Eriq's Blag » computer

Day Twenty Four: Stop D

Selkcip — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 23:47:25 +0000

I went in for an interview at Comm-Tech today. My dad gave me directions to the place and sent me off from Liverpool St. station. I like the Santa Cruz Metro better because they announce all the stops. So long as you know where you’re going, you know where to get off. I had no fucking clue how far the bus had gone or even what the stop would come up as. It didn’t come up, but thankfully other people were getting off there and I saw the stop letter. After walking through a residential area I came to the place marked on my map. The front doors were covered by metal grates, but inside it said Comm-Tech. They sat me down and asked some questions about what I had written on my application, trying to get an idea of what I know. It seems they felt I knew enough because I start a trial run this Friday. Getting home was much easier as the bus’ destination was Liverpool St. I’m seriously considering buying a bunch of EL wire and an old leather jacket and lighting it up.

Day Twenty Three: Gadget Porn

Selkcip — Tue, 22 Sep 2009 01:47:29 +0000

I eventually got out of the house today and went to Maplin Electronics. I wanted to see what they had to offer in terms of tech toys and DIY parts. They have some LEDs that might be useful and some cool looking kits, but I’m still not sure what I want to make. I think it would be really awesome to make some sort of Daft Punk costume or outfit. Maybe a jacket with lots of embedded LEDs. Tomorrow I’m going to the office of the computer chop shop I might volunteer at to find out exactly what it is they do. Hope I don’t get lost.

Day Fifteen: Dumb Luck

Selkcip — Mon, 14 Sep 2009 02:15:27 +0000

We had lunch at the club with the English relatives again. Lunch was meh. Afterward we drove forever to get to their house. It apparently took forever because of a football (soccer, duh) match, various road work and diversions (look! a unicorn), and the buying of a book of notes on another book. On the way we passed a bunch of idiots posing in the middle of the crossing at Abbey Road. When we finally got there we re-met my…second cousin once removed? My father’s cousin’s daughter. She’s now thirteen, slightly older than I was the last time I was here. She had the pre-requisite amount of makeup for a thirteen year old. After chatting for a bit my (I’m going to just call him my uncle) uncle got down to business, that being his website. Apparently he had some Indian guy working for him, making a website, working on fancying up his PowerPoint presentations, and something else. My uncle felt he wasn’t getting what he was paying for and made it known. In response the guy up and quit leaving his website leaning to the left and generally broken. It is his hope that I can fix this. After retrieving and changing the passwords for the control panel and the FTP account. We talked about what he wants. Nothing too fancy, but professional. I think that I can do that…I hope. I never tried to sell my coding services because I didn’t feel they were up to snuff and people would get upset and call it shit…like what happened to this Indian guy, but his really wasn’t all that great, hopefully I can do better. We then took the tube home and decided to give the fireworks down at the Thames the finger. Over the course of the day I had been rebuilding my N810 internet tablet as the backup I had used had stuff I didn’t want and some junk files that messed up Bluetooth syncing. By the time we got home, I had most of the applications that I wanted installed. I then tried one last ditch attempt to get my tablet to show up as a networked computer on Windows. By chance I found a number of installs claiming to be Samba, a Unix network filesystem that I had heard people throwing around when I first tried this. After a bunch of fooling and googling around I found info telling me what I should do to get it to work. Meanwhile my tablet had showed up in the network browser, only it wouldn’t let me open the folders as the root user so I had to figure out how to add a user. It worked. I was happy. Then I tried deleting a file. Copying a file. I didn’t have the permissions to do it. I think googled everything I could think of to give my new user read/write/execute rights. Nothing seemed to work. I thought I’d reboot it and try logging in as root again. When it came back up it was still using the same user “eriq,” damn. Oh wait, it just let me delete a file. Apparently restarting did something. And now it works. I have two wireless drives that I can easily move stuff to and from–so much easier than the USB cable or taking the Micro SD card out of the Mini SD card adapter out of the hard to get at slot on the tablet and putting it into the Micro to SD card adapter and into the reader on my computer. Wireless is awesome.

