Robert Beal

Lands End to John O’Groats (LEJOG) – Equipment List

Robert Beal — Wed, 19 May 2010 12:34:42 +0000

As usual cycling has been my biggest interest of late as the Summer weather begins to come into play. This year I’ve decided (after writing it off at first) to try and cycle 1,000 miles from Lands End to John O’Groats (LEJOG) on my Boardman Pro Carbon road racing bike. I was initially put off, [...]

Change the default sound card in Ubuntu Karmic

Robert Beal — Tue, 20 Apr 2010 22:55:38 +0000

I’ve got a pc with two sound cards, the onboard sound, and a Sound Blaster Live Value I’ve had for a while. I use the Sound Blaster as I’ve never been able to get the onboard sound working in Ubuntu. For some reason or other, I managed to mess up the default sound card on [...]

Mounting an EXT3 removable drive for the first time

Robert Beal — Sat, 17 Apr 2010 23:58:55 +0000

Since recently using a lot more HD .mkv files, I’ve decided to switch away from FAT32 (and it’s 4GB file limit) to EXT3 (which is a far better choice generally). I took my 320GB USB powered Toshiba drive, plugged it into my pc and using GParted formatted it to EXT3. Great that was easy. Using [...]

Installing Ruby in Ubuntu 9.10 (and OpenSSL)

Robert Beal — Sat, 20 Mar 2010 10:23:35 +0000

In the package manager for Ubuntu (Synaptic) we already have a “ruby” package. It wasn’t until recently though that I realised the “rubygems” part just didn’t work. Now that I’m depending on libraries such as “mocha” this is a blocking factor. There seems to be an ongoing argument between the ruby community and Ubuntu developers [...]

Banshee crashing? Rebuild the database

Robert Beal — Fri, 19 Mar 2010 16:08:21 +0000

In recent months I’ve become a dedicated Banshee user, and finally decided to drop Rhythmbox (bit dated / behind with the times) and Songbird (too slow for the size of collection I have). As of around v1.5.2 in Banshee they had fixed the slow load-up, and added a filesystem watcher. With those two things fixed, [...]

Setting up mediatomb in Ubuntu 9.10 (Karmic)

Robert Beal — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 14:19:09 +0000

Having recently bought a WDTV HD Live to replace my Xbox (with XBMC) I decided to look into setting up a UPnP service on my Ubuntu headless server. After reading around a bit, I firstly tried uShare but didn’t find it very flexible. I finally settled on MediaTomb as I liked the look of the [...]

Max Value HomePlug matching problem… Fixed

Robert Beal — Fri, 29 Jan 2010 09:12:17 +0000

For Christmas (2009) I was given a pair of Max Value 200Mbps HomePlug units, presumably from Amazon. Out of the box they worked, and still do, perfectly. I was so impressed by them, I quickly ordered another pair from Amazon within a few weeks, and this is where my problem began. The first pair, lets call [...]

Rebuilding Grub2 grub.cfg from Ubuntu Live CD

Robert Beal — Fri, 01 Jan 2010 18:26:23 +0000

After installing Windows 7 the other day I lost my Grub install. Not a problem, in the past I’ve used my Super Grub Disc to repair it. This didn’t work for me though (may be my disc is a bit date, or maybe it doesn’t support grub 2 just yet). Instead I booted up using [...]

Checkgmail not working in Ubuntu?

Robert Beal — Fri, 16 Oct 2009 10:59:01 +0000

Over the last few weeks checkgmail has not been working. This is quite common given Google probably changing things around. So it has happened in the past, and requires and update to be pushed out. Unfortunately, via the repositories this is quite a slow affair. There is a quicker solution though… Open up a terminal [...]

The Importance of Being There at Conception (of a Feature)

Robert Beal — Sun, 11 Oct 2009 13:24:19 +0000

I’ll use a slightly crude example to get across the point of this post. It’s maybe not the best comparison, but bare with me. Instead of “feature” think of “child” in relation to conception. Let’s say you weren’t there from conception of your child. In fact the first 15 years of the child’s life you [...]