There is a group who have developed a firmware called Rockbox, which [...]]]> Having bricked my router trying to use unofficial firmware, i was nervous about trying it on my iAudio x5 (the sucessor to my fondly remembered but increasingly unstable Iriver h-140,)  however I decided to be brave, and I’m having a lot of fun.

There is a group who have developed a firmware called Rockbox, which runs on many popular MP3 Players including (shudder) iPods.  I was looking for a way to tweak some extra settings, maybe change the theme of the playerm but rockbox does so much more.  I’ve just been playing Doom (I’ve arrived – they’ve ported Doom to my mp3 player!) and sudoku (much more my style) as well as solitaire and looking at the various effects.

I like my music to be organised the way I like it, rather than using the database functions in iPods and other players.  I know what I want to have where.  However, the Rockbox will build an index of all of the files which I have on the drive and let me access that database, as an alternative to the folder system I have.  It may not be used often but I’m glad it’s there!

So far it’s won’t play back videos like the original firmware will, but I may not have installed the right plugins and i don’t really care about video on a screen that size.  If I want to watch video I’ll use my phone.

Use “File”>”Save As…”, use it often.

No, I’m not talking about me (although I do wear rather nifty rimless specs and did celebrate a birthday a few days ago.) I’m talking about my beloved old Sinclair Spectrum.  According to the good old Beeb, the Sinclair Spectrum is 25 years old this month (younger than me – [...]]]>

the ZX Spectrum, 48k

No, I’m not talking about me (although I do wear rather nifty rimless specs and did celebrate a birthday a few days ago.) I’m talking about my beloved old Sinclair Spectrum.  According to the good old Beeb, the Sinclair Spectrum is 25 years old this month (younger than me – makes me feel old)  Turns out we share the same Birthday, which is VERY cool.

We got a spectrum when I was really young.  We had a ZX81 before that, with 1kb of memory, bur I was too young for that, and anyway – it didn’t have the rainbow stripe!  I learned some basic programming with the Spectrum.  MY favourite program, which I typed into spectrum computers in countless 80s electrical shops was:

10 PRINT “Brian Rules!!”

20 GOTO 10

See!  Programming Genius!  It would just print “Brian Rules!!” all the way down the screen.  If I’d been smarter I’d have put in colours and automatic scrolling, but that would have taken ages and I wasn’t interested.

I learned to programme by retyping programmes from books, but don’t really remember writing may programmes of my own – not beyond 20 lines or so anyway.  We got a microdrive for it, which was a mini tapedrive and loaded things much more quickly.

The only real way to load games was through a tape player – I well remember the tw0-part loading cycle.  The low hum then the screech, then the low hum and the screech again, which could go on for minutes, depending on how quickly the game loaded.

Aaah – heady days!

This was kind of a showstopper since all the solutions [...]]]> So I posted recently about my new found love for Ubuntu linux. I did have some problems getting it installed though. I would boot up the Live CD and, even in safe graphics mode, I would get a garbled screen once Ubuntu had started off.

This was kind of a showstopper since all the solutions I saw involved already having ubuntu installed and loaded. Thanks to the guys on #ubuntu I learned about the alternate install CD and managed to get that on. I still had the same problem but could get into the recovery mode console and so here is what I did (with help from various internet postings)

1. install ubuntu form the alternate install cd
2. boot into the recovery console
3. type “sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg”
4. set the video type to be “vesa”
5. reboot normally – hey, it works!
6. install Automatix
7. Let Automatix install the Nvidia drivers (together with lots of other cool things)

and you’re done!

UPDATE

corrected the typo pointed out by elijah below

Writing php to query indexing services is not particularly [...]]]> I’ve just been setting up a site search on a whindows server and decided to use an indexing services search. I had no idea it was so complex. It took me ages to work things out, although I’m neither a windows guru nor a php expert.

Writing php to query indexing services is not particularly complex with the sample from the page above, but there were several things that weren’t mentioned there:

• you need a version of PHP higher than 4.3.10, because of a problem with com objects in that version
• you need to persuade indexing services to index php pages

Most of our PHP pages were just html pages with a .php extension, to keep all of the extensions the same. The proplem was that indexing services wouldn’t index them because it didn’t know what they were. You can get the service to index documents with unknown extensions, but then it won’t scan them for metadata (including the page titles, which was my major worry). I searched for hours before I found a solution

All you need is to download a program called filtreg.exe from Microsoft. It’s part of the Microsoft Windows SDK (a hefty download for a tiny wee program). The you run that on the server with the following command line:

filtreg .php .htm

This not only makes .php a “known” file extension, but then makes indexing services threat the php pages the same way it treats html pages.