Since my last posting,  Christmas and New Years happened… *sigh*. As much as I enjoy the time off (haha, we all know a university student never gets time off), I hate having those “what have you been up to?” conversations with friends that lets face it, I don’t have time to talk to every week. Why can’t they just follow me on twitter? haha.

Anyway, I’ve had a recent techy upgrade. I don’t often treat myself with larger items, I tend to spend most of my money on spur of the moment purchases or spending time with my friends however since I’m finally getting back into the swing of working full time (it’s only taken 10 weeks). I find myself with extra cash, my first purchase was a lovely 23″ monitor (http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/23-Digimate-L-2362WD-Black-Wide-Full-HD-1080P-VGA-DVI-1920×1080-10001-300cd-m-5-ms-Speakers), it is very nice and replaced one of the screens I had before. I then got another for christmas from my parents, which completed the set.

My desk is messy in this picture, this is how is always is. I live at this desk for around 10 hours a day, It’s not great but it’s my student life. Whenever I see any of the workspace pictures on lifehacker, I always wonder how these people have the time to keep their desks to clear. Mine is usually got paper and books all over it. It really could use some re-organisation at some point.

What else has happened? Well I’ve been working on my courseworks, I’ve currently handed in 2 of the 3 that are in before the exams and one of those was my third year project progress report. For those of you interested, this document gives the markers an idea of how far we have gotten in 10 weeks. We include initial designs, gantt charts etc as well as literary review. Mine was a little too long :s, I wrote 10 pages of text… which is not approximately 3000 words as the specification said. Oh well, I hope my supervisor enjoys the read.

Finally, as anyone in the UK or knows anyone in the UK knows. We’ve had snow! It’s really not as great as people made out… university was closed today because there was supposed to be a big storm last night. Luckily it’s starting to thaw and won’t snow again any time soon.

Darius Out!

Onwards, Upwards and so forth… As anyone knows read any post here i’m a linux user, I use crunchbang linux as my primary operating system on my day to day. I rarely use my lovely desktop PC although I really should however I commute from home to University and like to be able to move on the go. Well recently I’ve been thinking that I should do the big swap and finally get make linux my primary operating system on my desktop too (i’m keeping a windows partition because i want to be able to play games without hassle). I have 2 drives (250GB’s each) and I’m going to have one for linux and one for windows with a 500GB external drive for the two of them, for music etc.

So i bought one from amazon for ~£50 (http://www.amazon.co.uk/exec/obidos/ASIN/B001EKW0O4) which i thought was a pretty amazing price, I got free super saver delivery and it arrived today, well i got a red slip from Royal Mail for it today.. so i had to go and collect it. I’ve run into my first problem however, what format should I use on it? I’m currently going with FAT32 however im concerned by the 4GB maximum file size, i know that NTFS isn’t all that great on linux so if anyone has any suggestions let me know.

HD Review

I thought I might give “reviewing” it a go, I’m not usually one for saying “this is crap” because I just do my research and buy which ever product is best so i don’t deal with alot of “crap” (i really wish blogs could have a crap alarm like LO). Firstly, it’s very very geared towards windows users however that is just a fact of life. I get a total of 465GB out of the “500″ claimed which agian is fine and totally expected. I really love some of the hardware features, I’m one of those computer geeks who turns his computer off when he goes to bed, i know its extreme (i do take my netbook to bed with me though :s). This drive turns on and off with your computer, it is completely independantly powered, I think thats just a pain useful feature. I’ve had other drives which require you to switch them on and off manually and I’m just too lazy for that. It also has an “power-saving mode” , i’ve not been able to find any material telling me how it saves power exactly but the description says

[quote]Buffalo DriveStation USB 2.0 Hard Disk is a simple solution to back up your important data.
The Power Saving Utility constantly monitors data access to the hard drive and automatically redcues power consumption when the unit is idle.
TurboUSB software increases data transfer speeds via USB.
Secure Lock Ware software encrypts and protects your important personal data from theft and unauthorised access.
With Auto Power On/Off Function, the DriveStation automatically turns on/off with your Windows PC.[/quote]

Now i worry slightly that “reducing power” between idles will reduce performance or cause it to consume more power spinning up if the time between idles is short. The last feature still remains my favourite.

WednesdayMorning

Well in my last post i mentioned some changes, i’ve edited the splash to point here. The layout of the splash will give you an idea off what the website will look like. I’m going to use the template that i designed the WoW Site as it didn’t have a WoW Theme to it. Eventually the blog will be skinned to match or i’ll intergrate the blog into it somehow but for now the website will be used for the following :-

• Publishing tutorials, articles and HOWTO’s on pretty much anything I’m working on
• Some Scripts, a few friends of mine are flash developers (flash game developers) and they bitch about there being no truely good and easy to set up arcade scripts so i thought i’d start with that

It’s a pretty limited scope at the moment but I’m sure some idea’s will come to me as I get started.

Exams are nearly over!

I’ve got my last examination off Semester 1 tomorrow and I can’t wait, this has been the most packed semester I’ve had yet and from what i’ve been told this is as bad as it gets. I plan on taking the whole weekend (including friday) off to do absolutely nothing. It’s been a fair while since I’ve had chance to do nothing.

