So what have I been up to? Firstly I’ve been on holiday with my family. Where did I go? Wales. Saundersfoot, near Tenby in south Pembrokeshire, to be precise. Here’s a photo, click it to make it bigger.

This photo pretty much sums up every day of that fortnight. Well, that and about a hundred hours of gaming on my phone, something I’ll refuse to indulge in whilst at home, normally.

So apart from getting drunk in Welsh taverns, what else have I done? I’ve been recording and mixing down demo recordings for post-rock band Former Miss Czechoslovakia, for who I also play lead guitar and sing lead vocals for, a very odd mix I know.

I also got a car, but because of ridiculous circumstances, I haven’t been able to drive it to work in the seven days that I’ve had it for. It’s currently sitting in a garage, while hopefully mechanics are working ten to the dozen fixing the steering and the boot-cap (the what?) so I can take it to another garage tonight and then they can give it a full service and a cam-belt change. I kind of know what that bit means.

So for the mean time I’m catching the trains and buses, listening to really bad music while I’m on them and trying to find time to get these bloody mixes down.

For now I’ll leave you with a link to a rather intriguing tweet of mine.

It made me retch. I’m not even sure why I do it. It’s like checking your bank-balance after getting wrecked in town the night before (something I also did today).

What am I talking about? John Gruber. He’s a blogger apparently, which doesn’t shine him in the best light. I’m a blogger after all, but I can barely string a sentence together. So I see him more as a journalist/writer, because it makes him sound more like a writer. What I really want to say is, he’s good at writing, and he writes a blog.

He writes for his blog called Daring Fireball, which is mainly about Apple products. Anyone who knows me will know where this is going now.

He’s a self-confessed Apple zealot. I’m sure he get’s off most nights by stroking Apple logos and preying to a picture of Steve Jobs. He really loves it.

The other day he wrote a piece on the new iPhone, and how it has re-defined perfection, again. It reads like an up-market soft-core porn film. He is expressing his arousal with every word.

Now. I’ve recently signed up for a HTC Desire phone. No-one is hiding the fact that it’s an iPhone clone. On few occasions, I’ve even called it an iPhone when showing it to others. I then go home, find a razor, and add another slit to my wrists.

It’s amazing, but it’s fundamentally different. The concept is similar. You have a huge narrow screen and you touch it with your fingers to navigate through screens using menus and icons. It’s a simple idea. The difference is the approach. The software is open to all manufacturers to use and modify. Users can add their own applications to it. Of course, they’re not called applications anymore, because Steve Jobs has amended the OED and added a clause whereby if you use a mobile phone you have to call it an app. Because it’s trendy.

John Gruber is amazing at writing. The issue my stomach contents has is his absolute belief in all Apple products being beautiful and usable and without flaw. I’ll give him the first two, but there’s a shit-load wrong with that company. It’s attitude towards being exclusive sucks. I’m not sure if Steve Jobs has a complex because it’s products lack the market-share acquired by Microsoft based machines, or if he feels that Macs are unsung because kids want to use MSN on their laptops or they consider it broken, or if he was bullied as a child for being so water-tourtureingly irritating, or whatever. It hurts me, because it’s a belief that hates diversity. It lives in a world where everything has an Apple logo embedded. It’s like the Aryan race in electronics form. A hundred years from now we’ll be teaching kids about a holocaust where everything Microsoft or Linux or Android or unlucky enough to not be pre-fixed with the lowercase-letter “i” got obliterated because it wasn’t good enough, because it dared to be different.

Every time I hear about Apple suing companies for daring to stand up to the hype, or Steve Jobs bragging about an innovation that’s been doing the rounds for the best part of a decade but it wasn’t relevant then because it didn’t have an Apple sticker on it, or see someone on the train telling me how their existence beats mine because they have an iBag or an iSock, my stomach goes again. I just know with a chilling certainty that in a few years I’ll have to conform and be affiliated with the rest of them whilst pledging my allegiance to Mr Jobs or be stripped and gassed to death, then my body ejected into space with all the porn and Adobe Flash software boxes where we all belong.

So yes. Apple have amazing products. They’re beautiful and flawless if you don’t care about doing things the same way that Jobs preaches. I understand. I’m just scared. Plus I have a compulsion to spend my money on alcohol and take-aways, so at the end of the month when the next new “iPhone 6.5G LS mkIII” comes out I can’t afford to fork out another grand to pay to the Apple-tax man. A crime that will surely be punishable by instant decapitation this time next year.

