UPC (Ireland) upgrade [edit: FUCK UPC TECHNICOLOR]

They insisted on giving me a new modem. hopefully these Technicolor modems aren't a pile o shite n start crapping out on me like the dodgy Cisco they tried to peddle to me until i got it replaced with an older model...

...so far so good.

[EDIT: NOPE! they suck.]

Change local IP address range

They've changed the local IP range from 192.168.1.x to 192.168.0.x
This can now be changed back to the familiar 192.168.1.x range. There seemed to be an issue with it initially, and then after that it would come up with the error
"Error converting one or more entries: 
Make sure the Primary Network and Guest Networks do not overlap IP pools:"
I was able to change it by doing something strange.
First I moved the router's IP to 192.168.0.200 and starting address to 192.168.0.210, without googling the subject I was just guessing that that may not 'overlap'? Then after it rebooted itself I was then able to move the LAN to 192.168.1.1 etc. like I wanted in the first place.
Also, I would suggest temporarily changing the subnet mask on the router and your current PC from 255.255.255.0 to 255.255.0.0 to prevent headaches of not being able to access the router during the change over.

Device quirks

Certain things it will give the appearance of changing but they do not *actually* change. If this happens try making the change and then reboot the router yourself after each individual change (maybe even rebooting after each step if it involves a few changes in the router GUI). Not guaranteed to work for everything, some stuff is just plain broken on this unit.
I am convinced that the firmware has been remotely updated since I first got it on my own unit as the unit now reboots itself after certain changes where it did not before, and generally the router GUI seems a little smoother.

There is a mysterious device set up on 1st DHCP lease at 192.168.0.10, cannot get rid of this, seems to be something on the router itself. x.x.x.10 is where i traditionally put my main pc so that is annoying also.
[ EDIT#2: just did a quick check on (http://aruljohn.com/mac.pl) for the MAC 00:10:95:DE:AD:07 it's coming up as a "Thomson Inc." device. so this arsehole device *is* a Thomson. I had heard a rumour. Having worked in telecoms troubleshooting Thomson network devices I can tell you Thomson are absolute fucking garbage, cheapest, shittiest pieces of crap out there. RANT!! ]
[FIXED: Whatever this Thomson thing is it always moves with the starting DHCP IP address plus ten, so if you want 192.168.x.10 free, just move all DHCP addresses somewhere arbitrary like 192.168.x.200 or whatever and the Thomson device will be on 192.168.x.210]

Port forwarding

Port forwarding is weird. the boxes insist you put in port ranges like 60000-60100. but it does not open port ranges, only the lowest port on the range, so you have to create multiple entries for each individual port to actually create a range.
[EDIT: At this point, when I was initially setting up the router, I lost the rag here and wanted to throw the router out the window, as my ftps server needs a large range open to work and had taken a bit of work to get up and running in the first place. 
... This edit replaces quite a lot of CAPS SHOUTING AND SWEARING!!! I was pretty angry!]
[EDIT 18/03/2014: Was just setting up port forwarding for a program and lo and behold four months later you can now enter IP address ranges like you are supposed to. No reboot required, just need to hit save changes. I do not know if they update the version information but currently the status gives: Software Version STD6.01.27 ]
[EDIT 25/03/2014: In the last week I have had to restart and reset the modem a number of times. I was unable to restore my configuration backup after resetting modem -??? BUT! uPnP is now working, so no need to go opening ports for software that avails of uPnP. The Software Version number reported in the status has not changed, ..maybe this particular box, as opposed to in general, is a bit dodgy? ]

Get your own router

Obvious answer would be to fuck all this bollox and set it up in bridge mode and get my own router to do what I want. oh wait! NO YOU FUCKING CAN NOT BECAUSE THEY DO NOT HAVE A GODDAMN BRIDGE MODE ON THIS FUCKING PIECE OF SHIT MODEM.
[EDIT: Yeah yet more anger here! But here is a workaround:
Turn off WiFi.
Put you own nice, working, stable, store-bought router in the DMZ.
????
Profit. ]

WiFi is Rubbish

I have not experienced this yet as I live in a small flat, but apparently the WiFi is shit as well, drops out and pretty weak. It comes up as a pretty low signal anyhow at about -70dBm compared with the signal from my neighbours at -60dBm, and there is no external aerial on the thing.