P.S. (Access N810 over network with samba server) If that sentence there brought you here looking for a way to get that working, leave a comment.

Day Nine: The Day Batman Died

Selkcip — Tue, 08 Sep 2009 01:32:27 +0000

Stayed up late again and slept in. Didn’t go with my dad to drop off my application for a tech internship, but apparently it’s a chopshop where they take recycled computers and rebuild them for non-profits. Dismantling and rebuilding computers? Hey that’s what I’ve been dong since I was six…at least the dismantling part. Our landlord finally gave me the DSL info so I fucked around with the routers and managed to get the newer one working. Yay! My dad also got a wireless printer, which was unnecessary because the router has a networked printer server setup thingy. It was easy to set up on my laptop, but I wasn’t able to just pick it up on my dad’s netbook so after fifteen minutes of fucking around I had to share my DVD drive and then fuck around some more because I had to turn off password protection on shared folders. Got that working and then tried my mom’s laptop. Unfortunately there’s no Linux driver for the printer and no substitute, so she’ll have to use the netbook if she wants to print. Then I finished off Batman:TAS. I started watching episode eighty-six and realized something was wrong. Right off the character art style looked different and not in a good way. Something was missing, maybe they were less detailed. Whatever the case it was wrong. I looked it up on Wikipedia. After eighty-five episodes they stopped. They went on to other projects like Superman:TAS. Then a while later they came back and made twentish new episodes, but this was The New Batman Adventures. It really was new. So I stopped. Wasn’t worth watching a cheap knockoff even if it was by the same people. On to the next series: Farscape.

Day Six: Not Fast Enough

Selkcip — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 00:59:16 +0000

Almost a week here and I still haven’t done much. Went shopping for food again today, but mostly swore at the router which has apparently decided it’s going to fuck off whenever it wants. There’s another one here, but I can’t test it until I get the password for the DSL. A new wireless DSL modem/router would cost forty-five pounds (seventy-five dollars). I managed to eat an entire box of Cadbury’s Fingers in pretty much one sitting. I’m going to get fatter this year, but maybe it’ll help when winter hits. A tech company that my dad recommended me to sent me an application for an internship, but the PDF wasn’t a form you could fill out on the computer and send back, not exactly promising. We also don’t have a printer so I can’t print it out and send it. My dad says he plans to buy a printer tomorrow. We’ll see.

Day Four: Out and About

Selkcip — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 02:33:39 +0000

I meant to wake up at ten in the morning. I woke up at seven. I went to bed at two. After finally figuring out where to put my laptop so as to not burn/melt/crack anything I played TFTwo for about an hour completing an entire game (getting two hundred and eighty nine points) without the internet cutting out. Although my ping was at a near constant one eighty to one ninety, it played smoothly. I’ve now determined that the router resets whenever a computer connects…or when it feels like it. I had planned on going out, but I had no money and by the time I was done with the game, my mother had fallen asleep. When she did wake up I helped her with her laptop and we eventually went shopping. The city does not smell very nice. I took some pictures on our journey to Marks and Spencer. The first thing I wanted a shot of is what is called the gurken, a large, pickle-shaped office building:

Giant Pickle

We walked through the place where (according to my mother) the Diagon Alley scenes of Harry Potter were filmed. I couldn’t give a shit, but I figured Emma would be mad if I didn’t take any pictures:

This is for you, Emma.

When we got to Marks and Spencer I found this:

Might have to get this for my birthday.

Then there was Lloyd’s Tower which looks like something from a dystopian mining facility, but whose picture is currently sideways. When we got home I fiddled around on the computer for a while and then Princess Mononoke was on and having never seen it I felt I should watch it. I did. It was of course very good and trippy. Then I fiddled on the computer some more. We’ll see how sleeping goes tonight.

