Ignored Ambience

Wow. This week has been unusually quiet, given the insane busyness of the weekend. Time flys too quickly, it just goes missing.

Wednesday last week was the Canning Town OSM mapping party, great fun was had discovering one massive twiddly and insanely boring housing estate in Beckton - I’ve yet to map it up Anyways, that’ll be done soon, hopefully, or I’ll get the wrath of smsm1 on me, hell, I also need to organise the Croydon one!

Last weekend was the first UK Geocaching Mega Event it was quite insane, 3 events over the weekend that I was there. I got to met up with loads of people I’ve talked to online through the forums and irc. Particular credit goes to Dave and Mary of the purple_pineapples for essentially being my host for the weekend, I tagged along with them and Helen in Mustardland(+), who I met on the train to Harrogate.
As I was saying, the weekend was great fun and absolutely manic - more than 30 caches in the two days, 22 alone on the Sunday. The Saturday’s fox hunt event was a great twist on geocaching - it adds competition to the sport, especially the aspect of real-time FTF races! I’ll note I got my first 2 FTFs in a close race with TMM and TDW.

So, what now? I left with 180 finds, and on Thursday decided to go out for 17 more to boost my total to 197 - ready for a fun cache for the 200th. Unfortunately, the day went disasterously, finding only 5 of the 10 I attempted, so I dropped it and went back home.

And on the Friday, I purchased a nice (discounted) laptop. In the several years since I built my desktop machine, computer prices have become phenominally low, this laptop is more powerful than my desktop machine and almost as expensive (I never actually did do a full check on the price of it as building it). I’m in two minds now whether to ditch the desktop altogether, as it is a noisy and its performance has really been grinding on me recently. It must be because software demands now expect good powered machines, the 256MB of RAM and 1.4GHz processor must not be enough to run the Gnome desktop anymore, which is a shame, since the one thing I (theoretically) liked about linux was its simplicity. WTF am I talking about? Gnome is anything but simple…
If only OpenBSD were a good desktop system, I really should look at a nice lightweight wm that looks ok, (or just look at the config files closely for some of the not so good looking ones). The only issue I’m likely to have there is with the sound, it’s sound support is lagging behind linux by some way, I found it doesn’t ‘just work’.

So, now onto the laptop, it’s a HP Compaq 6720s, 2GHz Celeron processor, 1GB RAM, a do-everything optical drive and 80GB HDD. I think it is good value for £270, I particularly liked it over the other model eBuyer were doing for the same price, due to it being lighter and having a longer battery life.
The one issue with it is the preinstalled software, and in particular the OS - Windows Vista, I’m wondering if I should give it the benefit of the doubt and see how it goes, or just nuke it and start a cycle of testing Linux and BSD to see which will work with the hardware I have. Again, the issues I forsee are the sound support and possibly also the Wifi, since I’ve not seen this broadcom chipset on the OBSD hardware support pages yet…
I’ll just do a battery drain test on low use to see how long it lasts, Vista recons 3 hrs 30 on a full charge…

And finally - todo:

• OPLS Site
• Canning Town Mapping
• GM maps script
• Laptop setup
• Desktop setup
• Server 4.2->4.4

Great…

This entry was posted on Saturday, August 9th, 2008 at 11:45 PM and is filed under General. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.