[EDIT: Update on WiFi. It sometimes just stops completely. As in that part of the modem just ceases to function and will not come back, ethernet is fine during these episodes however. Box has to be power cycled to get going again. There is no WiFi interference, any other WiFi connection runs perfectly (tried other router, ad-hoc laptop to laptop). Also, I noticed movies were buffering while streaming across the WiFi to my laptop, so I ran iperf for 5 minutes to check the speed. Maximum speeds were good, but the WiFi completely drops out quite often. In the 5 minute test the WiFi completely cut out over 30 times. I have switched over and tried many different combinations of machines and it's simply the Technicolor/Thomson cutting out constantly. From reading forums and speaking to others it seems to be the general consensus that the WiFi is incredibly unstable.]

Bricked my Galaxy Note (Soft Brick Phew!)

Very intense day today as I luckily only soft bricked my GT-N7000. Got stuck in bootloop after an unsuccessful rom upgrade when returning to nandroid backup. And no i didn't use stupid stock ICS kernel. Reflashed stock rom with Odin and it decided to fail :-O, redid it and felt very lucky when it worked! back to stock JB 4.1.2 not going to flash for a whiles now.

Taking Apart a Microsoft Wireless Keyboard 800

I got some beer or cider under a couple of keys on this keyboard. seems like a lot of screws to open it, i count 13, seems excessive. I googled, as opening these things can get tricky, but couldn't find any guides, hence this post, so i'll let ya know if ya need to take em all out.

too many :-/ and they are all very slightly different lengths, so don't mix em up.

OK, so far I've had to take *every* screw out including the 2 tiny ones in the battery bay, pretty annoying. but guess what? IT STILL WONT OPEN. Yes there is yet another screw hidden behind the health warning sticker. it came out easily enough though.

It comes apart with a small amount of prying into top and bottom halves. the bottom half contains all the electronics, and the top half all the mechanical parts of the keys. The mechanical keys were getting stuck so i soaked the upper half in warm soapy water then rinsed off with some more warm water. and left to dry. the bottom half seemed OK, there was some residue in what looked like a little run off area in the design which i wiped off with a warm soapy towel. by all means use something like a pure alcohol cleaner if ya have it.

I'll let update this if anything goes wrong after it dries and I put it back together.

Netgear ReadyNAS NV+ V2 (RND4000)

