Gary’s Blog

It was Tom’s birthday on Friday, and the family and I had clubbed together to collect enough money for the gift he wanted. 

He had a old Dell latitude laptop, a D400 or something, with the noisiest hard drive ever™. He wanted a macbook, so we drove off to Bluewater (our nearest apple store) to get one.

once there, we finally decided on a white macbook, same spec as the black one, but £80 cheaper. We saw the same sales bloke as the last two times, but sadly he let the impression I had of him down big time by pushing the sale of silly apple support things, ffs if we needed training on how to use OSX we would not be buying our third OSX machine this year… (all bought from the same sales guy btw)

I thought he would have realised the reason I liked buying from him was his no-nonsense selling manner, but maybe they have been told to try to mis-sell support services by management or something

Anyways, we parted with too much money, then went to Costa (lot) coffee, Tom was well happy and opened the box right away to have a play (since apple ship there machines with 50% odd battery life)

The opening of a apple product is like so cool, you cannot believe how cool apple products are packaged. So he opened it up and went through the setting up sequence and had a play with it, all the time with a massive smile on his face.

Since then, he did a rebuild, as we are both geeks and like doing that kind of thing, and has hardly left it alone

The dell laptop has not been switched on once, not even to copy data over, which I think is cool as I got a bit of peace from the clunky hard drive.

He even found some OSS book writing software and has been busy writing his mathematics book.

Lets end by saying tom is very impressed with the build, fit and finish etc of the apple macbook. we will probably be installing ubuntu on it at some point, as the ubuntu install is a lot easier on that than my macbookpro (which I am waiting for others to write ubuntu install guides for first)

My Mum sent me a MMS, with this attached

Now I “think” she was going to a party, but who, at the age of about 60 (eek she will hurt me for not remembering her age) goes as a school girl?

What sort of party was it?

Maybe old age is catching up with her?

Maybe if she ever sees this she will hurt me?

As Daviey posted this link to the #ubuntu-uk channel, I thought it’d have a play… I don’t think it’s that good a likeness, but it’s a good waste of time, so meets with my approval anyways :) 

Link to Imbrandon’s blog here 

Tom and I were facing our last “workday” off work, and were wondering what to do last night, for some unknown reason we decided to go off to Aldeburgh on the Suffolk coast to see in the sunrise. Aldeburgh is a very nice place, lovely shops, fabulous fish and chips, but sadly at 4am these nice conveniences are all shut…  

So we had to see in the sun rise with only midges and seagulls (which are very very noisy)

Sunrise at aldeburgh 

Proof I was there :-) 

Tom and I have been off work this week, and today we watched all of season 3 or Doctor Who, wow, what a great series :) This might be mostly ‘cos we find Captain Jack so sexy of course…

Right, as many of you know, I am a member of the Ubuntu-UK LOCO team, I have been for about a year now.  I was just thinking today, after joining the IRC channel, and being offered advice pertaining to my recent post about my MBP not working quite right under Ubuntu, how absolutely excellent both Mr Pope, and the community are, I did not ask directly for help, I did not whinge, I only posted a blog comment, and actually said I was just waiting to find some guides on how to fix the few remaining “bugs”.

For someone to go out of their way, even if it was just a little google search using different keywords to what I used, and to post them back, un-asked for really impresses me.

This is why I like Ubuntu, and this is why I keep going back to them, I hate the default human theme, but that is so easy to change it’s a non issue, the OS is fab, but what beats every other distro and both the other two mainstream OS’s is the community.

As you can read on previous posts I have just got back from LugRadioLive2007, and I have also gone to LinuxWorld back in 2006, and meeting people who you see make such wonderful contributions to the community on the Forums, mailing lists, IRC Channels and LaunchPad, for no financial gain whatsoever really gives me that nice warm feeling inside.

So folks, and I hope you know who I am referring to, let me say thanks, let me honour you, YOU are the reason so many people like ME are ubuntero’s

Just back in June 2007 I bought a 15″ Core2Duo 2.2Ghz MacBook Pro from the Apple Store in BlueWater, and thought it about time I made a report on it.

I bought the laptop a matter of days after the slight upgrade and price drop, so I got the SantaRosa cpu and all for the sum of £1299 - which I thought expensive but better value than the previous models.

I had a great time in the store, sales assistants were helpful, it was light and airy, there was no pressure to be forced into a sale, nothing like PC World or similar, I was very impressed. I chose the Glossy screen, took me ages to decide too, but in the end I thought that the glossy screen suited my intended use better.

I have joined the apple discussions forums and helped out a bit, and read up on what troubles people have had with these laptops, obviously being a support site, people are mostly there to whinge or seek help, not to give help like me. I have had no issues at all with my machine, well except the skipping a key problem, but thats a very very minor issue for me.

Over all I am very happy with this laptop, and since it is the first machine I have bought with my own money, thats just as well :p

Well, a short while ago I bought a MacBookPro.

It’s a great piece of engineering and I really like it, OSX is easy to get used to etc, but I felt really guity, as it has a closed source OS on it.

Well today I thought i’d have a go at putting Ubuntu on it, as the last time I tried I had some problems, I followed the guide here Ubuntu Wiki Link and got most it installed, rEFIt is brilliant, it looks great and performs well.

The only things left are hoping someone figures out how to get audio, wifi and the Nvidia graphics card working, as at the moment it is rather quiet, non-roaming and using vesa graphics drivers, sadly.

Well I was dragged along to this by Nik Butler and some others from the ubuntu-uk irc channel on irc.Freenode.net - I must say, being a bit agoraphobic I was a little worried, it was due to be a busy venue and I don’t cope too well with busy places.

I got up extra early, 5am, and got ready and left the house spot on 6am for the drive to Wolverhampton. two and a half hours later, I was there, nice and on time, early in fact.

I met up with Nik, which was the second time I’d met him in real life, so felt comfortable, he said that the ubuntu-uk stand was a man down, and asked me if I could help man the stand, which suited me, as it gave me something to do, and a good reason for stopping me running away, which is what i’d basically done for LinuxWorld2006.

The weekend passed very well, we sold a load of polo shirts Nik had got made up, and I met a fair few new faces and people I’d only spoken to on irc, it was great to put faces and names to nicknames.

The event was great, the venue was great and the curry on Saturday night was really yummy.

big thanks go out to LoudMouthMan, Daviey and DaveMorris for making me feel so welcome

Well I have given up on both Website baker (good but just not powerful enough) and iWeb (naughty closed source :p) and have finally installed WordPress.  

Lets see how I get on with this…