...and furthermore, you can get a Bluetooth OBD scanner which you can use live with your smartphone as you drive along. I'm using a cheap scanner from eBay and the Torque app for Android.
My seven year old daughter was watching the speed graph linearly increasing whilst the RPM graph saw-toothed. Now she understands gears in a whole new way.
After ten years of two monitors I've gone for four and it's made another leap in friendliness.
In KDE, with 2x2 monitors you can:
maximize a window to all four
maximize horizontally
maximize vertically
drag to the middle of a side to fill that side
drag to the top / bottom of a side to fill that corner
drag to the middle of the top to fill all four
Pop into System Settings | Window Behaviour | Titlebar Actions | Maximize Button for much tinkering.
Another useful thing is that my mouse pointer is about 14mm high so it's easy to see, well done KDE devs. Sadly when I remote into other machines it uses their local mouse pointer size
In practice I find I spread Eclipse over all four and web pages fill the left or the right, it's pretty useful for eBay listings, Slashdot comments etc.
Before you ask it's 4 x 50GBP monitors and a 50GBP quad-head video card.
I tripped over that with my two cameras which had both been in-sync and at UTC. They had fallen out of sync.
I spotted it when looking at some photos the kids took which it transpires they took at the same moment when I adjusted the times. The little darlings did it all on their own without me prompting so maybe I can handover the file system management to them if they grow up as pedantic as me. Problem solved!
One day I'll probably be old and grey and sat around with nothing to do. It would be nice to find out what I was up to and didn't have time to look at.
Luckily, by then, the systems we use will be able to help me find interesting images.
I'm trying to use high-res for when I have a wall completely covered in a screen in ten years time and I want to avoid cringing when I see the old images.
BTW I was surprised that a 40"x60" canvas is only 200GBP these days.
This may be totally over the top, but I restore the backups onto my system before over-writing them.
I remove files duplicated in my live system by name+date and MD5-hash to catch renames. I then trawl the remnants manually. Sometimes I find a file I wish I hadn't deleted which I hadn't noticed in my 1st-level archive backup (see "rsync --backup-dir"). On one occasion I think I found a file where the MD5 hash had changed and I rescued a good copy from the restored version.
I seriously question the value of this process as the return is so low. Human-error is much more of a problem than bit-rot based on my experience with this approach.
I could improve the signal/noise ratio of the remnants by keeping a hash of the files I purposefully deleted from the live system but that's a whole new branch of exploration.
I've recently been using Mylyn to give me a focussed view on the code I'm working on. I love the way it automatically adds things to the context as I click around.
Then of course there's the rather gorgeous "Run unit tests in context" to give me feedback on the things I've been tinkering with.
Imagine if people could afford to live where they want to, get their kids the best education possible, and spend the time they wanted to with family and friends.
Some of us have already done this on our own.
Now that I don't live in London I've taken a hit on my salary and the types of work I can do. However, moving to the countryside has allowed me to spend that time with my kids instead. Today we went for a walk in the forest for a few hours and it was wonderful. We've been really lucky, we mandated a broadband connection as part of the move and the world has moved to make this a lifeline for banking, auctions, work, groceries,... we rarely need to actually go anywhere to do things. That's quite a change from the trudge my parents had to do when I was a kid in the countryside.
I believe people have been doing this for centuries.[citation needed]
At the end of the day I feel fortunate that we can finance living in the country on a programmer's salary. Just like with having kids, I'd say my basic advice is to lower your expectations of what you'll have in life and you'll be fine.
Yep, this works well for me. I have a slew of 160GB drives and I use them for offsite backups at other family members' houses. I gave up with DVDs when I got to 40GB. Having so many obsolete drives made me able to have multiple offsite backups which is always nice.
However I did go to the dark side first and set up big RAID arrays with them that were very fast. The only snag was I had to do that in each machine else I got upset copying files around as I wasn't using the fast drives efficiently. Then of course you have to get GigE to keep things rolling. Then you realize your time could be better spent posting to/.