Just bought one of these for €200. It's a compromise on price performance. I wanted 1 gigabit read/write, but would have to shell out a lot more to approach these figures. The unit looks good. As you may have read in other reviews the drive bays are way too accessible and easy to take out. The drive comes bundled with power cables and a CAT5 cable. Why is this gigabit ethernet unit not bundled with at least a CAT5e cable? Just installed a 3TB drive in the unit. Powered it up and was pleased to see it was updating it's own firmware automatically. Had to quickly install Radar Utility as the NAS was giving me 10 minutes until assumedly it would do a default configure on the drive/system. The choices were set up XRAID2 or some regular RAID system. I'll be buying my disks one at a time so I'm going to try out their XRAID sytem I've been reading about. Dissappointed to note there is no FTPS option, only vanilla unsecure FTP sever available. [Explicit FTPS available, be careful not to use plain FTP by accident if you wish your password to be secure.] Speedtests to come... folder -quick write test coming in at a lowly 25MB/s to write to NAS thru SMB, 4GB folder of videos files. -rough read test comin in at 40MB/s, same folder of file. caching may have occurred. -write 1GB file 39/MB/s -read 1GB file 42MB/s looks like caching again maybe. Tried folder write again, now writing at ~40MB/s, definitely caching occurring. Copying large 11GB file to NAS 32MB/s. Something strange occurring. Tried connecting direct using only CAT6 and staic IPs and began copying 11GB file. was getting less than through my shitty UPC router. Came in around 30MB/s, definitely less than though router anyhow. ================================================= OK, several days just passed there. got locked out of web control for NAS kept saying "Device is Offline", reinstalled OS, did factory reset, finally was sayin corrupt root. after much searching found that my Seagate drive ST3000DM001 had firmware CC4C. In the readynas hardware compatability list it was recommended to upgrade to CC4H. -and fuck seagate for being so awkward in the update, but that's another story, just make sure you have a bog standard pc hanging around if ya wanna upgrade seagate firmware, with an intel chip, working optical drive, no raid array, and on my annoying set up i basically had to unplug everything to disconnect the PCs own hard drives, or else the upgrade utility would mercilessly try and upgrade every HD it came across. i had to do this about 3 times in the end, was getting pretty pissed off. finally got firmware -> CC4H. still getting "Device is Offline" AAAAHHHHHHH!!!!!!!! next factory restore -> err: partitioning failed / corrupt root hooked the drive back up to PC (3rd time disassembling PC :-/) tried deleting any partitions on HD -> nothing found motherboard cannot read 3TB drives, created new empty partition windows prompts for MBR or GPT, do some interesting reading and go for GPT (Guid Partitioning Table). Discover some interesting shit about these new >2TB drives, they're all secretly aligning on 4k bytes instead of 512. can cause double write if misaligned blocks! does this explain my slow write speed in initial testing? put HD back in NAS, left to test drive overnight -> err: could not mount root RAID d / corrupt root factory reset -> err: partitioning failed OS reinstall -> auto does factory reset >> test disks >> installs FW >> installs X-RAID!! >> creates volume!! >> does normal boot :-) did a quick test there with 11GB file, writing at 40MB/s thru router no problems. reading at 42MB/s. top speed of the routers switch was measured at 50MB/s with iperf. May have to invest in switch if i can justify the expense, will need to do some more testing direct thru cable and when i get more HDs installed in the NAS. Pretty bumpy ride so far, i bought the NAS so i wouldn't have the bumpy ride and expense of building my own NAS. The joys of IT eh? It's always a learning experience.

Ubuntu 10 (Lucid Lynx) Linux Post-Install Set Up Tips

***just found this post in my drafts folder on blogger, a little out of date at this point as i wrote it at least 1.5 years ago***

1) don't use 64-bit unless you have more than 3.5 GB of RAM installed. more trouble than it's
worth.

2) to change minimize, maximize, close window buttons from left side to right side of top of window:

run gconf-editor and go to /apps/metacity/general/button_layout
change from "close,minimize:" to "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

3) get the win key working:

run gconf-editor and go to /apps/metacity/global_keybindings

change any of these values to "Super_L" to have the win key open that application

e.g. run_command_terminal = Super_L to have the win key open a new terminal window

or panel_main_menu = Super_L to have a similar function to windows by opening the gnome application menu

4) This is general firefox on linux tweak. To set the backspace key to go back a page in history, open a new tab, type "about:config" in the address bar, dismiss the warning and type "backspace" into the filter bar. double click the browser.backspace_action entry and set the value to "0" (zero). As far as I remember "2" is to scroll one screen up in the current page.
This makes sense when used in conjunction with the space bar to scroll down one screen in a page.

I'm back with UPC!

O joy of joys! In the last 10.5 months I've had to suffer with a data connection ranging from 40k thru my nokia phone with bad drivers, to ADSL on a 2Mb connection that at best connected at 1800kbps and was completely intermittant.
But finally I'm back with UPC!!! check it:

Prepare urself UPC, acceptable usage policies are about to be fully tested!

Just got a Samsung Galaxy Note GT-N7000 !!

Just received this by courier! Fantastic, it's huge!

Right hand side is level with a UK / IRL size electricity plug.