So John, as much as you dis-prove every little point that people try to make against your deity, and do it so well, I hate you. I don’t care if you’re right. When I wake up in the morning, my HTC Desire, a piece of unique electronic/plastic hybrid that is truly mine, that I customised, where I chose how it works or which hand I can hold it in, gives me so much joy and happiness. You give me so much pain and hate by rubbing in my face how wrong I should be. You give me so much pain and hate, that I had to compose a pie-chart to vent it all out.

If a hadn’t already written a million words I’d continue to explain every point. But I can’t. For now, I’ve ran out of hate.

And to make things clear, I copied that idea from this wicked cool website. If I was Apple, I would call it an iChart and patent it and then sue that guy instead. And he would sue me back and the world would be full of hate.

Disclaimer: Not everyone with an iFinger or iHairbrush is a twat. Some folks that use them are genuinely nice and have human feelings that don’t represent the Borg collective mind. My girlfriend has an iLaptop, and she’s very nice .

My brothers machine is for mindless entertainment. There’s one in the garage that I use to record and mix demos for bands that I’m in. Sometimes I’ll build web-sites if I’ve got any personal work on, be it for cash or my own perverted projects. This machine only get’s updated once a year though, because I won’t use it during winter. There isn’t any heating in the garage and I live in England.

Here’s a little fact, I’ve named them after Pokémon. Not just because I’m sad or I have a compulsion to name inanimate objects, but because they need to be referenced as separate machines when I’m setting the network up. Okay, I’ll admit, it’s a pure geek indulgence. Please don’t judge me.

My brother’s machine took all of five-minutes to install, followed by about a month to configure. Without the exaggeration, that’s about 3 hours to install and two-days of back-and-forth headless-ness to get it to work the way I like it to be.

The garage machine was a different kettle of fish. On my brothers machine I install a desktop version of Ubuntu, because it’s a desktop computer. On the other one, a version called Ubuntu Studio, for reasons I won’t patronise you with. For a start my DVD disc didn’t work, so I tried to install the desktop version and upgrade. Stupidest decision ever. It took about a week of messing around for me to give up (I’m not even joking here). I’ll put a brief geek synopsis under the graphic explaining why.

I burnt another copy and it installed fine. I say fine, it wasn’t what I expected, because it was supposed to install a “real-time” version of Linux, not a “generic” version. Why do I need it to be real-time? Because I’m recording audio, and this has to happen first and fast when the computer does it’s thing. The machine isn’t allowed to mess around prioritising YouTube videos or Chris Moyles’ whining from Radio 1 on the BBC iPlayer. It needs to be focused on capturing and recording all the audio I pump into it without jittering and jolting, all because someone sent me a message on Facebook for example. So to sumarise, Linux generic: good for being kept entertained by The Sims; Linux real-time: good for recording without Facebook notification alerts ruining a take.

There’s a messy reason why the latest Lucid Lynx version of Ubuntu Studio doesn’t come in real-time. I’m not really sure what it is, but it’s something to with the release schedule of Ubuntu being out of sync with the guys that make the real-time kernel. Okay, this post has claimed too many geek points now…

So… I’ve spent a lot of time staring at a blue screen with a progress bar on it. Because it takes so long, I have to do things to keep me alive, like move away and eat and drink occasionally, and sometimes sleep. Occasionally I pop back to check on the progress. To call it tedious is being very kind. Words can’t express the joy when it all ends.

So onto the geek list. I encountered a lot of problems. There are always niggles and the like that I can easily live without fixing. The issues were problematic. They either got side-stepped or conquered.

1. I couldn’t upgrade the repos off of the DVD when I wanted to update Ubuntu with the ubuntustudio-desktop package. It wouldn’t happen. I ended up reluctantly downloading gigabytes of data I already had because it wanted to use the Internet.
2. The drivers did work (I’m using nVidia). The monitor didn’t. I assume this is a problem with the drivers or the kernel. Windows was kind enough to lend be a raw EDID file, and I pointed X.org at that instead, thanks to the help of this Ubuntu Forums thread. Worked nicely.
3. I still have to use Windows NDIS drivers and a tedious unnecessary tutorial demonstrating how to get my Broadcom wireless card working under the NDIS-wrapper. The tutorial is very good. Without it I don’t think I’d have ever gotten online with Ubuntu.
4. Once I’d downloaded and installed ubuntustudio-desktop, ubuntustudio-audio and linux-rt I couldn’t get any of my audio applications, like Ardour and JACK, working. They crashed the entire desktop. It was infuriating.
5. After wiping and starting again with another disc of Ubuntu Studio, I bricked it by trying to install the RT kernel. So I had to do it AGAIN!

