Steve

Stevie Nicks on Absolute Radio

I’ve been a Fleetwood Mac fan for longer than I can remember, certainly the early 1970’s possibly before then as a kid. I’ve also loved to hear about the background to some of my favourite songs no matter which band it is.

I came across this interview this evening, absolutely brilliant and a very enjoyable hour listening to the music from that golden era as well as hearing Stevie. Moments like this have to be captured and savoured.

Absolute Radio Icons: Stevie Nicks by Absolute Radio on Mixcloud

New Filofax Shoulder Bag

I had never considered buying a Filofax bag until recently.

I spotted a Filofax bag on offer in their sale. It was still quite expensive but I had a discount voucher that I could use so it brought the price down a more sensible price.

So this is the Filofax Architect Portrait Courier, it’s rather smart don’t you think?

It came in it’s own dust bag which I keep it in when I’m not using it.

It’s bigger than I thought it would be. It has two main pockets which are very generous in size. Turning the bag over there is another slip pocket which will take an iPad or similar full size tablet. There is a grab handle at the top, and also a strap for looping the bag over a wheeled suit case handle.

The woven shoulder strap is very generous in width and it is also quite long too but it has a metal buckle to adjust the length.

Now in terms of what will fit inside. The smaller front pocket has a variety of slots for pens and cards but still has enough room for other small items too, including a personal size Filofax!

The leather flap has a zip pocket in it as well, plenty big enough for your smart phone or similar. The flap closes with a magnetic fastener in the middle.

The slim pocket on the back can take an iPad easily, it has a velcro tab at the top to hold it closed too.

The main pocket can take an A4 Filofax or an A4 size zipped conference folder easily. I’ve also tried it for size with my 10″ Netbook PC, and it slides in easily with space to spare. In the photo is an A5 Zip Holborn, that goes in sideways with plenty of room too. I think the biggest size of PC you could fit in would be a 11.6″ display one, such as a MacBook Air or a similar sized Chromebook.

A large ring size personal Filofax as shown here also fits inside the front pocket easily.

As you might be able to see on the detail of the front flap it is made of leather and textile lined inside. But the leather is a smooth finish and a pebbled finish in two distinctive panels.

Being a vertical format bag compared to the horizontal format of most messenger bags I find it retains it’s rigidity a lot better.

I’m very pleased with it, grab one for the man in your life for Christmas….

Apple iPod

The iPod has been a great invention. It was the first Apple product I/we owned. It was Philip my son who first made me aware of the iPod, he showed me the advert for the 1st generation iPod, it almost seemed to be too good to be true. A small device that you could slip in your pocket that could hold hundreds of CDs. I sat trying to work out how much storage space I would need for my full CD collection, which at the time was about 200 CD’s.

Before the iPod came into our lives I had been using a CD Walkman to play my music CDs on journeys and around the house. But it was limited in battery life and by how many CDs you could carry.

Before the CD I had a Sony Walkman, this was back in about 1983, at the time I lived and worked in Cyprus and I used to record audio tapes instead of writing letters and posted them back and forth in the mail. It sounds old fashioned but it was great getting tapes from friends and loved ones. I forget the exact model number, but I bought a Sony recoding Walkman which had a built in radio and a single speaker on the back and a built in microphone too, so it was quite a versatile device.

So anyway the Apple iPod, Philip was still at school when the first one came out, he was originally going to buy the 5Gb model, but me being me I offered to give him the difference in money to buy the 10Gb model.

iTunes was also a big improvement over Windows media player at the time. I was using that on my PC before I got my own iPod. I discovered Smart Play Lists and that has been quite a bonus for me, they present music to me that I’ve not listened too for a while and that means I listen to a lot more tracks rather than buy new ones all the time.

iPod

My own first iPod was a third generation 20 Gb model, not exactly a classic but it got me started. There were a few issues with this model, mainly battery life and also the battery charging indication, because it doesn’t control the charging very well, the battery would get overcharged and this in turn would limit the life of the battery. I have changed the battery on mine at least twice, a strong set of finger nails and good eye sight is all you need to get the back off to change it!

Eventually along came the iPod Touch in Philip bought a 32Gb 1st gen model and sold his original iPod.

I also upgraded my iPod to a newer model with a colour screen and a 60 Gb drive. Compared to my previous one it was a massive improvement on the user interface and battery life too. I still use this one in the car, it holds all of my music collection and I just synchronise it every few months.

I also bought an iPod touch in 2010 although I have used it for a lot of other things as well as listening to music. Alison now uses it for listening to BBC Radio 4 in the kitchen!

Alison joined the club with an iPod Nano, she listens to dozens of podcasts rather than music. I’ve recently started using this as it is so compact and light in your pockets.

Her mini disc player/recorder still works, but interfacing it to anything is a pain

Philip replaced the iPod Touch with an iPhone 4 which he has recently passed on to me

Alison now has my iPod Touch, it has replaced the 1st generation iPod Touch which still works but it is a bit limited in what you can do with it now, which reminds me of my Psion organisers really!

With wireless syncing of devices to our iMacs and iCloud we no longer need to connect the latest devices to our computers every few days, just a charger by the side of the bed or in the kitchen is fine.

Over 30 years of portable music devices since the Sony Walkman through to my iPhone, the technology has got better, but one thing hasn’t changed… the music I listen to. Steely Dan and a the rest of my music collection.