Seemingly Impossible Broadband Connection.

the great mcmonkeys1 is now working tech support for an ISP. i came accross a customer with an interesting ADSL modem. this customer's telephone line is really shit, he's in dire need of an engineer to fix his cabling to the house. the fault is pretty bad, there is alien current / voltage on this line. on top of that his line is only rated to take 4Mbit due to the length of the wire and the resistance this incurs. in addition his connection has been stable and up for over 7 days.
here is some imagery nobody outside the company is supposed to see. it means nothing to you, but this picture is like magic to me, the modem should not be doing this! noise levels are almost as loud as the actual broadband signal, the attainables are a measure of the max instantaneous possible speed possible on this line, the modem simply should not be able to connect higher than this! but it is synced at the full speed possible on the line setting (it's currently on 5Mbit).

it hangs up there like a floating city for weeks on end. i check on it now and then just to amaze myself.

btw i was speaking with the customer a number of times, the modem is a Billion Bipac 7800N, am considering buying one if my next gaf does not have UPC and i have to rely on shitty ADSL for internet.
it's pricey mind you http://www.dabs.ie/products/billion-bipac-7800n---wireless-router---dsl---802-11b-g-n---desktop-7RYB.html?utm_source=ie+email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=email240412&utm_content=e800

3D Cinema

I saw Martin Scorcese's Hugo in 3D in the cinema last night. Everytime I go to the cinema in the last while I'm dissapointed by the small screens, often lack of surround sound, and appalling shutter speeds. The 3D was good, and the movie was not too gimmicky about it, but did use it. BUT! I could not help thinking: yeah that ball looks great coming out of the screen, but why am I seeing eight of them when it moves? It really seems like they're slapping 21st century technology onto 1970s tech, and I guess that's what they are doing, but really they need to update these projectors properly if they want the cinema industry to survive. I think a lot of people have large flat screens and possibly 5.1 surround at home these days. Surely they should increase the framerate and screen size by updating old tech or moving over to digital projectors? And for the love of jaysis turn on the feckin surround sound if you've got the equipment!

Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED

My awesome new Viewsonic VG2436wm-LED monitor (pics pending). Another fantastic gift to myself ;-) Thanks Ros! No problem, anytime Ros.

24" 1080p, colours look vibrant, contrast ratio is high. Viewing angles are no great shakes, but no worse than other monitors. The most stand-out feature is pivot support (rotation) so that monitor can go into portrait mode. This is great for reading long articles, and should be fantastic for writing long functions when I get around to programming again. I have only tested this function on my laptop so far with Intel drivers, works great! Simply put mouse pointer on screen you desire to be rotated and then use the CTRL+ALT+arrow-direction keyboard shortcuts to rotate to desired screen orientation, very quick and easy to apply. The height can be adjusted to quite an exteme to allow for easier rotation, it makes the unit a little prone to shaking about slight vibration though, and may need a sturdy desk/worktop surface.

All in all, a nice little number, and the cheapest 24" monitor with pivot adjustment support built in and decent screen specs.

[UPDATE]
New monitor in action:

OCZ Agility 3 60GB

Santa's been! Actually I bought this one myself. I have a Lenovo R400 Thinkpad, it takes about 4/5mins to boot up and hard drive always seems to be thrashing. Seemed to be getting 40-60 MB/sec moving large files off the hard drive which is pretty shit. Bought myself an OCZ Agility 3 60GB and fuck me it's fast! Seem to be getting impossible speeds. It has SATA 150 interface (i.e. 150MB/sec theoretical upper speed limit) but testing with numerous softwares are getting figures of 200MB/sec and over???

It's booting and shutting down breathtakingly fast, i'm actually stunned as to how fast it is, PLUS the drive is designed for SATA 600 interface! I have SATA 300 in my main PC, i will run some tests on that machine at a later date, but stunning results so far! SSDs really do live up to the hype!

[UPDATE]
In retrospect, clearly the Lenovo spec sheet was wrong. Laptop must have SATA300 interface. Getting contiguous large file reads of 250MB/s during testing, but have recorded burst rates of ~298MB/s by monitoring actual system performance using HDTune Pro. Impressive stuff! Alas now, in the inevitable race ever upwards, I am noticing the limiting factor of my laptop's CPU power, and my once proud RAID disk system is beginning to feel a little challenged, regular defragging is now needed and the once seemingly quick boot times seem to take an age as I restart my laptop several times for fun as it does one single boot..

