Archive for the ‘Life’ Category

Video news updates are now live! Britney Planet is the first site to benefit from the new feature. Plus xmeltrut.com has a whole new system for posting (including uploading and storing video files) and editing videos (well the information at least) to deal with it. Playlists, etc are all in there too.

This is a result of finally getting my camcorder at Bod which works great with my new desktop which has a proper 6 pin firewire port and even more importantly, it’s frontside.

I also now have Adobe Premiere Pro which looks awesome. It has been redesigned and the tools seem a little wierd at first but I think I am getting my head around it and it has title overlays that can go over video and a whole new encoder, it’s pretty sorted.

I have a real urge to make a film now. I actually missed a film making meeting today but I think I might start scripting a horror movie that I can film here at Bod.

You and me baby, we ain’t nothing but mammels so let’s do it like they do on the discovery channel. To non-Bloodhound Gang fans that is probably all you will know of them but others will recognise classics as The Ballad of Chasey Lane and The Roof is on Fire.

They were playing today at Leeds Met. I only found out a few days ago and reminded on Monday night (possibly Tuesday morning actually, it was pretty late) so I went down to Leeds Met’s union and picked up a ticket, in the rain I might add, earlier today.

I turned up at the gig and met up with Tom and Ian from Grant house (aka, the house I’m in) and Matt from Seton house as well as a few girls that were hanging with them.

The gig itself was billed with two support bands but only on one website, the promo stuff just listed Electric Eel Shock who were the only support band that played in the end. They came on at like 8:00 and played a 40 minute set.

They were pretty good. They’re a Japanise band and all pretty mad. The frontman was entertaining and got the crowd going and the bassist was just wasted. He climbed on top of the piles of amplifers a few times. The drummer was cool too, he started just bashing the drums with his hands then playing the drums with two sticks in each hand.

At 9:00 (probably later actually, maybe as late as like 9:20) the Bloodhound Gang came on and with the acceptation of like a 10 minute break they played through until almost 11:00. They played pretty much everything they had with the exception of The Lap Dance is Better when the Strippers Crying.

They were awesome. They invited the audience to spit on one of the guitarists and to celebrate Leeds being “the binge drinking capital of Europe” (or so they claimed but it’s not impossible as nobody binge drinks like the British and nobody parties like Leeds ;)) he downed an entire bottle of alchol – not one of those alcho-pop bottles, a propper spirits bottle. He later threw it all up over Jimmy Pop’s ass, at Jimmy’s invitation no less.

I spent quite some time trying to get VNC working between my laptop and desktop. Didn’t work. Actually I didn’t spent that much time but with only about 40 minutes to set something up I opted for the Remote Desktop tool that is built in to Windows XP. And it actually worked.

The next step was to get it working in the wider world. IE, configuring my firewall and port blocking to allow the connections. After that step was done all I needed now was something to deal with the possibility of a dynamic IP address. Luckily NO-IP Duc came to the rescue combined with a scheuled task to run the application even if I wasn’t logged on at 8 am, 1 pm and 6 pm every day.

So I got home and tried to test it – it actually worked! The frame rate is of course aweful but that is to be expected. The point is I can log in and access all my stuff which I did last night when I needed to check something and I can even stream music and stuff over it by opening up media player on my desktop and playing whatever. Awesome.

So it turns out my host wasn’t kidding about the IP changes. They cut them off last night as far as I can make out as Branch Planet was working yesterday lunch time and wasn’t working when I tried it today.

I’ve been busy going round and making the changes and I think I have most of them but the reason I didn’t make them before is I simply don’t know what makes connections and what doesn’t. It’s only really now where I can see if a site has died or not that I know if I need to make an IP change and that is going to take me a while to complete the process at that.

I went into Headingly to get a new Serial ATA cable about an hour ago. Looking back I think the old one may have been working but this one is shorter so less messy in the case and Dell says a maximum of 450mm. I think the one I am using now is 450-500mm whereas the old one was 1,000mm.

Anyway so I went into bios and it was picking it up and it was even listed in device manager, it just wasn’t set up. So I downloaded the Seagate DiscWizard thing which does it all for you. It quickly formatted the drive and by the time it had exited the program, it was appearing in My Computer. Now I can begin transfering things over, item one, my music.

The reason my blog hasn’t been working properly recently was that my tmp folder was full. That has now been fixed so I can blog again but I wouldn’t have figured that out from the WordPress error message. I only worked it out from problems with my other sites. Hunting down other problems now but as a general guide – upgrading a server is not good. I’ve lost my GD functions now!

Yeeha! It’s sorted – finally both my computers can view the workgroup and each others shares! I have restarted my laptop and it still works, I’m too scared to restart my desktop and see if it still works though lol. Seriously, I can see it not working when I start up next time which I am really dreading.

Still for the moment I need to focus on other things. I am moving my printer over to my desktop as a the moment it is an extra wire on my laptop and this way I can just run it as a network printer to my laptop via my desktop. I am also thinking about doing the same thing with my external hard drive although once I get my new hard drive (250 gb Seagate, ordered today) I am going to use that as my storage drive and use my external hard drive as a backup drive I can take with me when I go home or whatever.

I really want to minimal the things attached to my laptop so I can pretty much to plug it in to my network cable when I get here and use it with all the network or I can take it away without having to detach a million cables.

The other thing I need to do is set up remote access to my desktop so that when I am at home and all my files are here I will be able to access them. It will still probably be limited by the transfer speed of the internet but I will still be able to get the important files like word documents and website code which I need.

Stuff like my emails and things are going to be staying on my laptop anyway as these are things I am going to need wherever I am and I am going to be going between Bod and home or wherever I am so I need anything I need with me always to be on my laptop. Then the other stuff goes on the desktop.

There are a few solutions for remote access I am thinking off, the main contendors are VNC and Citrix. VNC is good and free, I’m not sure if Citrix is free but the school of computing at uni use it so it looks pretty good.

I have my Windows reseller account back underneith it’s bandwidth limit but I want to continue migrating sites over to my Linux account. The first two I think I will work on will be Worfolk Music and Interstate.nu. Worfolk Music will be pretty easy to do while Interstate will require a little ASP to PHP translating.

I also bought Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas today and started playing it. It’s not a bad game from what I have played so far though the controls are really bad. Once I get into it though I’m sure it will turn a lot better.

Ok currently I have both computers on the internet, I think I mentioned that earlier. I keep getting steps closer too, now my laptop can access mshome, see both computers on the workgroup and access shared folders on both computers.

The desktop meanwhile cannot access mshome and cannot access the shared folders on my laptop but it can browse it’s own network path so slowly but surely I think I am getting there. I also need to make sure nobody else can access my shares though.

I’ve blogged live from DEC-10 and Eniac, now I’m blogging from Inca. But Inca is no computer lab, it’s the name I gave to my brand new desktop which I’ve just finished configuring with my router so that both my laptop and desktop can access the internet!

Now all I need to do is get them to talk to each other and I’m sorted! It’s a cool machine as you may know if you have read my previous posts. The 5.1 surround sound is cool though I need to test it at high volume to really appreciate it and in the early hours of the morning I doubt the people living on either side of me would appreciate it too much.

It also has a massive 17″ monitor which I’m currently running at 1152 x 864. It will go up to 1280 x 1024 but I quite like having it at this resolution, I don’t really need a massive screen size as my laptop runs 1024 x 768 and that handles things fine. What I really need now is a decent game to test the true power of this machine.