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Happiness is a capacitor replaced
In his book “The Case for Working with Your Hands: or Why Office Work is Bad for Us and Fixing Things Feels Good”, Matthew B. Crawford explores the reasons why manual labour such as repairing a motorbike, building a wall or repairing an item of furniture, is both pleasurable and beneficial. It is a manifesto for the restoration of what, in my day, was called CDT (Craft, Design and Technology) to its rightful place as a first-class component in our education system.
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Bartech #3
Another great Bartech CTO meetup last night in Noho. Some really interesting discussion on the matters that are top of our minds - hiring and making tech work within an organisation using what ever means available - SCRUM/kanban/agile/lean/kanbean/scrumban… Looking forward to Bartech #4 already!
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Is that site down for everyone, or just me? →
How useful is this!? Does what it says on the tin - great for filtering out false positives from another alerting system maybe.
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Wordle tag clouds →
Still a great fun site - try a word cloud of your emails, your blog, Twelfth Night…
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Alternativeto.net →
Find software that is like something else, e.g. what can I use instead of Photoshop? Of course it’s excellent for finding open alternatives to commercial applications so might help people transition between operating systems more easily.
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FlightRadar24 →
Unbelievably neat map overlaid with flight data acquired from ADS-B transponders fitted in many aircraft. At the time of writing it makes clear where volcanic ash has closed airspace.
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Ubuntu 10.04 on LVM
I never get partition sizes right; too much root, too little root etc. So I’m going to re-build my notebook with LVM partitioning, just for kicks. Ubuntu Server CDs support LVM install from the “Expert” mode, but it doesn’t look like the desktop variants do. Given that they save me a fair bit of work subsequently, I’ll therefore work around that.
My starting point will probably be http://bit.ly/92oE - I’ll write up my discoveries here.
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ThinkPad Edge: Skype…
Hot on the heals of the WiFi issue solved yesterday, we have a Skype problem. Here are the observations:
- Gnome sound recorder works fine, records from mic
- Playback is fine
- Run Skype, make test call. Nothing.
- Now Gnome sound recorder fails to record anything: it immediately stops when you hit record.
Now you’re stuck. Reboot. Still recording is broken throughout. So how do we get around this?
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Lenovo ThinkPad Edge WiFi with Ubuntu 10.04
The Lenovo Thinkpad Edge is a rather nice notebook from the budget end of the Lenovo range. It makes savings in the right places (screen not quite as high res as the expensive models; no carbon fibre; fewer things that blink) whilst retaining a solid, well built feel. Just one problem: under Ubuntu (Lucid - 10.04) the wifi doesn’t really work…
NB: As of the update providing kernel 2.6.32-22 Wifi appears to work out of the box, thus rendering this article redundant.
NB(b): Ubuntu 10.10 was found again to be unstable; as of writing the latest Realtek drivers, installed as per this article, seem to be more stable.
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http://gephi.org/ →
Data junky porn just itching for a dataset to play with!