Dennis Ritchie is dead. Long live UNIX and C!

Sad news and no fanfare for the passing of this s/w giant =(

Father Of C And UNIX, Dennis Ritchie, Passes Away At Age 70

Meteor mobile broadband.

hooked my laptop up to my phone with a usb cable. so i now have internet at home, wahey!
here are my stats from speedtest.net, bathe in their glory ;-)



Hot shit no? My emails are blazing down in mere minutes!

Firefox v4

Upgraded to Firefox v4 there last night. Seems to want to crash all over the shop. It's also using
a whopping 400+ MBs of ram. I'd recommend any Firefox users delay their upgrade until next
incremental release, at least (version 4.1?). Other than that, the GUI interface
now resembles Google Chrome. There is also built-in support for roaming browsing, i.e. save
your tabs+history+watever to a server so they open up on whatever machine your using. I also
have a lot of custom settings in "about:config" which have been left unchanged by the
upgrade. That is good =) I haven't snooped around much apart from that.

--

Put Archlinux on my eee pc 901

I decided to wipe eeebuntu 8.04 from my eee pc 901. I have put on archlinux which turns out to be great! you have a lot more control of ur installation with archie, and i've gone for a very lightweight approach to suit my netbook. No desktop environment, just using openbox window manager, and carefully chosen each application to get exactly what i want.

A non-exhaustive list-
Programs)
Terminal: roxterm (mainly), xterm
Editor: vim (general), geany (IDE)
Network Manager: wicd (great! ncurses+GUI)
File Manager: pcmanfm (weaning myself off nautilus) nautilus, mc (ncurses)
Video Player: mplayer (no fancy GUI for me, plenty of shortcut keys) smplayer(FTW!)
[Video Editor: avidemux-gtk]
Music Player: audacious (haven't looked into this much seems ok screen space wise)(great!)
Office: openoffice, epdfview
Archive: xarchiver
Graphics: gimp, mirage [added eog as mirage a bit slow]
Browser: lynx, firefox (main), chromium
System)
Window Manager: openbox
Wallpaper: set with feh (extremely lightweight!)
System info: conky & tint2 various tray apps
Tray/Panel/Dock: tint2 lxpanel
Compositing Manager (transparency, effects): xcompmgr
Audio: alsa, alsa-utils (alsamixer)
GUI Configurators: obconf, obmenu, tint2conf

That's all i can think of right now.

TODO:
Network shares are not mounting automatically for some reason [-requires root?], [or SD card]
haven't thought about bluetooth,
must work on speeding up boot process (no autodetecting modules really speeds things up). [never switch off/reboot]
Must setup scripts to move ~/.mozilla folder to RAM on system start, and sync to disk on system shutdown. [Done! But for aforementioned reason sync it with cronjob, and logging in or out of bash for good measure. Use rsync as it just updates changes to disk rather than full copy (good for SSD drive)].

Otherwise coming together nicely.
Click for screenshot of 9.1 inch screen:

Have since dicked around with a custom minimal gtk theme, made the windows title bars as small as possible to save screen real estate -may just ditch em all together and use shortcut keys? Every program has been visually miniaturized as much as reason would allow.

Conky now calls a script that reads battery level values from the filesystem and colours the battery display accordingly, e.g. red below 5%.
TODO: add functionality to the script to send notifications and suspend2ram. Need to keep it simple as script is called every ~2 secs.

All-in-one RAID0 SSD Drive on PCI-Express

120GB OCZ RevoDrive PCI-Express SSD Solid State Disk (read 540MB/sec - write 480MB/sec) for €327! Almost affordable, and you get 2 quality SSDs with built in hardware RAID0 communicating over 1GB/s PCIe x4 bus.

My current set up feels fast (~150MB/s read/write 2x 7200rpm 64MB cache spinny drives, fake/soft-nvraid) and cost just over half that with 2TB space, but 540MB/sec with enough room to install win7+apps, thats shit's insane!


http://www.memoryc.com/storage/solidstatedisk/120gboczrevodrivepciexpress540mbsec.html

Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive Review

I've owned a 1TB Iomega Home Media Network Hard Drive (hmnhd for short) for about a year now. It's damned handy for sharing media files between my computers (and housemates). In fact, if it was feasible, i would use a network hard drive for all my data across machines and OSes.

