Last night, I went to the final recording session of That Mitchell and Webb Sound.

I arrived just in time at a studio just off Tottenham Court Road. Luckily, being on the guest list got me past the numerous checkpoints and I managed to get in before they locked the doors.

This was the first time I have been to a radio recording. Much like a live show, just with less visual gags. Obviously.

Dave and Rob soon appeared on stage and had everyone doing a Mexican wave in short time. Once we were in the mood, they were joined by James Bachman and Olivia Colman.

Very quickly, we were in to the sketches. All well written and performed, and naturally tremendous fun. Some were short monologues, others involved all four.

My favourite was the fictional number game, or possibly the IT support one - listen out for them. My friend thought that some of the sketches may be too risque and will be cut. I'm not sure if they will, but we'll wait and see.

The show will be broadcast on Radio 4 from February through to March. If you can't get access to Radio 4, then you can listen via the Radio 4 website.

Channel 4 just showed Fahrenheit 9/11. Sadly, the person who thinks up technical solutions for Channel 4 and those who choose what to put on the air, are worlds apart.

At the end of the film, the voice over announces that Michael Moore is on a webchat ready to take questions. After finally accessing the Channel 4 site and rummaging around, you realise that they are not hosting it. Instead some outfit called www.webchats.tv is. Looks like a small operation in Nottingham, could be wrong, but I can't access their website to find out. Of course it's an effective slashdotting.

I must congratulate Channel 4 on predicting that hardly anyone would want to talk to Michael Moore just after the UK network premiere of the show, and announcing the fact he was taking questions online. Genius.

I was listening to Adam Curry's Daily Source Code from the 20th, when he played a fantastic song by Adaption Amateur Transplants called London Underground, from the CD Fitness to Practice. All monies go to Macmillan Cancer Relief

Brilliant.

Especially if you have to take the tube every day. Probably best not to play it if young children are within earshot.

Anatomy for Beginners

I watched the first of this four part series last night. This is defintely not for the squeamish. A real cadaver is being dissected on air in order for you to understand anatomy.

Last night they took off the skin and sliced up a brain to show you how the central nervous system worked. As the show was about movement, they also demonstrated how muscle groups work.

I think if I was still eating meat, I would have been put off watching this. Not that they intend to eat the body, but just seeing that meat is meat wherever it's from. Maybe people should see animals being butchered before they eat them.

The hairs on the back of my neck were standing up for much of the show. I sympathised with the reaction on the faces of the audience. Even so, I found it very interesting and informative. Definitely required viewing.

The rest of the shows are playing every night until Friday at 11pm on Channel 4.

One of the things I lamented, moving from KDE to GNOME was the fact I could maximize my windows how I wanted to in KDE. In KDE, a right click would maximize the window horizontally, and a middle click vertically. I searched for a way to do this in GNOME, reading and asking. No dice.

I wanted to set my minimize all windows keyboard shortcut to something other than CTRL+ALT+D. By pure chance, I stumbled upon an option to set up a keyboard shortcut for the above. Hurrah! Now CTRL+Right Arrow maximizes horizontally, and CTRL+Up Arrow maximizes vertically. The world is sane again.

Andy asked me how I got the CPU temperature gDesklet to work. I just hacked at some existing display files to get it to work. I am looking into being able to set the interval of checks, but may wait until I get to play with the new version of gDesklets.

I started off with LT Variations. Add the additional files to (LTVariations directory)/Displays/LTCandy/. Here are my additional files:

• lt_cputemp_battery.tar.bz2
  MD5: 722a11221fc63b4cb48ae3073dac21ec

This requires that you have ACPI working on your laptop and that the sensors are picking up data. The icons are shamelessly stolen from other gDesklets. Note that this is for gDesklets version 0.26.2.

This laptop is operating under Kernel version 2.6.8

Basic Installation of Ubuntu 4.10

Why use Ubuntu 4.10?

It is an up-to-date Debian based Linux distribution, and the FX705 is reasonably old hardware: a brilliant combination. Using older hardware means that drivers are likely well refined and tested.

Obtaining Ubuntu 4.10

ISOs can be downloaded from one of many mirror sites:
http://www.ubuntulinux.org/download/
The ISO needs to be burned on to CD to begin installation.

You can also order pressed CDs at no charge. Completely free. In fact, why don't you get 10 and hand them out to friends and strangers? (can take 4-6 weeks):
http://shipit.ubuntulinux.org/

Installing

Ubuntu uses the Debian installer. The only part that requires thought is the partitioning section. I went for a 512MB swap partition and 10GB ext3 partition for /. Everything else should be taken care of. It even DHCPs so you're online straightaway. Total space needed is under 2GB.

Post install modifications/tweaks

Root access

One oddity is the lack of a root password. Ubuntu prefers that you sudo to perform root operations. You can create a root password quite easily:

ATI drivers

Download the new drivers, install, and restart X. Just follow the instructions on the gatos site. I have tested the XFree86 4.3 driver only.

PowerNow!

This technology allows your processer to run at a lower clock speed when not being used. This means that you can save on battery power and less heat is generated - both issues on this laptop.

powernowd is installed by default. You have to make two modifications to files.

Add this line to your /etc/fstab

Add this line to your /etc/modules

An applet can be added to any panel to show you what speed your CPU is currently running at.