I’m now left with Ubuntu Studio Lucid Lynx, without a real-time kernel, quite bare and not configured because I haven’t had enough counseling to take another shot at it. I’ve read around about low-latency kernels and the like with the latest version of Linux that apparently work. I may give these a go. But when I see things like “incompatible with nVidia” or “compile from source” I start cutting my wrists with razor blades.

Well, I’ve spent all my money this month and all my close friends are away on holiday. I need this machine working because I’ve got some demos to finish for a band. All I have to do now is take a deep breath, start again and get on with it. Okay, here goes…

I’ve already scared one member of the house-hold by shouting and clutching at a pillow with more vigour than I’ve ever know. I’ve gotten over-emotional at a silly episode of Doctor Who, and shouted at a politician on a rolling news channel.

So how long’s it been? 11 hours. Not even a day.

Why am I giving up? I’m skint. Also I need to sort my life out a bit, and I guess cutting out the crap is a kind-of start to it all. Wahoo. I’m also getting a car and don’t want to crash it because I was too busy rolling one at the junction. (I can still remember the points in the roads and journeys where I used to light up.)

Couple months back I did a fortnight before crashing on a really sticky night out. I smoked because I was in town I was drunk and looking for highs. I didn’t pick-up the fags during my hangover the next day like I thought I would- I got over it and carried on without them. But then something happened and I marched to the nearest shop for 20 Embassy number 1s. And I was back to my ten-to-fifteen a day.

I stayed indoors last week for the Sunday and the bank holiday. I was playing on my new phone and it did such a good job of distracting me I didn’t need to smoke. But then I had to get the bus really early the next day and the absence of nicotine from my system made the physical pain distracting. I had too much work on to loose concentration.

But now I’ve not got much work on because I done it all. I was quitting this morning, and there was a point where I was really happy I hadn’t gone out for a smoke at all, and then, something happened.

These “something happened” moments suck, but they’re not related to my smoking (except they only seem to happen when I’m trying to quit) and I figured I need to get over them. Shit will happen in life, and a cigarette seems so insignificant. So I’m going to learn to take news like a real person, and talk when things are upsetting instead. Also, the less I try and quit the less these catastrophic events will happen. I’m sure of it!

So why am I blogging this? Why is this being broadcast? Why have I dramatically changed my grammar?

BECAUSE I’M GOING FUCKING CRAZY!

Or I’m just being a bit of a wuss…

The White Noise Festival is an event organised by the guys at Maybeshewill and the Firebug. It features some simply awesome bands with a mix of post-rocky and musically unusual performances. It’s surely Leicester’s music forte.

Like I’ve already said, the highlight for me were Herra. I’ve been following this band since they we’re in college, and their brief split last year broke my heart.

You have to check them out- Here’s a link to their MySpace. I truly recommend you turn up to one of their shows, because my shit copy-writing skills can’t do such an epic performance justice.

There were other very worthy bands playing too, but these guys scratch my musical back just the way I like it.

So there’s a few aims here. Firstly, to communicate events I want to share with the public. Honestly, this doesn’t cover a lot at the moment. Not because I don’t get out much, but because I’d rather not share! Or because I’m too lazy to write the stuff up. Secondly it’s for when I want to rant, assist or review. Say how I do things and share my opinions with the aim of helping others to make their own minds up, be it music or web-sites or something else vaguely interesting. But also it’s an SEO blog. This relates to search engines. Putting more content on my blog makes it rank higher because it attracts more people from a variety of fields. Simple!

As I can see at the minute there are a few issues making the above effective. I don’t have many followers! Now I’m getting a fair few hits from the Ubuntu comunity (where I participate occasionly) and a few folks from Facebooks and King Brick, but not much interaction. I can tell this blog gets looked at from the statistics.

But that isn’t one of my main aims! I wan’t an archive of my outings, put reviews up for a few geeks and musicians but mainly so I can reference them. I’m quite a self-centred person

The SEO bit is working well. My only issue is having it on the King Brick domain. That means King Brick ranks in Google for things like Linux and Firefox.