Re:I'm in Australia (Adelaide) Looking to move cou
on
Moving Between Countries?
·
· Score: 4, Interesting
Yes, New Zealand is a beautiful place. Personally I prefer the non-Auckland parts, but YMMV.
Without wishing to state the obvious, NZ/AUS is a long way from other places. The flight to the US isn't a killer, but you'll find you only see family once or twice a year. That's OK for a while but once you have kids you may find you want them to be with their relatives more often (or maybe not!) Moving to NZ will at least keep you near your (assumedly) AUS family.
Our friends from NZ just visited last week - we last saw them about three years ago and it'll be another five years before our kids are big enough for me to happily go from the UK to NZ. We miss those friends and I'd like them to be a bigger part of my kids lives.
As for moving countries, we found it quite easy because I was seconded from my UK company. The folks we know who seem to have had the best time are the ones who committed whole-heartedly to the move and got setup in the new country with the intention of staying. Having said that, one of my friends from the US is just about to move back as he can't sell his US house and can't afford to live in the UK anymore. It's a real shame as he was really getting settled in the UK.
My experience is that getting your foot in the door is the hardest part, but once you're in you can demonstrate your competence and all is well. Its time to use every friend, contact or professional organization you can - they can be surprisingly willing to help.
Maybe you're running your MythTV box to make it easier for other folks in your house to watch TV. Being 3 years old they can't set it up (but not for lack of me explaining how). It's nice to have access to whatever I subjectively think is good TV rather than just switching it on and watching whatever is there.
Yep, being time-poor seems to be part of being a Dad. I've only got time to post this at 01:47 as I'm waiting for my 5-month old son to drift off back to sleep.
I've been coming to the same conclusion about MythTV and have been waiting for the Playstation-based TV to appear in Europe. As for maintenance, my wife was at PC World on Sunday buying a new video card as the old one went flaky and she was on the phone to me whilst I was trying to stop the hot water flowing out the side of the house.
I refer myself to previous comments I made to myself - "You have to lower your expectations when you have kids". Ahh, there we go, now I'm happy again.
Yes, mine was great too, so good in fact that I got one for my gf. They were a bargain at 500GBP back then.
I recently got an Eee for 200GBP and the happy memories came flooding back, but with much less of the pain.
Having a decent PC I can pop into the pocket of my cargo pants is wonderful.
Hurrah!
Yep, you're right. Having the extensibility of Firefox on my Eee PC really helps. Little things like FlashBlock, Repagination, Remove-it Permanently and NoScript really enhance the experience.
In fact I have also owned a Libretto, Pocket PC and Nokia N80 (640x480) and the winner would be the phone as it's got ubiquitous coverage even though the browser and RSS reader are less functional (we don't have pervasive WiFi outside of London in the UK.)
>>If it can't fit in my pocket, I'm not carrying it around "just in case".
BTW I tested the Eee would fit in my pocket before I bought it - I suppose I'm the only one around who still wears cargo-pants. I must be getting old. Of course in reality it's only the phone I take everywhere.
How ironic. I just switched from Barclays because they implemented this scheme. Note that Barclays give you everything you need for free.
You need a user id, password, your card and the PINSentry device to access the site. That's sort of OK when you're at home. It's not great when you leave your card in the reader and don't realize until the next day when you're in the shop. It's not great when you travel and you have a few different accounts setup. Although Mr G overcame that he wouldn't have his card to make payments with!
It's spectacularly bad when you have a Python script screen-scraping their site twice a day and you're running the transactions through your local "suspicious transactions" algorithm. I record the bulk of my future transactions, so it's easy for me to spot erroneous ones - heck, I even have a secure RSS feed for the transactions from my five accounts. There's no way to give my bank this payment information (yet) so their heuristics are running without the data that would really help them. I had a heart-to-heart with my Premier Account Manager at Barclays about this and his hands were tied - they just aren't advanced at all. If they want to keep the data in their closed world then they need to give me the tools in that world to manage my money (and yes, OpenPlan is a step in that direction - great if you only use Barclays I guess).
