Chris's Random Ramblings

My work laptop was upgraded to a Lenovo W510 recently, replacing a 3 year old T60p. The setup and install of Ubuntu 10.04.1 was fairly straightforward, just a couple of problems:

ureadahead package needs to be upgraded to a version in lucid-proposed. Otherwise it will randomly OOM on boot and fail to start
For suspend to [...]

I’ve been tracking our household electricity usage live for a while. We have an LCD display but its not something that we remember to check very often to make sure that everything that should be turned off is off.
I noticed some cheap rgb led strips on deal extreme and thought I’d make my own [...]

About a week after planting the seeds we have little seedlings appearing All the cucumber seeds have sprouted as well as a couple of the tomato plants. So far no sign of life from the eggplant or cherry tomato plant seeds.

Apparently its a bit too cold to plant the seedlings yet and warming [...]

The weather forecast for Saturday was clear and sunny so Kelly and I decided to take Alyssa out to see if we could get some good high resolution outdoor photos of her. Most of the photos we have of her are low resolution ones taken with our iPhones. So I got out my D70s and [...]

All of our outgoing phone calls go via a local asterisk server connected to Internode’s voip service NodePhone. One problem we’ve had is that muting our phone line for long periods of time, which I like to do during conference calls, would lead to the call being disconnected. I should complain more often on twitter [...]

We’ve been tracking our electricity usage for a few weeks now and have a web page of graphs which make it easier to work out when we’re using a lot of electricity.
I have a perl script running on one machine which reads the CurrentCost data from a serial port and publishes the temperature and [...]

is apparently sitting on the PS3.

I think Linden would like us to turn on the heater.

Last year i was very lucky to be given a CurrentCost power meter. Unfortunately the electrical board in the townhouse we were living in didn’t really have room to fit the clamp meter and as it had 3 phase power and we only had one clamp we couldn’t really use it properly. Yesterday I finally [...]

My sister-in-law Jackie bought me a very tasty treat today:

Linden likes to hide in bags and wait for people and cats to walk by before jumping out to surprise them. Sometimes she doesn’t choose her hiding spots so well though.

Pipe walks past and becomes prey. I don’t think he’d survive too well in the wild as he doesn’t play dead very convincingly.

After a bit [...]