What’s the plan Batman?

Potentially get a new domain. That requires effort and money so I probably won’t bother. Plus the band is the main thing I want to big up! Talking about geeking and web-design doesn’t relate at-all to my band, but it’s one of my fortes so I want it to! I want to set up a personal brand for my music and digital musings. It’s something to do right?

One way to counter all this is to split the categories up into almost seperate blogs. At the minute stuff bleeds into each other too much. So one article will explain about a wicked band I saw, the next about JSON and AJAX management and the next about how much I like the weather today.

So I’ll re-brand, re-skin and re-organise. That’s the plan!

Ubuntu is heading for a milestone. In April they will release the latest version of their Operating System called Lucid Lynx. Every 6 months Ubuntu release a new version but this one will be a Long Term Support release, a version that is released every 2 years and supported for 3 years. This might not sound a long time (especially if you’re using the 9-year-old Windows XP) but in this modern world of the Internet and technology- it seems forever!

So what’s changed?

Well the thing that’s got e everyone in a fuss is the re-branding. Ubuntu previously sported a very friendly look, using “very large, almost Comic sans MS” font as I once described it. Now it’s moved on, and even the OS theme has been given a reboot.

When I first saw this screen-shot I described it as “overall looks like vomit”, but after installing the theme, turning the fonts down to 8px and using it for a few weeks, I love it. It’s beautiful.

The title-bar buttons being on the other side doesn’t bother me- I think I’ve gone to click on the right-hand side by accident three times in total so I’ve no idea what all the geeks out there are fussing about. I love the use of monochrome icons and the purple is certainly a lot better than the dullness of the brown previously used. If I could change anything about the new theme it would be the sprites used for the scroll-bars (I think they look a bit amateur-ish) and the buttons I think are too dark.

All in all- congratulations to the Ubuntu team. Looking good

Links
Brand – Ubuntu Wiki
LTS – Ubuntu Wiki
Ubuntu Branding revealed – Ubuntu forums
Inital Ubuntu forums poll

Initially I worked with four applications tiled vertically across the workspace. This was very efficient. However, I do a lot of work just using the browser. So a few Firefox extensions and a vertical re-haul later and I’m in business

So here’s what I’m doing. First thing I did was switch the Windows task-bar vertically to the left-hand side of the workspace. Because I’ve got so much width, I can easily afford a generous sized task-bar now. I’ve got the task-bar at approximately 96px wide. I can clearly read the titles of at least 24 application tabs with 18 32px icons attached as well. It’s daunting at first, and I still look at the bottom right for the time, but it’s certainly much more efficient. My only gripe is the start menu doesn’t invert with the task-bar, so when you press it you have to navigate to the bottom to find “All programs”.

Setting up Firefox wide was pleasurable. I use Personal Menu to eliminate the menu-bar from the top, essentially hiding the menu-bar (like Internet Explorer and Chrome). Although I’ve got a good height, applications and websites will always scroll down, so having a few extra pixels really helps. (Don’t get me started on stupid side scrolling website )

For the tabs, I use Tree Style Tabs. It’s a beautiful add-on that sorts out tabs in a hierarchy, making them easily manageable. By default, it groups them and collapses the tree when out of focus, but I’ve disabled this as it would take me about 60 tabs to get that far

I can see the title of each tab very clearly. Because I’ve got sooo much width (brag brag brag eh?) I also keep the bookmarks side-bar always open.

So to conclude: when I’m working, because I’ve got so much width, I have adjusted my desktop and Firefox to use vertical menus and tool-bars, instead of the horizontal by default. At home, I’ll still use Chrome, because I haven’t got the width and I can always scroll for more height. The point is I still don’t have to side-scroll.

Vertical tool-bars and wide screens – it’s the future

Rather than do the bi-annual Windows XP clean install, I ripped a disc and jammed in the latest Ubuntu. Karmic Koala it’s called.

This is the first time I’ve installed Ubuntu as opposed to Ubuntu Studio. Installation was a bit daunting. It does it all through the Live CD but it has to boot up like that first, and it took a while. I left it with a black screen for a few hours, came back to it, and selected “Install” off of the desktop.

After that it went okay. There were a few issues.

Look ma, no wires!

Getting the wireless working was the same as on my garage PC. I go through this NDIS Broadcom wireless walk-through and it works like a charm. NDIS is Windows driver and I’d rather use native Linux ones, but it works and that’s ultimately all I care about

I can see clearly now!