I used to work in a car parts factory in the UK. We paid someone to lift product from the output hopper of one machine and put it into the input feed of another machine. So I asked the obvious question. They had already found out that it would cost 250k for a machine to do this job. The guy doing it was getting around 10k and when they were really busy they'd hire another guy for a second shift. The maintenance on the machine would have been more than the wages.
Luckily this was a sane company, so they didn't buy the machine.
A Mac Mini has a DVI port.
A DVI cable can be very long (mine is 10 metres).
So I simply put my box in another room and use an X10 radio remote.
Complete silence. Bliss.
OK, I'm going to have to bite on one of these posts.
My TV manual says it uses 3W on standby. It was only manufactured in January. I believed the 3W right up until I actually measured it and found that it was 20W. That's nowhere near your 80W so there is exaggeration going on. My electricity (from a wind-farm) is 0.15GBP/KWH => 26.28GBP/year if it was on standby.
Now that's nothing to compared to my 8cu ft chest freezer (fairly small) which uses 125GBP/year worth of electricity. A really good freezer uses about 30GBP/year so clearly it's time for a trip to Comet if the lifetime of a freezer of 300GBP is more than three years.
Some real estate agents in the UK use WMF files to show the floor plan. They didn't even realise as they are using a generic house-selling application from some vendor. When I was looking to buy a house I used the following command under Fedora Core 4:
convert xpladv470.wmf xpladv470.png
and all was revealed.
Unfortunately my Fedora Core 4 is also failing to install the viruses - I feel so left out.
I'm not sure why, but no-one has mentioned the Lexus RX400h
It can run on batteries whilst you drive your daughter to school and then the rather large 3.3 litre petrol engine can kick in to get you to work. It has part-time 4WD and it's size will help when you hit that deer. If you care, it does 0-60mph in about 7.5 seconds - and will go upto around 130mph (if you want to go that fast in something weighing 2 tonnes)
The main thing for me is that you go from something like 15mpg in normal SUV to more like 30mpg (in a suburban run). Petrol in the UK is approaching 1 GBP per litre (nearly 7 USD/gal). When you're in city traffic you aren't making the problem worse, you just sit inertly. It uses a constantly variable transmission and so is apparently very smooth to drive. It even brings the petrol engine to rest in a position where it's ready to start back up again.
If you go for the 45k GBP version you get a highly-luxurious, relatively efficient, pretty fast 4WD SUV.
I believe there's quite a waiting list in the US for them.
They did post high quality versions of Hitchhikers online whilst they were broadcasting it. This is very useful for those of us with babies to chase around after.
If you were really keen then you could just setup a cron job to grab the low quality versions:
Same here - I'm using the Nova-T USB device in the UK with FreeView (digital over-the-air). I do get some transmission problems, but no worse than my old set-top box. Oddly they tend to happen in the middle of the night.
It works pretty well under Myth and having the digital content recorded directly is a great feature. I typically get about 2GiB an hour for the 720x576 content that we have in the UK.
I'll admit I'm looking for a second device and I'll probably go for one of the USB2 devices. It really helps your uptime to have things that don't need the power off to move them around. Currently at sixty days and counting - sadly one of our visitors got a bit keen with the "Start a new instance of Myth" button on the remote control:)
Slashdot Mirror
...and furthermore, you can get a Bluetooth OBD scanner which you can use live with your smartphone as you drive along. I'm using a cheap scanner from eBay and the Torque app for Android.
My seven year old daughter was watching the speed graph linearly increasing whilst the RPM graph saw-toothed. Now she understands gears in a whole new way.
After ten years of two monitors I've gone for four and it's made another leap in friendliness.