There are however drawbacks. The drive (server) is connected only by 1000Mbit gigabit ethernet. That would not be so bad, but my router has only 100Mbit ports and wireless-g @ 54Mbit -obviously my laptops are connected wirelessly. On top of that, all these max throughput figures are not represented in the real world.

Back to the review. I recently updated the firmware from 1.0.29 to 2.0.64. Luckily I backed up everything beforehand, as the update destroyed access to most of my files and folders. Previously, the drive was written to internally by a user with linux uid=254 and gid=254 (some sambauser account perhaps?). That user no longer exists with the update, and so many files/folders have permissions set like
-rwx------ 254 254 somefile
drwx------ 254 254 somedir
meaning I could no longer access them >:-[
After much messing around, the only thing I could think to do was format the hmnhd.

More Annoyances.
To expedite backing up the hmnhd, I directly connected the drive with a CAT6 (gigabit) cable to the gigabit ethernet port of my big PC. This took over 6 hours to back up ~580GB @ ~27MB/s (probably closer to 7 hours). I'm currently writing the back up *back* to the hmnhd, and am pretty fucking annoyed to notice that the average write speed to the drive after about 30mins is a disgraceful, disgusting, limp-dicked, ravaged-arsed, cock-faced 7.4MB/s. I'm writing back 541GB so this should take me about 21 hours! Lying win2008 server reckons it'll only take 12.5 hours. If your drive is totally full you can probably double these times.
[EDIT: ok it's settled at an average of 11.3MB/s, ~= 13.5 hours]

hmnhd specs: max values
read from 27.0 MB/s
write to 11.3 MB/s --corrected

Buyer beware. I would definitely consider a more expensive unit in the future with removable drives and/or USB 3.0 or other fast interface for large reads/writes.
Did a quick check there, 1TB units available ~€100 with both NAS+DAS interfaces (meaning both network+USB to you). Also no hard drive units with SSH access available -could make your own with a linux-plug or some such device, or forget NAS and get a decent router with a fast USB port and reflash it with DD-WRT or some such arrangement.

Stanton Final Scratch 2

have had the stanton box, timecode records, and a zillion leads sitting in it's box for nearly 3 years. just got the correct firewire lead for it, *and* ditched trying to get the software that came with it to work. i don't like using illegal software, but in this case it was actually the only way to get it to work, since both stanton and native instruments stopped supporting the hardware in 2005 -the registration software is no longer supported??? and you can only purchase newer versions of the software that don't work with the hardware apparently. so, H2O crew FTW!

Ubuntu 10 (Lucid Lynx) Linux Post-Install Set Up Tips

1) don't use 64-bit unless you have more than 3.5 GB of RAM installed. more trouble than it's
worth.

2) to change minimize, maximize, close window buttons from left side to right side of top of window:

run gconf-editor and go to /apps/metacity/general/button_layout
change from "close,minimize:" to "menu:minimize,maximize,close"

3) get the win key working:

run gconf-editor and go to /apps/metacity/global_keybindings

change any of these values to "Super_L" to have the win key open that application

e.g. run_command_terminal = Super_L to have the win key open a new terminal window

or panel_main_menu = Super_L to have a similar function to windows by opening the gnome application menu

4) This is general firefox on linux tweak. To set the backspace key to go back a page in history, open a new tab, type "about:config" in the address bar, dismiss the warning and type "backspace" into the filter bar. double click the browser.backspace_action entry and set the value to "0" (zero). As far as I remember "2" is to scroll one screen up in the current page.
This probably makes sense when used in conjunction with the space bar to scroll down one screen in a page.

[EDIT] On that note i thought it might be good if the space bar did go forward in history one page. There are no settings in firefox/mozilla for this, so i delved into the world of greasemonkey to make this possible.

Here's my first greasemonkey script!