Well i’ll try an update a little quicker next time, probably will be about my new setup for my desktop and my experience with that.

Darius

Greetings,

Got a couple of things to talk about today,

• The future of wednesdaymorning.co.uk
• Stupidly small USB keys
• Crunchbang update
• Twitter? What do you use it for??
• Ubuntu Phone Buddy and other gadgets
• anything else that comes to me as i write

Future of  WednesdayMorning.co.uk

Well anyone who’s read the blog that has read the main domain site will know what wednesdaymorning.co.uk was suppost to be about.  Check out the splash description if you haven’t already, it’s basically a WoW UI repository. It stores your lua data and addons and restores it on other machines, it was an idea I had while i was on the train to see my girlfriend when she was studying in Reading. The big selling point of it was that it would be a in Java and wouldn’t require a client to actually be installed on the users computer. Anyway but the big upset is that

…

…

i’ve stopped playing WoW, mainly because of issues associated with the latest expansion pack but it was about time for me to stop. Now, this doesn’t stop be developing this website which is something im still interested in however it’s not something I’m interested in constantly updating and maintainingt So i’m trying to think of something to do with this domain, now  I already have the blog but maybe I could add some kind of personal portal including things like :-

• tutorials i’ve written and future tutorials
• interesting news articles i find

As you can tell i’m kinda stumped, so anyone with any idea’s please post a comment and let me know about them. I’m always looking for a reason to code something in PHP!

Stupidly Small USB Keys

Okay, they really annoy me. I’m a firm believer that making things smaller for the sake of making things smaller is entirely pointless, now I’m not refering to transistors or anything that is a true benifit. I’m talking about USB Flash drives mainly, i find having an 8gb flash drive the size of my pinky a little pointless and just an effort to sell more pointless gadgets. Here’s a picture illustrating my point.

Going from left to right, 8gb USB Flash Drive, 1gb USB Flash Drive, Pen (for scaling), 100gb USB Hard Disk. As you can see the first USB drive is the one i’m talking about. The second one is in my opinion the best size for a USB storage device, it’s big enough to remember however its also small enough to fit inside a pocket or wallet. The 100gb USB HD is infact what i used to carry around with me before I got my eee pc and I still carry it along with me these days however sometimes i felt the cable annoying. So that was my little rant about them, they tend to come in 2-8gb sizes and are quite cheap however if you buy one please tie it to yourself because you are bound to loose or forget it.

Crunchbang Update!

Now this isn’t techniqually true as i write this because the update instructions arn’t out yet so if you want the latest version you have to install it clean.

Download it : http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/downloads

Release Notes: http://crunchbanglinux.org/wiki/release-notes/8.10.02

Now i can’t really give it a review because i haven’t used it so as soon as the update instructions code up i’ll stick up some kind of review however there was something in the release notes that struck my eye.

[quote]A modified default theme for use on smaller screens.[/quote]

I don’t remember from previous release notes if this was something already in their because if it was it was poorly done but i do remember posting about it on the forums so I’m crossing my fingers .

Twitter

I recently signed up to twitter, http://twitter.com/aughban. Every time i go to change my picture I find that there are to many tweets? Okay i’m all for blogging and podcasting but I don’t really see what i should do with this twitter thing, now that might be because i don’t have any friends on it (mainly because the search function has been disabled).

So? if you want to see my tweets add me, I would really like to see what all the fuss is about.

Ubuntu Phone Buddy!

This thing is really cool!

3x USB ports, SD Card Readers and a phone charger with multiple types for most phones on the market

Now i’m not just shamelessly plugging this thing, I actually bought one! Mainly because i needed somewhere to put my phone when im at my desk but it also provides a few helpful features such as the phone charger. The phone charger runs entirely off the power supplied via USB and its damn useful because it means i can leave my phone charger by my bed. The one and only complaint I have about the thing is that you must keep the silicon pad very clean or it doesn’t allow your phone to stick to it! This does mean every few days i need to give it a wipe because of the dust on my phone from where its been in my pockets.

I did find it kind of ironic that in the instructions it mentioned how to install it on Windows and Mac and not linux however  it worked fine in crunchbang.

etc

I’ve been listening to the linux outlaws podcast while i’ve been writing this, i think i’ve mentioned before that its one of the podcasts i enjoy listening too and they had a few good articles that have come up over the week such as the Oz’s banning MySQL people and the follow-up to the teacher incedent. If you haven’t read them I suggest you go and listen to the podcast, they have to genuinely interesting stuff on their and they are very easy on the ears.Oh and they are firefly fans which is always a plus in my books, they take the line “we aim to misbehave” for their website and i think it suits the theme very well. Oh and fab is a crunchbang user so thats another plus! (you can probably see from the very informal structure to these posts, i don’t actually plan anything in advance and my english isn’t very good either)

I suppose this being a blog about me and my Uni life I should mention something about it, i’ve had my head in my operating systems book the last few days learning and revising everything for my exam this week. It’s going well, its by far the most content rich module i’ve done this semester (i would even go as far to say to content rich) however the teacher is extremely helpful and attentative to our questions. I really can’t wait untill the next semester starts and I don’t have any work for a week or so, I could really do with a few days off to do absolutely nothing!

Thats all for now.