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After watching the two Doctor Who Christmas episodes I thought I’d watch the ‘behind the scenes’ programme ‘Doctor Who Confidential’. During one segment where they discuss the set used in the Christmas episode I spotted a bunch of machines with what look like Ubuntu boot screens on them. If you’re in the UK (or have access to Freesat in Europe) you can see it on BBC HD at 16:55 on 3rd January, or on BBC Three at 04:10 on 5th January. according to the iplayer page. The frame below was grabbed from 38:29 mins in.

That would be me.

I’ve started speaking to strangers more. Here’s what’s happened so far.

A couple of weeks ago I spoke to a guy standing on the concourse at London Waterloo station. He was standing with an electrically powered bike. When I approached him and asked what it was, how it worked and so on, he seemed somewhat taken aback. After telling me all about the bike and his adventures on it we moved on to talk about Brookwood Cemetary and the special train that used to take the dead and mourners there from London. I learned that you had to buy a one-way ticket for the casket - which makes total sense, but I’d never thought about it.

In my minor quest to visit as many of the UK Linux User Groups as I can, tonight is beer with Lonix - London Linux User Group.

I’ve visited a few LUGs now, including one LUG in the USA, and it never ceases to amaze me how much LUGs differ.

It’s the characters that make up the LUG that heavily influence them of course. Some LUGs have people who are passionate about open source, others are ardent fans of the “bring a box” meet, where others are just big on curry and booze. I’m looking forward to seeing what Lonix will be like.

Sophie is over 2 and a half years old now. It’s amazing the speed at which she’s grown up. We have full conversations where I quiz her about her day and she describes how she’s feeling, what toys she’s been playing with, and makes some self-projected stuff up about pink teddy.

When she was younger we disovered she was a bit of a “sucky” baby. Not in a “YOU SUCK!” kind of way, but well, she seemed better with a dummy (pacifier). Yeah yeah I know what some people say about dummies and to a certain degree they’re right. Dummies are a pain in the arse, mostly at the time when you want the child to give them up. Don’t get me wrong, Sophie only has her dummy when she’s sleeping, and even then she can cope sleeping at Day Nursery without it, but at home she’s had it since she was really very young. She has Dummy, raggy (a bit of a piece of Clares clothing she cut up to give to Sophie to comfort her), and the aforementioned “Pink Teddy”.

I should add some content here :)

At work people often come up to my desk and ask if they can get their password reset. I usually do this and tell them their new password. I’ve decided I’m missing a trick here. What I now do is this.

User: "Please reset my password"
Me: "Sure"
*tapety* *tap* *tap*
Me: "Right, your password is 'ubuntu'"
User: "Huh?"
Me: "Here, take this, it will help you"

I hand them an Ubuntu CD pack. They get to read the cover of the CD pack on the way back to their desk. Perfect.

This is a long post which started life as a letter to my Dad explaining what I had done to fix his broken computer. I figured it wouldn’t hurt to paste it in here.

My Dad dropped off his PC to me. It’s an ASUS motherboard based generic PC with a 1GHz CPU, 256MiB RAM, 30GB and 40GB disks, and a CD burner. It has a Matrox 450 video card, a Pinnacle DV500 ieee1394 capture card, a sound card, some USB ports and a PCI modem. It runs Microsoft Windows 2000, but as it has only been on a dialup connection in its life, it had virtually no updates installed.

As regular readers of my blog may recall, I recently gave my brother a PC running Ubuntu Linux. He uses it for surfing the web, getting email and chatting online. He also has an HP PSC 1610 printer/scanner/copier which works under Linux pretty well. He has a Dlink WAP/Modem/Router providing his ADSL connection via wired ethernet.

I had a phone call from him a week or so ago telling me the PC was broken. To cut a long story short he had difficulty getting a disc removed from the CDROM drive and eventually resorted to pulling the power cable out. This resulted in filesystem errors when he rebooted. I’ve not had many of these types of problems so don’t have a huge amount of experience in the area. So I talked him through removing the hard disk (which was easy because the PC he has is very modular) and he sent it to me.