Day Two: Sunshine

Selkcip — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 02:38:10 +0000

It was hot and sunny today. This fact disappointed me. We had lunch with my dad’s cousins, their children, and their parents. They belong to one of those country clubs. My parents got somewhat dressed up, but told me that jeans and a t-shirt were fine. Turns out it wasn’t the kind where they turn you away or give you dirty looks if you don’t look the part. My second cousin is sixteen, but is now taller than me. For dessert I had a Mars Bar ice cream bar, this requires further examination. After lunch we went for a walk around the club. In the process I realized I had lost my day pass for the train. When we got back the the clubhouse I found it where it had fallen out of my pocket when I had taken my tablet out. I promptly lost it again in the same manner, only realizing half-way back to the tube station. Next we visited my Father’s colleague whose family we are friends with. On the way we found a grounded adapter for my laptop (using it now). That was rather uneventful. By this point I was over the heat/sunny weather. On the way home we went through Brick Lane and had dinner at a Bangladeshi restaurant. Just about every restaurant was Bangladeshi and just about every one was completely empty. After we got home I spent a good amount of time trying to figure out how to fix the wireless. I thought that I needed to turn the modem/router into a gateway so that the wireless router would give out IP’s. I took a break while my mom checked her email (this was on my dad’s netbook) and plugged in my laptop and hooked it up to the HDTV. I tested Farscape and Batman:TAS. Despite the fact they are very low resolution they both looked just fine which is sweet. I then spent another few hours trying to get the wireless to work only to realize there was nothing I could do and that, in fact, it did work, but it was very flaky/finicky. Then I played some TFTwo. My laptop can play it at ten-eighty on full settings, but sitting on the couch, I can’t actually see anything. The lag wasn’t too bad, but because of the flaky internet, it looks like I might have to deal with frequent random disconnects. Seeing as it’s three thirty in the morning, I should probably go to bed.

Day One: Arrival

Selkcip — Sun, 30 Aug 2009 19:18:02 +0000

I’m on my tablet because I don’t have a cable or adapter for my laptop yet so I’m going to keep this brief. The flight from SF to Atlanta was uneventful. From there to London was also uneventful except for the old guy who couldn’t breath for a bit causing mild panic among the flight attendants. When we got to customs it turned out my dad fucked up and we couldn’t legally stay until the date we has planned because my mom and I weren’t on the visa and guest visas are only six months (we would be going two weeks over). The woman kept telling us how fucked up and that the British were very disappointed with us. I can’t legally get a job. We’ll see what happens in terms of deportation. The internet here is a bit fucked. There’s a modem and a wireless router, but the modem is also a router which I think prevents the wireless from assigning more than one IP address so only one device can use it at a time (others have to use an ethernet cable). Possibly three times daily Jack the Ripper tour groups of fifty plus people go by outside. There’s a group down there now with a rather loud guide. I haven’t gone out yet as I hadn’t slept much in the past twenty-four hours. I took a nap. Oh yeah, there’s an HDTV; it’s shiny.

Summer is…Lazy

Selkcip — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 07:41:58 +0000

So I haven’t posted for (wow, just looked, I started the last 3 post “So…”) a while, not that anyone reads this. Facebook is helpful for staying in touch with people I suppose, though i wasn’t able to find any of my friends from England. The last few days I’ve been trying to get Ubuntu running on my laptop. Ubuntu is actually a really great distro, it recognizes almost all your hardware out of the box (ok off the live cd) and is ready to go. However, my laptop is also a tablet and Ubuntu requires some configuration to get it taking advantage of this fact. I fucked up big time once and reinstalled (though it may not have been necessary, but it did get dvd playback working). Today, I finally managed to get it all working, except for the accelerometer (for which no driver exists). I then promptly fucked it up again somehow killing my keyboard. After a good deal of copying and pasting I managed to discover the problem and right it. The only problem is, now that I’m done setting up, what do I do now?

If by some chance someone trying to configure their tablet with ubuntu happens upon this post, I’d be happy to point you in the right direction.

More Cubes

Selkcip — Thu, 29 May 2008 19:55:03 +0000

I got bored with my old wallpaper, so I rendered a new one.