In KDE, with 2x2 monitors you can:
Pop into System Settings | Window Behaviour | Titlebar Actions | Maximize Button for much tinkering.
Another useful thing is that my mouse pointer is about 14mm high so it's easy to see, well done KDE devs. Sadly when I remote into other machines it uses their local mouse pointer size
In practice I find I spread Eclipse over all four and web pages fill the left or the right, it's pretty useful for eBay listings, Slashdot comments etc.
Before you ask it's 4 x 50GBP monitors and a 50GBP quad-head video card.
I tripped over that with my two cameras which had both been in-sync and at UTC. They had fallen out of sync.
I spotted it when looking at some photos the kids took which it transpires they took at the same moment when I adjusted the times. The little darlings did it all on their own without me prompting so maybe I can handover the file system management to them if they grow up as pedantic as me. Problem solved!
One day I'll probably be old and grey and sat around with nothing to do. It would be nice to find out what I was up to and didn't have time to look at.
Luckily, by then, the systems we use will be able to help me find interesting images.
I'm trying to use high-res for when I have a wall completely covered in a screen in ten years time and I want to avoid cringing when I see the old images.
BTW I was surprised that a 40"x60" canvas is only 200GBP these days.
This may be totally over the top, but I restore the backups onto my system before over-writing them.
I remove files duplicated in my live system by name+date and MD5-hash to catch renames. I then trawl the remnants manually. Sometimes I find a file I wish I hadn't deleted which I hadn't noticed in my 1st-level archive backup (see "rsync --backup-dir"). On one occasion I think I found a file where the MD5 hash had changed and I rescued a good copy from the restored version.
I seriously question the value of this process as the return is so low. Human-error is much more of a problem than bit-rot based on my experience with this approach.
I could improve the signal/noise ratio of the remnants by keeping a hash of the files I purposefully deleted from the live system but that's a whole new branch of exploration.
I've recently been using Mylyn to give me a focussed view on the code I'm working on. I love the way it automatically adds things to the context as I click around.
Then of course there's the rather gorgeous "Run unit tests in context" to give me feedback on the things I've been tinkering with.
Imagine if people could afford to live where they want to, get their kids the best education possible, and spend the time they wanted to with family and friends.
Some of us have already done this on our own.
Now that I don't live in London I've taken a hit on my salary and the types of work I can do. However, moving to the countryside has allowed me to spend that time with my kids instead. Today we went for a walk in the forest for a few hours and it was wonderful. We've been really lucky, we mandated a broadband connection as part of the move and the world has moved to make this a lifeline for banking, auctions, work, groceries, ... we rarely need to actually go anywhere to do things. That's quite a change from the trudge my parents had to do when I was a kid in the countryside.
I believe people have been doing this for centuries.[citation needed]
At the end of the day I feel fortunate that we can finance living in the country on a programmer's salary. Just like with having kids, I'd say my basic advice is to lower your expectations of what you'll have in life and you'll be fine.
I love that the remote turns on the PS3. Mine is two rooms away with a long HDMI cable - the kids can turn on the PS3 through the walls.
Seeing as we have a toddler, the PS3 is safely ensconced in the 19" rack and little grubby fingers and cheese sandwiches can't get to it.
Yep, this works well for me. I have a slew of 160GB drives and I use them for offsite backups at other family members' houses. I gave up with DVDs when I got to 40GB. Having so many obsolete drives made me able to have multiple offsite backups which is always nice.
However I did go to the dark side first and set up big RAID arrays with them that were very fast. The only snag was I had to do that in each machine else I got upset copying files around as I wasn't using the fast drives efficiently. Then of course you have to get GigE to keep things rolling. Then you realize your time could be better spent posting to /.
Yes, New Zealand is a beautiful place. Personally I prefer the non-Auckland parts, but YMMV.
Without wishing to state the obvious, NZ/AUS is a long way from other places. The flight to the US isn't a killer, but you'll find you only see family once or twice a year. That's OK for a while but once you have kids you may find you want them to be with their relatives more often (or maybe not!) Moving to NZ will at least keep you near your (assumedly) AUS family.
