While a moderate degree of hassle was involved, I’ve successfully got a 21 year-old laser printer working with a month old stick computer. Between the two are a USB hub, a network switch box, a USB LAN adapter and a few metres of network cable.
It’s a temporary arrangement, though; a USB hub/LAN adapter combo is on order.
I’ve had my main email address, garymoore@btinternet.com, for twenty and a bit years. I’ve hung onto it mainly because lots of people know it. It’s caused some hassle though, because I’ve a relatively common name and other people with the same name have very similar email addresses. Which results in my frequently being signed-up with various sites and services, as well as receiving mail meant for other people.
It’s a very long time since I’ve had an account with BT, but, like many people, I hung onto the mail account. Quite a few years ago, BT began charging a nominal fee, £1.60 a month, for legacy email use. I happily paid this amount, even though the service is hosted by Yahoo and the webmail is ad-laden. A couple of weeks ago, though, in common with many people, I received an email from BT, advising that the charge would be rising to £5.00 a month.
Not a huge amount of money, but sixty quid a year for an email account is somewhat excessive. I only pay £28 a year for a domain name (this one), web space and unlimited email addresses. Which puts things into perspective and has made the decision to part with my old BT account easy.
Not so easy is remembering all of the accounts and transactions associated with this email address. I’ve set up Thunderbird on the PC, the first time I’ve used a proper e-mail application, apart from at work, in years. It seems to be struggling a little, but it’s currently in the process of downloading several years’ emails.
I now need to make Windows less like Windows. At least until I have the courage to attempt to get Ubuntu onto this computer again.
An early finish at work today allowed seeds to be planted (chilli, coriander, chives and thyme) and a Windows (stick) computer to be made more useable.
A productive evening.
A great deal of fruitless time today was spent in attempting to bring our new Hannspree Micro PC back to life. Sadly, to no avail. I was unable either to boot from Linux or restore a Windows image I’d found on the Internet. But, after a couple of stiff Gins, I was inspired. At the point of giving up and putting it down to experience, I had something of a light bulb moment.
In short, we now have a fully working PC on a stick.
It was a painful process, but the outcome was positive. In an awful Windows kind of way.
My resolve is strong though; I shan’t abandon my aim to have a working version of Ubuntu on a pocket device. Apart from my phone, that is. I’d say more about that, but the Gin’s influence prevents me.
Yesterday afternoon, in view of the unusually nice weather, my second in command and I spent some time in Ouseburn; the Ship, the Cluny, then the Tyne Bar. We skipped the Free Trade Inn, since it was really busy and didn’t have any obviously fish-free beer.
Followed by the Bridge Tavern, then, on returning home, the Traveller’s Rest. And then it was time to set up our new ‘computer’, a Hannspree PC on a stick. It’s small, around the size of the Android devices that’ve been around for a while now. It has 2gb memory and 32gb storage, although there’s a micro SD slot too. It manages to fit in a full size USB port and has both WiFi and Bluetooth. The quad core processor seems fast enough too.
The device comes with Windows, unfortunately. There’s a Linux version (from Intel), but the spec’s not great. Getting it up and running was painless, even after a pint or two of beer.
I bought the Windows version after reading about the potential to replace the OS with Ubuntu. Which I set about doing today. Sadly, I also managed to trash the device while installing Linux.
I’m not really into computer games, but I did once have a favourite; Command & Conquer, Red Alert. That was a long time ago, the late 90s, early 2000s. I often played the game with my youngest child, across our home network.
It wouldn’t compete nowadays, although there have been several more modern versions.
Anyway, there’s now openra, a cross platform browser based incarnation. It uses reverse engineered code and works pretty well too. Best of all, it runs fine under Linux.
Well worth a look, it’s free after all.
I’ve had mixed experiences with my Ubuntu phone. I love the operating system, but the lack of native apps is something of a problem; I had to buy a second, Android, phone just to be able to do some of the basic things that people expect from even a low end phone nowadays.
I have, though, donated my second phone to a grandchild. And I’m currently typing this on my Aquaris E4.5, which was the first commercially available Ubuntu phone. I can do this because I flashed the phone last night and it’s now running Android.
I may now have reverted to one phone, and it may also be running Android, but that doesn’t mean that I’ve given up on Ubuntu.
Because I’ve ordered a Meizu MX4; the Linux variety. It’s a better spec phone so should hopefully run Ubuntu at a more bearable pace. The lack of basic apps will still be an issue, but I do still have the E4.5, which runs very well on Android.
Unfortunately, during the process of flashing my phone, I’ve lost all contacts (since there wasn’t an easy way to transfer them).
Somehow it all made sense last night.
There may still be some drawbacks to life with an Ubuntu phone, but every update (monthly) makes the experience nicer. Yesterday, some icons changed and new indicators (top of the screen) arrived. I quite like the move away from the standard bars for signal strength.
sudo mount -o remount, rw /
sudo cp ~/Downloads/lost_in_space-warning.ogg /usr/share/sounds/ubuntu/ringtones/
It’s strange how messy a change of ringtone can be. Three phones ago, this was a simple task; just copy a file to the phone, then select it as a ringtone. Now, what was wrong with that?
My move to Apple around five years ago was generally a good experience. Ok, so having to use iTunes was a pain, but I was prepared for that, having used iPods for years. But silly little things irritated me; for example, the bizarre method of adding a ringtone (restricted in length, of course).
My move away from the iPhone, to the first Ubuntu phone a few months ago was, overall, quite positive. I’d known in advance that the product was a little raw, but that was fine. It was, and still is, great to be part of something which will, hopefully, become a real challenger to the Apple/Google monopoly. However, there’s a familiar ringtone problem. In fact, it’s a ringtone problem of a whole new order of magnitude. The stock noises are pretty awful, as you’d expect with any phone, and it’s proving to be very difficult to add new ones. After downloading a program to convert noises to *.ogg format, then agonisingly copying them to the phone, the above command lines (in a terminal window, since the phone’s file manager doesn’t seem to recognise when it’s no longer in read only mode) didn’t work. I may attempt this another day.
My new Android phone does now have new ringtones. Although I needed to install an application to allow this to happen and couldn’t simply select an *.mp3 file to be used as a ringtone. So, this was still something of a hassle and, while it’s just a second phone, I was left feeling disappointed.
While on the subject of phones, I’ve had a text from the Willowman festival today, from Jimmy, who’d just seen his 1000th band. I can’t claim to have seen anything like that number. And then there was a call or two from Peter, from the Ramblin Man festival Fair. The latter wasn’t a pleasant experience, Scorpions I believe (the lack of an apostrophe was deliberate by the way).
And, since festivals have crept into my whinge about ringtones, I’m allowed to mention that I’m going to Kendal Calling next weekend. My second in command will be there also, as will be my niece and her new boyfriend (who seems a lot nicer than the last one). This will be my first small festival in ages and I’m really looking forward to it. The line-up’s impressive for something of this scale; my second in command may have told the entire populations of Gateshead and Peterborough that she’s going to see Augustines and Elbow.
A final note; should you ring anyone from a gig, if you put your phone on speaker, then the other party might have a less painful experience. A useful tip learned from a security man in Manchester.