In the middle of setting up my shiny new dedicated host for serving the growing toastboy empire, I realised it would be really handy to have a transparent filesystem link between the old server (a Debian Etch VM).

Now, here’s a good howto about sshfs on Debian, but for me, it didn’t quite work. When I got to the point of trying a modprobe fuse, I got the error FATAL: Module fuse not found.. So after a bit of thrashing about I realised that the missing link was this: you need to do depmod -a before modprobe fuse will work, and then everything behaves as expected.

Solved!

It would appear that Ubuntu’s powernowd has problems with AMD Cool ‘n’ Quiet, at least on my Asus A8N-SLI Premium motherboard. Turning off Cool ‘n’ Quite (crap name) in the BIOS menu solves the problem where I’d be typing away and the machine would just freeze hard, to the extent that mouse-waggling had no effect. I’m really not used to Linux doing that to me: that’s Windows territory.

To be honest, though, I don’t have a terrific amount of confidence that the Asus A8N is a rock-solid motherboard. I’ve always used mostly Asus motherboards, and never had cause to complain. But this one’s always been a bit iffy. It “supports” 4 slots of DDR400 RAM, up to 1G each, but one of the BIOS revisions had a mysterious “update” feature which just said that if all four slots were populated with 1G DIMMs, it downgrades the RAM clock to 333Mhz. WHY? Presumably just because they’ve got problems they can’t resolve any other way. I think the next mobo will be a Tyan.

This is a cracker. Use your existing PDA’s GPS receiver to write a GPX log, and then use it to tag your photos with the exact location where they were taken later, with no connection between the GPS receiver and the camera necessary!

Here’s how it works. It’s all about time. A GPX log just records the raw data coming from the GPS receiver - basically just a very accurate time together with an exact location, at intervals along your journey. Digital cameras tag the photos you take with the time and date they were taken - so all you need is a piece of software that’s smart enough to take the timestamp and use the GPS log to turn it into a position.

Here’s one way to do it:

First, I needed a program for my PDA phone: a t-mobile MDA Vario (also known as iMate K-JAM, Qtek 9100, HTC Wizard, etc. etc. - man, I hate re-badging like that) running Windows Mobile 5. It doesn’t have a buit-in GPS receiver - my next phone will (HTC Kaizer) - but I do have a Bluetooth GPS unit which works just fine for the moment. I wanted a program that would also allow the GPS port to be connected to another program while the logger was active, so I could still use it for navigation. What I found does exactly that: I can still use TomTom Navigator at the same time. The logging program is called SunsetGPSLogger and it works a treat. It does have a couple of foibles, but what do you want for free? It doesn’t remember what port your GPS receiver is connected to, so you have to set that every time you launch it. It has a hard-wired path to the place where it will write the logs - and that path is in /Storage Card, so you’d better not have an empty expansion slot. It also has some useful smarts, though: not least the clever algorithm which only writes “good quality” waypoints to the log. Anyway, it writes lovely, compact logs - now I need something to use those logs to tag my photos.

That’s where GPicSync comes in. Again, it’s free, and again, it’s nifty. You point it at the GPS log, and you tell it where the photos are, and you press a button. Actually, it’s also a good idea to tell it the difference between your camera’s clock and the proper GPS time: it’s less easy to keep camera clocks spot on than those of a PDA.

Press the button Synchronise button, and off it goes - writing to the EXIF tags of your photos, and even backing them up if you want, in case it messes things up. It even has a button to show the results in Google Earth once you’re done. Very, very nifty.

This is as much for my benefit as anybody else’s - for when I set up or reinstall yet another machine for myself.

1. Adblock Plus: Gotta kill the ads. The very best internet experience is that without twonks trying to sell you things. Of course the other benefit is that pages load much quicker since they’re much smaller without the ads, and your browser has to contact fewer places on the Interweb.
2. Adblock Filterset.G Updater: The way to keep the blocking capabilities of Adblock up to date. This add-on just downloads the latest version of the master list which tracks where the ads come from.
3. Google Browser Sync: This one is very clever. It will sync pretty much everything in the inner workings of your browser between all the machines on which you have it installed. This includes bookmarks, cookies and history - although you can turn off the bits you don’t want synced. A real time-saver, this makes flitting about between work and home an absolute breeze. Not for those with something to hide, I guess, since it uploads your dirty secrets to Google servers, but I don’t care ’bout that.
4. Morning Coffee: A simple but dead good idea - really, in effect it’s just multiple bookmarks that open with the click of a single button. What do I have on mine? Well, a share price check or two, plus Get Fuzzy, Dilbert and Google Reader.
5. Firebug: Great web development tool. You can poke around in the way any page is put together, and debug JavaScript if you want (I don’t do that since I think it’s broadly evil - see below :->)
6. Web Developer: Another very full-featured web development add-on. I use it in particular to nose around in the HTTP response headers, but it will do a lot more besides.
7. Aardvark: Last web development one, I promise. Possibly a bit overkill to have this instead, but this one is very good at figuring out what’s going on with your style sheets and so on. You can find what box comes from where, and even hide page elements to experiment with what happens to the layout. Invaluable.
8. NoScript: A way to turn off potentially dangerous JavaScript and (less dangerous in my opinion, but hey, whatever) Java and Flash. You can make exceptions for sites where you really need it, and you really trust. It takes a while to bed in, but it’s well worth the effort. Google can take you anywhere these days…
9. LiveHTTPHeaders: Actually I just realised that on my main home machine, I installed this a while ago and it’s even handier than Web Developer for dissecting headers. It can display headers as they fly past in the sidebar, which is very handy indeed. I’m sure some little gits use it to put together XSS attacks, but its powers can also be used for good (like getting caching right).
10. StumbleUpon: Saving the best till last. Well - if by “best” I mean “best destroyer of productivity”, anway. Bloody thing. It turns up all sorts of crap that you really shouldn’t waste your time looking at, which of course is the whole point. Apparently eBay are going to pay umpty-thrumpty* million dollars for it soon, if they haven’t already.