Living With Linux

Linux is an open source operating system that appeared back in the 1990’s possibly earlier. I’ve been using Linux in one form or another off and on since about 1993. In the early days it was just a command line system much like MS-DOS was around about that time before the days of Windows 3.1… yes computers haven’t always had a graphical user interface!

Back in the 1990’s I used Linux to run my amateur radio packet radio mailbox system a fairly niche application but at the time given the technology available it worked well and it supported all the different protocols I needed. I ran the mailbox until late 2003 and then due to a decline in users on the system coupled with a change to our house layout I closed the system down and more or less forgot about Linux. During my year off work in 2004/2005 I revisited Linux, by this time using Ubuntu with a full graphical user interface. Wow.. this is so much easier to install and use compared to the old systems I had been using.

I had bought an old PC with a small size hard disk fitted and I used it as a bit of an experimental machine, learn by my mistakes. If it went wrong then there was nothing in terms of data I was going to miss. So it was a great work horse to rediscover things on.

When we moved to France I had a big clear out of old PC’s that had been cluttering up the garage, I find it difficult to get rid of old working things! But I managed to rationalise what to keep and what to recycle, removing the hard drives and any memory and then cycling what was left.

Having cut my teeth on my old desktop machine and learnt how to set up Ubuntu I thought time to look at the remainder of the old machines we had. All Windows XP machines, all getting a little old and slower and slower. I picked the worse culprit… a Dell Inspiron 6000 laptop we had bought this machine in early 2005, but by 2009 it had almost become unusable on a daily basis, 20 minute plus boot times and running at a snails pace afterwards. We had both bought small lighter netbooks so the Dell sat in it’s carry case not doing anything.

I pulled it out and cleared any wanted data off it. Dropped an Ubuntu CD in to the drive and rebooted the machine. Tested it out first Wifi worked, Bluetooth worked, the trackpad and keyboard all worked so I carried on and did a full install of Ubuntu clearing the hard drive completely. The machine was instantly transformed in to a useable machine again. I don’t carry it around alot it tends to sit in our lounge and I use it whilst watching TV, but I use it on our longer trips back to UK, the bigger screen helps when editing documents. As you might expect the battery life isn’t anything to boast about, but the machine all works.

I’ve recently installed Ubuntu on another redundant desktop machine, this one was a bit more powerful, this time I installed it as a dual boot system, retaining XP on the machine and adding Ubuntu. When the machine starts you choose which operating system you want to use and off you go. All of my previous installs have been a complete install over the top of the previous operating system.

Getting Started

So how do you get running with Ubuntu? Well you need a PC obviously, ideally not your main machine, if you are a beginner then anything under 10 years old will be suitable It needs to have at least 5GB of free space on the hard drive if you are going to dual boot the system, 500MB of memory is the minimum recommended specification to run Ubuntu comfortably, more helps of course.

Download the software from the Ubuntu site, it’s free, but you can make a small donation if you wish. You can then create a bootable CD or USB drive The USB memory key needs to be about 4GB in size to work.

Put the CD in or plug in the USB memory key and start up the machine, if it boots in to the existing operating system you might need to start again and go in to the BIOS settings (F10 typically) to make sure that booting from CD or USB is enabled.

Wait a short while for Ubuntu to load and then you will be offered the chance to run Ubuntu or install it.

You will be running it from the CD if you pick the first option, it might be a little slow but it will give you some confidence that the machine is working and all the interfaces are working before you take the big leap and install Ubuntu.

So are there any disadvantages to using Ubuntu? Nothing really I can do most things without any issues, the installation includes things like Thunderbird, Firebox, Libre Office and a loads of other applications. Other applications are easy to install from the software centre. With the Dell I have a reasonable amount of memory installed (2 GB) and a reasonable size hard drive (only 80 GB) but if you have something bigger or more powerful naturally you will benefit. Plugging in my digital camera I was able to download the pictures off of it without needing to add any additional software. I can send emails and browse the web in exactly the same way as any other machine in the house.

The user interface is a little different, but with a few tweaks to the system it becomes second nature and you don’t have to remember or think ‘oh this is Ubuntu, how do I do this’ you just use the machine in much the same way as I do my iMac or a Windows XP machine.

I added some more memory to the desktop machine I recently converted to dual boot and it’s a very handy machine to have along side my iMac I use XP for a few legacy systems which I’m still in the process of getting working on Ubuntu. But the Ubuntu side of the machine is working well and it’s very quick.

If you haven’t tried Ubuntu yet you should give it a try…

Old School Drawing Tools!

I loved technical drawing at school. In my training I spent a couple of months in the drawing office updating building plans and the like. I remembered the other day my Rotring pens and stencils

I discovered them in one of my cupboards along with the drawing arm attachment. I bought all of these when I was working in Cyprus about 30 years ago. Surprisingly the ink hadn’t gone solid! I put some ink in one of the pens and gave it a try… it worked.

I was a little rusty as you can see about how to get the spacing right on the letters, but it was fun trying them out again.

I can remember in the late 1980’s using these stencils to label some Filofax dividers… none of your fancy labelling machines!

Last night I did a quick search for Rotring drawing instruments, the Isograph 2000 pens are still available, but gosh I was surprised at the price, they don’t appear to sell the same ‘8 pen set’ I have. They don’t appear to still make the A2 drawing arm attachment, but mine still all fits together ok.