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Submit Response is a weblog by Jack Mottram, a journalist who lives in Glasgow, Scotland. There are 1276 posts in the archives. You can subscribe to a feed.

Today’s Links (15/05/08)

Posted at 11am on 15/05/08 by Jack Mottram to the links category.
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Today’s Links (12/05/08)

Posted at 1pm on 12/05/08 by Jack Mottram to the links category.
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Today’s Links (01/05/08)

Posted at 2pm on 01/05/08 by Jack Mottram to the links category.
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Telly Savalas Looks At Birmingham

Especially for Mom and Dad:

The film is one of many ‘quota quickies’, B-featurettes shown in cinemas, an unintended side-effect of the Cinematograph Film Act of 1927.

Director Harold Baim seems to have had a real suburballardian fascination for motorways, multi-storey car parks and tower blocks.

Discovered thanks to a wonderful documentary by Laurie Taylor, which just finished. (I’ll upload it tomorrow after it appears on Listen Again.)

Update: The good people at Speechification, an excellent weblog that posts highlights from Radio 4 and other ‘intelligent speech’ stations, have archived the documentary.

Posted at 11am on 26/04/08 by Jack Mottram to the art and culture category.
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Today’s Links (26/04/08)

  • Liliputing: Comprehensive list of low-cost ultraportables
    The E900 looks to be the best of the bunch. Though I do like the Elonex One, on the grounds that it’s a bit bonkers (I can see myself grabbing one off eBay for a few quid in a couple of years).
  • EeeUser ASUS Eee PC EeePC Forum / eeecontrol 0.2 ( fan and fsb control )
    GUI for overclocking, fan control on the Eee PC. Bit buggy, apparently, but less faff than the alternatives. (Though I’m not really convinced overclocking is worth doing, unless you’re playing games or otherwise using your Eee in a silly way.)
  • DigiCamHistory
    The history of the digital camera, and other kinds of camera too. Dangerous: I came this close to buying a Quicktake 200 after reading it. (Which would’ve required buying an ancient computer too, to get the photos off it.)
  • Cheese
    Super-basic photo-managing app. Beta (in the old fashioned sense), so I’m just keeping an eye on it for now.
  • YouTube - Multi-Touch Eee PC 900
    Gah, this isn’t helping me resist the temptation to upgrade. (Assuming all these gestures are built into Xandros?)

Posted at 10am on 26/04/08 by Jack Mottram to the links category.
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Eee PC Setup v2.0

Thanks to my compulsive tendency to install every vaguely intriguing application I come across, and a bad habit of tweaking stuff without really understanding what I’m doing, my Eee PC went a but wonky recently. So I did the F9 trick, which resets the Eee to its default state—a great feature, that—and worked out what I really need on the thing.

So, here are the steps I took to turn a stock Eee into the perfect machine for writing on the move.

  1. Enable Advanced Desktop Mode, because Easy Mode is just silly.
  2. Add extra repositories, from which to download applications not provided by Asus.
  3. Install SSH server, so you can connect your Eee from other computers: sudo apt-get install openssh-server
  4. Install Subversion, to keep all your files in sync: sudo apt-get install subversion (setting up a Subversion repository is left as an exercise for the reader).
  5. Install AbiWord, because OpenOffice is too slow on the Eee: sudo apt-get install abiword.
  6. Install VLC, for playing telly programmes on the train when you can’t be arsed working: sudo apt-get install vlc
  7. Tweak Firefox to make it more Eee-friendly:
    1. Install the MiniFox theme.
    2. Install the Fullerscreen add-on.
    3. Install the Google Browser Sync add-on, to keep your bookmarks, passwords and history synchronised with your main computer (optional, but well handy).
  8. Remember to keep all your stuff on a removable SDHC card, not on the Eee’s internal memory card.

That’s it. The whole procedure takes under ten minutes, most of which is spent waiting for the list of repositories to update and the 15MB AbiWord to download.

I’ve been running the Eee like this for ten days now, and haven’t missed any of the gizmos I’d installed over the last few months. More importantly, the Eee is now as fast as crikey, and I haven’t had a single application crash on me yet.

Just in case anyone thinks I’ve lost the will to tinker, I feel moved to point out that I wrote the above while waiting for a Puppy Linux CD to burn.

Posted at 3pm on 25/04/08 by Jack Mottram to the linux category.
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Today’s Links (25/04/08)

Posted at 1pm on 25/04/08 by Jack Mottram to the links category.
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Today’s Links (16/04/08)

Posted at 11pm on 16/04/08 by Jack Mottram to the links category.
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