ing to those, cos yes, although it's not "Debian GNU/Linux" it's still got all the good stuff, like apt-get! YAY!

updated ...

the layout of my blog a bit today ... only by adding a thumbnail and link for the latest screenshot from my desktop to it, so you can go see it, I update it every once in a whle, and did so earlier today

Planet issues

seem to all be sorted now, switched to a different tree, or trunk, or what ever arch calls different parts of different repositories

(hack) the planet (or something)

updated to the development version of planet the other day, from their arch versioning system thingie, though it seems to not have been touched since september or something. It's fixed mark's markup, in that it doesn't start displaying tags to people, but it's lost how to work out the url for his blog, and now thinks it's the planet's url ... weird

yay for the kitchen

yesterday evening spent there very pleasantly, myself, pads, rory, peter adams, roo, and then the girlies turned up later, thought Dearbhleah (as pads said it's spelt, good example of irish names adding in extra vowels, pronounced "Dervla") was very nice *cough* but less about that, lots of the black stuff all round, good good. Rory brought one of his rangefinder cameras with him and took photos during the evening, which he's currently processing with my help, as his head and thought processes are being a bit fluffy after the festivities ;) pics shall follow on his blog, I'm sure

teh pics

Yeah, here it is, what you all wanted, the fotos mentioned yesterday

tedah