*Yes, yes, I do listen to Mark Kermode’s film reviews. As a matter of fact, I listen to more reviews than I watch films, and it’s all down to him and the way he witters with Simon Mayo.

Honestly, E, you’ll have to try harder than that.

Seriously.

Here I am trying to read about Perforce at midnight on a Friday night, while E watches telly. “Ooh look”, she says, “there’s Shane Ritchie in the background”.

Answers on a postcard as to who’s the sadder..

What a right kerfuffle. Trying to get MySQL replication working has consumed the Sunday morning early start. Oh well. Off to walk Des. He’s most insistent.

Now I’m hopped up on 10mbps cable, the old US Robotics CMX cable modem finally reached the end of its useful life. Not least, the 10BaseT connection would saturate before t’internet gave up all its goodness. So, two days ago it was time to ask NTL for a new modem. Twenty minutes on hold and a transfer to the wrong department later, an appointment was arranged for today.

A shiny new modem arrived today, with a very cheery engineer who gave a few choice little bits of insider information that will no doubt turn out to be handy (nothing dodgy, just stuff you wouldn’t necessarily guess). One ten minute call to customer services and I had my PIN for registration. A slight snag where the registration CD software assumes that you are upgrading from dialup. Do you want to keep your old dialup ID? No? Then you must want an entirely new account.

One more call to customer services (10 mins) and it was established that I needed to talk to broadband tech support. Fair enough. They picked up almost immediately, and told me the best thing to do was to register a new, temporary ID, and then call them back after 2-3 hours when it was fully established in order to get my old mailbox etc. transferred over into my original ID. They gave me a ticket reference number to give when I called back. After 3 hours I called back (again, very little wait time), gave the ticket number, and after a little bit of re-explaining, the transfer was done. All is now peachy.

So, it was hardly painless, but I have to say that apart from one hiccough, it’s been handled pretty well. And now I have a speedy pipe! So to speak. Of course now I’m not bitching about my connection, but the failings of the servers, the network in general, latency, and the price of fish. Oh well. Speaking of fish, thank you Rick Stein for your Ragout of Turbot and Scallops with Vouvray and Basil. Omega 3licious!

eMusic give away 50 downloads when you sign up, and then if you don’t cancel then they start charging you for monthly subscriptions. The basic package allows 40 downloads a month for $9.99.

Sounds just fine so far, but the problem is about as fundamental as it gets. They ain’t got much I want to download. They’re known for offering tracks by out of the way artists, indie labels and so on. That’s well and good, but they’ve typically only got one or two albums even by reasonably well-established artists. For instance, if they had more by Iron & Wine, or anything by Bright Eyes, I might not just take the 50 songs and run without paying them a cent.

It’s a pity, because everything else about it is great; the site’s good, the downloads are unencumbered by DRM bollocks and are a pretty good bit-rate. Oh well, never mind.

Sadly, it’s not one of mine. That would be because the tackle needed to get the shot is a bit beyond my budget. By a lot. A very lot….

Dione and Tethys

A lot’s happened, some of it none too pleasant, but everything seems to be under control now. Anyway, it’s amazing what you can find out when you pootle around on Wikipedia:

1. I am three days older than Claudia Schiffer
2. The church where I sang in the choir two a half decades ago (!!!) has now gone all soft and namby-pamby and installed a toilet in a corner of the South Transept. To quote the great Ivor Cutler, in my day, people just kept it in.
3. The Students Union at Manchester no longer has the office that I held, namely Events Officer. That’s not all; the SU newspaper used to be called, in glorious punnage, “Mancunion”. Now it labours under the stark yet functional “Student Direct”.
4. Wikipedia doesn’t know what “clart” means.