cloudplasma various photographs and (oh too few) mini linux tips

8Feb/100

statue and mansions — glasgow architecture

maps — two examples of the var­ied archi­tec­ture in glasgow’s city centre. a statue at the top of a build­ing on sauchiehall street and st. george’s man­sions at the corner of wood­lands road and st. george’s road.

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6Feb/100

tower — gilbert scott building

the tower on the main build­ing (gil­bert scott) of the uni­ver­sity of glasgow.

map more info

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2Feb/100

browser benchmark — test yours with peacekeeper

future­mark (the people behind the fam­ous graph­ics card bench­marks) have a browser test avail­able on their site peace­keeper.

you can check out other browsers res­ults or test your own.

i only have three installed at the moment on ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 and my paltry res­ults can be seen in this screenshot…

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28Jan/100

underpass — blue neon lights

map

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27Jan/100

sansa fuze — replace firmware with rockbox

just replaced the firm­ware (think oper­at­ing sys­tem) on my sansa fuze v1 (8gb model) with the open source rock­box. when using the sansa’s ori­ginal soft­ware i was get­ting jumpy play­back and i wasn’t ter­ribly fond of the inter­face.
rock­box has a vast array of fea­tures and can be cus­tom­ised and fine tuned to suit the user’s needs and tastes.
the firm­ware, cur­rently, only works with the first gen­er­a­tion of the sansa fuze (v1) not the second gen­er­a­tion (v2) so check your play­ers ver­sion before attempt­ing any­thing. it also sup­ports vari­ous other mp3 play­ers so see if yours is sup­por­ted
there’s an auto­matic installer avail­able but i chose the manual method.
really enjoy using it so far. lots of fea­tures to tinker with and last.fm scrob­bling support!

a couple of screen shots of avail­able themes

Cabbie-enhanced-info by Bernd Fischer

FuzeRock by Terry Dale

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24Jan/100

upgraded to ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2

this isn’t a review but thought i’d write about the fact that i just upgraded to ubuntu 10.04 alpha 2 from ubuntu 9.04 on my main laptop (a dell inspiron 1545) and everything is func­tion­ing very nicely.

grab the iso here. i stuck it onto a usb key using unet­bootin and was ready to go (obvi­ously back­ing up all import­ant data before proceeding!).

i keep my home dir­ect­or­ies on a sep­ar­ate (encryp­ted) par­ti­tion so format­ted / and /boot but left the rest alone.

the install really is beau­ti­fully simple…it’s been well stream­lined over the years (a far cry from when i star­ted using ubuntu back with dap­per) and was com­plete in 10 minutes or so. all hard­ware was detec­ted out of the box…the cor­rect res­ol­u­tion set for the panel, net­work con­nec­tions work­ing (wired and wire­less), sound play­back and func­tion keys all ok too. after run­ning apt-get update quite a lot of updates are installed even though this is a recent release…after this is com­plete we end up with the 2.6.32–11-generic #15-ubuntu smp kernel.

hap­pily using this as my main system…encountered very few bugs so far (and they were trivial).

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24Jan/100

vodka and coke with red straws

just a glass of vodka and coke. used a wide aper­ture to cre­ate a nice depth of field and then tweaked the col­ours using curves in the gimp.

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13Jan/100

anniesland court — high flat

annies­land court is a high flat (tower block) loc­ated in the west of glas­gow, scot­land. it’s glasgow’s only build­ing of this sort to have ‘grade a’ lis­ted status. some more info can be found here.

map

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8Jan/100

spinning fairground ride at night

vis­ited win­ter­fest in george square over the hol­i­day period and tried some long expos­ure shots of the rides.

my first real attempt at this…i think they turned out ok. click a thumb­nail for a gal­lery view.

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29Dec/090

festive lights — royal exchange square

map

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