After all the trouble getting nVidia binaries working on Ubuntu Studio Jaunty (with the real-time kernel) I wasn’t looking forward to any graphics driver installation. As with the wireless, the graphics are also very similar (Gefore 5 and 6 series). However, the binaries in Ubuntu Studio Karmic worked fine straight away fresh out of the Hardware Drivers GUI (a tool for installing 3rd party binaries). Thankfully, it was the same on Ant’s PC. Nice one Karmic

Notifications kept popping up down a bit too far. I’m not sure if this is intentional, but I found an Ubuntu forums post to sort it out (again, still searching for that link ).

What did you say?

Then we had sound issues. I tried multiple Ubuntu forum tutorials trying to get it working but no luck. The first problem was how distant the sound was. I wasn’t getting the right frequencies, any stereo field and MP3 compression sounded crap. Turns out I’d dislodged the speaker’s mini-jack

My bro tried out Battle for Wesnoth, having played it on an openSUSE distro I’d tried out years ago. No sound though. I followed a simple Ubuntu forums tutorial linking to a blog post, fired up a deb file and got it up and working in seconds! (I’ve misplaced the link for now but I’ll keep searching for it!)

Jerk, jerk, jerk!

So with the sound almost fixed, there was one last issue. On my machine, Ubuntu Studio Karmic with Compiz and the works, is damn smooth (far smoother than Jaunty). Yet this machine was clunky as hell. The log-on sounds we’re stuttered. They still are, but they’re a lot better and I’m putting it down to low spec and filing it under I-don’t-care.

Spending some time in the terminal, I was getting error messages spat out at me left right and centre over and over again at a fierce rate of repetition. They went like this:

Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.512447] ata4.01: configured for PIO4
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.513091] ata4: EH complete
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.516020] ata4: drained 32768 bytes to clear DRQ.
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584267] ata4.01: exception Emask 0x0 SAct 0x0 SErr 0x0 action 0x6 frozen
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584275] ata4.01: ST_FIRST: DRQ=1 with device error, dev_stat 0x59
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584289] ata4.01: cmd a0/00:00:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 tag 0 pio 36 in
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584291] cdb 12 00 00 00 24 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00 00
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584293] res 59/00:01:00:24:00/00:00:00:00:00/b0 Emask 0x2 (HSM violation)
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584298] ata4.01: status: { DRDY DRQ ERR }
Dec 13 13:54:51 bulbasaur kernel: [ 1783.584332] ata4: soft resetting link

Daunting, eh?

The logs kept growing, and I couldn’t open the Log File Viewer because it couldn’t take it (as expected). I begged for help on the forums but because the query was so hardware specific and such a generic error the cry was in vein.

Now I don’t know much of what those errors mean at all. A bit of Google’ing led me to stories of duff hard-drives, but I wasn’t buying any of that! I fiddled around with the insides and fixed it by un-plugging the CD/DVD-ROM drive. So it must’ve been a dodgy cable or unit. But again, I don’t care why, it works. Yay

There, Perfect!

It’s sweet. From all that error checking, I’ve beaten the first level of lagno (GNOME game, Reversi clone) which I’m very happy about. Even Rhythmbox doesn’t jerk (haven’t tried it in the garage properly yet – far too cold ). I love it, and my brother can now study his A-levels, play on Wesnoth and browse with Chrome.

Also, I hate to admit it, but it’s not bad looking. The brown kind of glows, the fonts are bubbly. It makes me smile when I use it. (I feel like I should be telling this to a shrink!) I’ve got no proper gripes and it’s helping me use my PC in the greatest ways possible.

I haven’t got down to any major road testing with Ubuntu Studio Karmic yet, mainly because it’s so damn cold in that garage. I’ve got band demos to record and websites to build. Studio Karmic will get a thrashing. But for now, I’m very happy with what I’ve got. Thank you Ubuntu

This website and everything else in my life in under construction

It couldn’t be more accurate!

Blog-wise I’ve got ten topics waiting to be penned. Seven will require screen-grabs, two will need photos and three of them are going to be Linux tutorials. So what am I waiting for?

For one, madnessJack desperately needs a re-brand. Even just some form of brand will do. (That’s eleven topics now! ) I need to sort it out!

However, if I didn’t work full-time, handle private projects, play in and direct bands, commute by public transport and drink so much I would probably get this blogging thing down!

Expect more, just not right away