Floppy access

The floppy drive needs to be added as a kernel module before you can use it.

MP3 playing

In order to get MP3s working:

Movie watching

I prefer to use xine to watch movies.

Setting up additional features for Ubuntu

ACPI

• /proc/acpi/* provide information including CPU temperature and battery levels.
• The screen xlocks when you close the lid.
• If you want to add your own events then look at /etc/acpi

Touchpad

I have not attempted this, but you can make your touchpad do more things:
Synaptics TouchPad driver for XOrg/XFree86

Other Useful Info

Netgear MA521 Wirless PCMCIA card

This was the one thing I was dreading. Under SUSE 8.2 this was quite tricky to get working. Thankfully things have progressed, and there is now an easy way to get this working. We use the Windows driver. Clever eh?

Download the latest windows 2000 driver (make sure it says ndis in the filename) from Realtek. Go to their site and enter 8180L into the search box, the go to Downloads. Unzip this file somewhere friendly.

check your dmesg

Configure via the network configuration tool. Done. Hurrah!

Backports

Backports allow you to have the stuff on your otherwise stable system. The Firefox which ships with Ubuntu 4.10 is 0.93, but perhaps you've grown fond of 1.0. You can get it by adding a new repository to your /etc/apt/sources.list:

There is some debate about whether it will make things tricky when you finally upgrade to Hoary Hedgehog in April. There are some instructions to revert your backports. I personally use backports. We'll see if I lament my decision come April.

Ubuntu Calendar

This idea tickles me. They have created a package which includes a new wallpaper for you every month. Simple, but effective.

Links

• Unofficial Ubuntu Guide - useful after you have installed Ubuntu
• Sony VAIO - download manuals, etc.
• Linux on Laptops - find out more about installing Linux on your specific laptop
• Gatos - all things ATI
• Synaptics TouchPad driver for XOrg/XFree86 - if you want more out of your touchpad
• Realtek - get the latest driver for the Netgear MA521
• NdisWrapper - get your wireless card working
• How to Set Up the NdisWrapper
• Linuxant - if you really have trouble getting the modem, or wireless card working
• gDesklets - for putting sensor related data on your desktop (see screenshot)

A 10GB partition on my desktop was bored and asked to be installed with all the distributions I have always wanted to try.

First up is Ubuntu. This relatively new distrbution has gotten tremendous press and has been recommended to me by many people. It is apparently the nicest desktop Linux you can currently find. It is based on Debian, but is apparently so easy that your grandma could install and use it. I had problems getting the ISO to burn on a CD and work in my DVD player. I was using quite old media, which may have been the problem. The install seemed to stop at bsdutils installing every time. I now have a small collection of CDs each labelled, UBUNTU coaster (maybe I can sell them on ebay). They make funny noises when inserted into drives; sometimes the drive just spits them out disdainfully.

Andy took pity on my plight and sent me a working CD, which arrived today. Thanks Andy. Have just installed it. No fuss at all. I now have a working Ubuntu install. :)

It has a very clean GNOME interface. It prefers you to sudo to perform tasks. I think this is a good idea for a desktop, as I have seen far too many people (usually from a Windows background) log into X as root, ready to click anything shiny.

Now to upgrade from Warty Warthog to Hoary Hedgehog. If all goes well I may install it on the laptop too.

Note: Ubuntu are currently offering to ship free CDs out to people. Unfortunately, the wait is quite long (4-6 weeks), and I really wanted to try this out.

In short, podcasting involves the recording of internet radio or similar internet audio programs. These recordings are then made available for download to portable digital audio device. You can listen to the podcast internet radio program while you are away from your computer or at a different time than the original program was broadcast. --- Wikipedia

A couple of weeks ago, a friend told me he was podcasting. I thought he meant broadcasting from his iPod with an iTrip. Dismayed that he wasn't running his own pirate iPod station, I didn't investigate any further.

Encountering LUGRadio encouraged me to explore further. After downloading a receiver, I began subscribing to feeds (much like RSS blog feeds). Each feed downloads the latest shows to be transferred onto your iPod. This is actually quite fun. Someone, somewhere recorded 30-40 minutes of themselves chatting in their living room, or wandering around the streets of some far away place. And now I'm listening to them on my iPod.

Note that you can listen to the shows on any device capable of playing mp3/ogg vorbis files; you don't need an iPod to podcast.

Of course you are as free to podcast yourself and your adventures. This should appeal to those personalities fond of their own voices, or who have always wanted to be a DJ.

What I still don't understand is when do these people have time to record a show, and when do people have time to listen to so many?

My extremely unplanned New Year's turned out quite well.

Instead of running around trying to arrange things with lots of people, I just went with the flow. A friend's family kindly took me in for the lead up to and into the New Year. Plenty of good food and booze. Oh, and fireworks!

After a quick stop at home to pick up my wallet and some fresh clothes, it was off to London for more New Year well wishing and eating. Then back home in time for the bank holiday monday and receiving more people.

So far this year, I:

• have been cutting down my meat intake - currently at pesco-lacto level.
• have not been back to the gym yet.
• have been looking at Python (still not as fun as Ruby)
• have been ignoring the origami calendar instructions in favour of my own designs.
• am still writing 2004.
• have been ignoring blogs and emails. :P