My Writings. My Thoughts.

So long and thanks for all the fish

// April 28th, 2012 // 1 Comment » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

I’ve been an Ubuntu member since 2006 and was actively involved for a year before that. In years gone by I’ve enjoyed spending time with the bugsquad, the doc team, #ubuntu support and a couple of small packaging fixes. Despite my best intentions, I’ve not managed to stay involved since my last renewal, my interests [...]

Bleaklow aircraft crashes walk

// March 31st, 2012 // No Comments » // General

During the sun last weekend Tom and I ventured out to stretch our legs and find some of the airplane wreckage on Bleaklow. On our list to find was the B29 Super fortress “over exposed”, a Lancaster KB993 and a C47 Skytrain. There is more wreckage besides on Bleaklow and in the rest of the [...]

Married

// November 20th, 2010 // 5 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

At 3pm on the seventh of October I married the gullible gorgeous Sara-Kate Smith at Ringwood Hall, Chesterfield. The whole day was just amazing, so many of our friends and family all came to share in our day. We had a “small” (40 people) wedding and I still feel bad that I didn’t spend enough [...]

Kindle

// September 5th, 2010 // 10 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

It was my birthday on Monday, and on Friday I finally received my present, Sara, Lemon and my parents had bought me, a Kindle 3G. I’ve been using it for a few hours (finished reading Bram Stokers’ Dracula this morning) and I’m pretty impressed. I’ve not had or even played with an ebook reader before. [...]

Crackful thinking: multiple monitors and auto focus

// August 15th, 2010 // 2 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

I don’t very often use multiple monitors, but when I do it always takes a while for my head to come to terms with how focus works. I’ll do something in a window on one monitor and then look at the other monitor and start typing before realising that the window in the first monitor [...]

Then and now

// April 24th, 2010 // No Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

Following the meme currently running on Planet Ubuntu here is one of my first linux desktops (the oldest screenshot I have). The install was set-up in 2002 I think. Mandrake 8.2 using the fluxbox window manager. It didn’t get used an awful lot as I could never get my ISDN modem working. Today I run [...]

First impressions of gnome-shell

// September 24th, 2009 // 48 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

GNOME Shell is the proposed interface for Gnome 3, it replaces the window manager, the panels at the top and bottom of the screen and everything that sits on them. It’s in the repositories for Karmic, install gnome-shell and then run gnome-shell –replace to give it a try. You should note that it’s still under [...]

Student loans cost increase

// May 20th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // General, p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

The Student Loans Company have just announced that they are to increase the real cost of post 1998 student loans. Student loans are supposed to be linked to the lower of the retail prices index (RPI, a measure of inflation) and the Bank of England base interest rate +1%. The idea being that inflation does [...]

Ubuntu One

// May 14th, 2009 // 5 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

Dave wrote The fact of the matter is there are proprietary drives in Ubuntu and you choose whether to use them or not, why should this service be any different? I think the difference is that this is proprietary software (or at least the back end is) that is branded as Ubuntu. Personally I don’t [...]

Gwibber themes

// May 1st, 2009 // 12 Comments » // p.u.c & p.u-uk.org

I’m using gwibber for keeping up with identi.ca and twitter. I mainly use an eeepc while at home, so to get a couple more dents on screen I’ve recently been using the defaultsmall theme. This theme isn’t quite as nice to my eyes as the default theme though, it makes the background darker for one [...]

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