Our friends from NZ just visited last week - we last saw them about three years ago and it'll be another five years before our kids are big enough for me to happily go from the UK to NZ. We miss those friends and I'd like them to be a bigger part of my kids lives.
As for moving countries, we found it quite easy because I was seconded from my UK company. The folks we know who seem to have had the best time are the ones who committed whole-heartedly to the move and got setup in the new country with the intention of staying. Having said that, one of my friends from the US is just about to move back as he can't sell his US house and can't afford to live in the UK anymore. It's a real shame as he was really getting settled in the UK.
My experience is that getting your foot in the door is the hardest part, but once you're in you can demonstrate your competence and all is well. Its time to use every friend, contact or professional organization you can - they can be surprisingly willing to help.
* smile *
Maybe you're running your MythTV box to make it easier for other folks in your house to watch TV. Being 3 years old they can't set it up (but not for lack of me explaining how). It's nice to have access to whatever I subjectively think is good TV rather than just switching it on and watching whatever is there.
Each to their own I suppose.
Yep, being time-poor seems to be part of being a Dad. I've only got time to post this at 01:47 as I'm waiting for my 5-month old son to drift off back to sleep. I've been coming to the same conclusion about MythTV and have been waiting for the Playstation-based TV to appear in Europe. As for maintenance, my wife was at PC World on Sunday buying a new video card as the old one went flaky and she was on the phone to me whilst I was trying to stop the hot water flowing out the side of the house. I refer myself to previous comments I made to myself - "You have to lower your expectations when you have kids". Ahh, there we go, now I'm happy again.
Yes, mine was great too, so good in fact that I got one for my gf. They were a bargain at 500GBP back then. I recently got an Eee for 200GBP and the happy memories came flooding back, but with much less of the pain. Having a decent PC I can pop into the pocket of my cargo pants is wonderful. Hurrah!
No problem, it's exhausted the battery by that time as it's been busy allocating all that RAM.
Yep, you're right. Having the extensibility of Firefox on my Eee PC really helps. Little things like FlashBlock, Repagination, Remove-it Permanently and NoScript really enhance the experience.
In fact I have also owned a Libretto, Pocket PC and Nokia N80 (640x480) and the winner would be the phone as it's got ubiquitous coverage even though the browser and RSS reader are less functional (we don't have pervasive WiFi outside of London in the UK.)
>>If it can't fit in my pocket, I'm not carrying it around "just in case".
BTW I tested the Eee would fit in my pocket before I bought it - I suppose I'm the only one around who still wears cargo-pants. I must be getting old. Of course in reality it's only the phone I take everywhere.
How ironic. I just switched from Barclays because they implemented this scheme. Note that Barclays give you everything you need for free.
You need a user id, password, your card and the PINSentry device to access the site. That's sort of OK when you're at home. It's not great when you leave your card in the reader and don't realize until the next day when you're in the shop. It's not great when you travel and you have a few different accounts setup. Although Mr G overcame that he wouldn't have his card to make payments with!
It's spectacularly bad when you have a Python script screen-scraping their site twice a day and you're running the transactions through your local "suspicious transactions" algorithm. I record the bulk of my future transactions, so it's easy for me to spot erroneous ones - heck, I even have a secure RSS feed for the transactions from my five accounts. There's no way to give my bank this payment information (yet) so their heuristics are running without the data that would really help them. I had a heart-to-heart with my Premier Account Manager at Barclays about this and his hands were tied - they just aren't advanced at all. If they want to keep the data in their closed world then they need to give me the tools in that world to manage my money (and yes, OpenPlan is a step in that direction - great if you only use Barclays I guess).
Not really, I can confirm that Firefox on Linux works fine for Alliance and Leicester, Barclays and Halifax.