It adds an event listener for keydown (key events are not available by default in greasemonkey),
checks for space bar press (it assumes the code for space bar is 32),
goes forward 1 page in history,
& suppresses the default behaviour for space bar (i copied that bit, don't really know what it does)

here's de code:



// ==UserScript==
// @name Space Forward
// @namespace http://mcmonkeys1rants.blogspot.com
// @description Makes space bar go forward in history and not scroll down
// @include *
// ==/UserScript==

function KeyCheck(e)
{
if(e.keyCode==32){
history.go(1);
if(!document.commandDispatcher.focusedElement)
e.preventDefault();
}
}

window.addEventListener('keydown', KeyCheck, false);



pretty basic, but it works!

5) Get rid of F10 menu accelerator, ("ALT+F" works fine, and "F10" interferes with midnight commander quit key):
run gconf-editor and remove "F10" from /desktop/gnome/interface/menu_accel (i.e. set="")

6) Set up SMB N/W share mounts:
make sure smbfs & smbclient are installed.
add this horrible line to /etc/fstab (all in one single line)
//192.168.1.13/public /media/public cifs user=netusername%netpassword,directio,soft,noexec,nosuid,nodev,rw,uid=1000,gid=1000,file_mode=0664,dir_mode=0755 0 0
-subbing in your network login for "netusername" & "netuserpassword", and your own network locations and local mount points.
i wrote that some time ago, most of the option are not required, i was trying to stop the local PC from hanging when my NAS went down.
don't for get to "sudo mkdir /media/public" or whatever you'll name them.

[EDIT/EDIT]
OK I'LL PROBLY TURN THIS INTO A WHOLE NEW PAGE SOMEWHERE FOR MY OWN REFERENCE MORE THAN ANYTHING. I've gone thru this process so many times when installing new OSes that i should probly keep a record rather that rediscovering de same ould carp (esp. linux).

right, i've been busy, must say i'm lovin de look n feel of ubuntu 10, and so many previously annoying linux things are seemless now (e.g. wireless networking, and ACPI -yes! that used to be a problem! anyone remember havin t write/download specifics for their broken BIOSes?? twas hell i tell thee, but auto shutting down before ur laptop's battery emptied was a must! i digress, n fuck all ppl would get this. i.e. praise be linux kernel 2.6 and the copping on of Dell and the like).

all what follows is pretty personal to my own system.

gonna need an autostart file -right it appears that system/preferences/sessions no longer exists, now it's the more intuitive system/preferences/Start Up Programs, duh! i had to google that, stuck in me ould ways. tsk.

have a few config files i reuse: .conkyrc, .fehrc, .fehbg, .bashrc, .vimrc
install the relevant apps: vim, conky, feh.
will post config files when i set up a new space for this, good to have somewhere, maybe someone else can benefit as i've carried these for years n spent a lot of time on them.
java is an annoyance on ubuntu, they insist on openjdk/icetea/gcj and there all still shit slow and have incompatibilities with java proper. PAIN! as i do program in java, and java apps? well, they are slow enough as it is -raw C/ASM baybee!! fuck de rest. n fk u java queers, real men use C/C++/
have a new step by step for keeping java up to date manually -post that also on new "space".
that's all i'll post now. DEFO GET BACK THIS!

US Drones "Hacked" By Iraqi Insuregents

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2009/dec/17/skygrabber-american-drones-hacked

Pretty amazing what the US military counts as "hacking". OK I think a lot of people know that what the media calls hacking is actually "cracking" -circumventing security systems. The US military it would seem have another view entirely. A method one could use to "hack" the military drones is to tune in a digital set top box to the unencrypted omni-directional signal that the drones blast out when in use. It's as much hacking as watching ITV Digital on Freeview. Anyone else a little shocked? The mind boggles! This reminds me of the case against that autistic guy who "hacked" into the pentagon looking for evidence of UFO cover ups. He was able to browse around their open, unsecured network shares (filled with sensitive documents) with zero technical knowledge. They've been trying to have him imprisoned for "breaking into the system", obviously the lawyers are having a field day.