will.pimblett

1. Uni & A New Project

   Tuesday 18th October 2011

   Three weeks of Nottingham down, quite a few more to go… But anyways a new project is in the works! Very very early days now but this could be be fun. Essentially it’s a modern (audio (mainly)) podcast directory, designed for discovering and exploring new content. Lots of bells and whistles involved… so ‘watch this space’!

   Also I was supposed to start looking for freelance work at some point… (and do a engineering degree)

2. 

   Guard Tower on The Great Wall

   Monday 19th September 2011

3. 

   DSC_0454

   Tuesday 13th September 2011

4. 
5. 

   Rural around Datong

   Monday 5th September 2011

6. China (Pre photos)

   Saturday 3rd September 2011

   I’ve been in north China for the past week (beijing, datong, pingyao) with Joe and Garrood. and have loads of awesome photos. Will post in the next few days when I have proper wifi. Currently waiting for the night train to pingyao.

7. Ubuntu - get your act together!

   Tuesday 23rd August 2011

   I like Linux, I like Ubuntu. I’ve used Ubuntu on servers and the odd low power laptop for years now and with little hiccups. I’ve almost come to trust it, that is until this week.

   We’ve got an old Dell desktop at home (XP generation so ~ 8 years), runs Win 7 near perfectly out the box. It’s been doing so for while now and is starting to get a bit slugish - so I thought we’d kick out Windows and stick Ubuntu 11.04 on, i’d be easy I thought!

   Installing was painless, almost enjoyable. It magically fits into any space on your hard drive, leaving Windows still working - which I thought would be an idea before I got this up and running. The install finished and all was well.

   Rebooted, GRUB loaded, Ubuntu started up. I’d opted for auto login so nothing came up it just started loading the desktop. Except there was no desktop, several reboots confirmed this. The ‘new and amazing’ unity thingy was not loading and was not falling back to something else and there wasn’t the option to load something else on the login screen because there was no login screen. Gah!

   This got solved with a google or two into how to re-enable the login screen from the terminal… so now we’re in Ubuntu classic yet it feels very choppy and sluggish. I fire up the closest thing that Ubuntu seams to have to a driver manager: the additional 3rd party driver manager tool that promptly informs me that the Nvidia driver that will make things work is ‘installed but not currently activated’. There is NO WAY to activate this, I’ve set the Xorg config, I’ve reinstalled the Nvidia stuff, fiddled with compiz, everything. Why is such a fundamental part of an OS missing in ubuntu, there is no GUI tool to tell me what drivers are loading and what are being used. Nothing.

   I hate this, I’d really like to like Ubuntu but by god they’re making it hard. The main problem is to take from this is that Windows (in the Mac sense) does just work! Ubuntu makes setting up an Hackintosh build look easy (my main machine).

   I may try 10.10, might work better.

   UPDATE: Seams to be Ubuntu theme for quite some years, from 06: http://joyeur.com/2006/11/03/official-i-am-leaving-ubuntu-for-windows-vista/

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