The banks are quite helpful in suggesting security products that will run on Linux too.
I used to work in a car parts factory in the UK. We paid someone to lift product from the output hopper of one machine and put it into the input feed of another machine. So I asked the obvious question. They had already found out that it would cost 250k for a machine to do this job. The guy doing it was getting around 10k and when they were really busy they'd hire another guy for a second shift. The maintenance on the machine would have been more than the wages.
Luckily this was a sane company, so they didn't buy the machine.
A Mac Mini has a DVI port. A DVI cable can be very long (mine is 10 metres). So I simply put my box in another room and use an X10 radio remote. Complete silence. Bliss.
OK, I'm going to have to bite on one of these posts. My TV manual says it uses 3W on standby. It was only manufactured in January. I believed the 3W right up until I actually measured it and found that it was 20W. That's nowhere near your 80W so there is exaggeration going on. My electricity (from a wind-farm) is 0.15GBP/KWH => 26.28GBP/year if it was on standby. Now that's nothing to compared to my 8cu ft chest freezer (fairly small) which uses 125GBP/year worth of electricity. A really good freezer uses about 30GBP/year so clearly it's time for a trip to Comet if the lifetime of a freezer of 300GBP is more than three years.
Some real estate agents in the UK use WMF files to show the floor plan. They didn't even realise as they are using a generic house-selling application from some vendor. When I was looking to buy a house I used the following command under Fedora Core 4:
convert xpladv470.wmf xpladv470.png
and all was revealed.
Unfortunately my Fedora Core 4 is also failing to install the viruses - I feel so left out.
I'm not sure why, but no-one has mentioned the Lexus RX400h
It can run on batteries whilst you drive your daughter to school and then the rather large 3.3 litre petrol engine can kick in to get you to work. It has part-time 4WD and it's size will help when you hit that deer. If you care, it does 0-60mph in about 7.5 seconds - and will go upto around 130mph (if you want to go that fast in something weighing 2 tonnes)
In the UK the police are looking to use them: http://www.mixedpower.com/modules.php?name=News&fi le=article&sid=739
The main thing for me is that you go from something like 15mpg in normal SUV to more like 30mpg (in a suburban run). Petrol in the UK is approaching 1 GBP per litre (nearly 7 USD/gal). When you're in city traffic you aren't making the problem worse, you just sit inertly. It uses a constantly variable transmission and so is apparently very smooth to drive. It even brings the petrol engine to rest in a position where it's ready to start back up again.
If you go for the 45k GBP version you get a highly-luxurious, relatively efficient, pretty fast 4WD SUV.
I believe there's quite a waiting list in the US for them.
They did post high quality versions of Hitchhikers online whilst they were broadcasting it. This is very useful for those of us with babies to chase around after.
k ers.ra
m
If you were really keen then you could just setup a cron job to grab the low quality versions:
mplayer -quiet -prefer-ipv4 -dumpfile `date --iso-8601`_hitchhikers_low.ram -dumpstream -cache 32 rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/hitchhi
or even the high quality version (but sadly it's name changed each week):
mplayer -quiet -prefer-ipv4 -dumpfile `date --iso-8601`_hitchhikers.ram -dumpstream -cache 32 rtsp://rmv8.bbc.net.uk/radio4/hitchhikers/omega.r
Now the broadcasts have concluded the content is no longer available.
Same here - I'm using the Nova-T USB device in the UK with FreeView (digital over-the-air). I do get some transmission problems, but no worse than my old set-top box. Oddly they tend to happen in the middle of the night.
:)
It works pretty well under Myth and having the digital content recorded directly is a great feature. I typically get about 2GiB an hour for the 720x576 content that we have in the UK.
I'll admit I'm looking for a second device and I'll probably go for one of the USB2 devices. It really helps your uptime to have things that don't need the power off to move them around. Currently at sixty days and counting - sadly one of our visitors got a bit keen with the "Start a new instance of Myth" button on the remote control