Maybe I have sold my soul to the devil, but I am freezing this blog in time and in future will be posting to: http://blog.bobcox.com.

One reason for the scarceness of posts here is it is a bit fiddly to do. So I have been playing with Google’s Blogger and it is certainly easy to use, easily allows postings straight from a mobile phone and is more readily tweakable than I had expected.

So just to say - new posts from now on will be at http://blog.bobcox.com which although still using my own domain name, is really hosted by the nice Blogger people.

Up to now I have either used a rucksack or panniers for carrying stuff while cycling, but the panniers seem unnecessarily large for normal day-to-day use and the rucksack tends to make me end up uncomfortably hot and sweaty.

Hence this new Agu Yamasha 475 Rack Pack which I bought from Chain Reaction Cycles for £34.99. The name sounds a bit Japanese but it is apparently made in Holland. In fact it may well be “Yamaska” rather than “Yamasha”, but I spelt it the Chain Reaction way. Anyway, it seems well made, is nicely padded inside to protect things like cameras and phones and has an adjustable, padded divider in the main compartment. There are loops for attaching a cycle pump and a clip for securing keys.

It secures to the rack with four velcro straps and can be extended upwards for extra space if required:

and for even more space, these small but clever pannier extensions unzip, fold down and clip to the frame like normal panniers:

Finally, it comes with a waterproof cover and also a shoulder strap for carrying when away from the bike:

How it stands up to heavy use has yet to be discovered, but certainly it seems to be a case of so far so good.

There does seem to be an awful lot of netbooks on offer at the moment. For me, the Samsung NC10 was an easy choice because it has an excellent keyboard - the keys are shrunk only ever so slightly - it has very good battery life and also does not have a shiny screen. It’s a personal thing, but I don’t like these glossy, highly-reflective screens, especially when used out of doors.

The only downside was the absence of choice of operating system. It was Windows XP or nothing. As I intended to install Debian Linux straight away, this meant paying Bill Gates for something I did not want and would probably just throw away: the so-called “Windows tax”. But the Samsung won in every other respect, so this was something I just had to accept.

A bit of research showed that the webcam, bluetooth, sound and wireless systems should all work ok with Linux so I went ahead and chose a blue NC10. At the time of purchase the other colours available were red and black.

Samsung NC10 (and a six inch ruler)

As the NC10 is too small for a CD/DVD drive, the easiest way to at least start this installation was with a bootable USB flash memory device, bootable SD card or a USB CD/DVD drive. I employed the latter medium as I had a drive available and used the “netinst” version of the Debian “testing” distribution, currently called “squeeze”. This involved downloading and using a 150MB iso CD image, available from this directory. This image contains all the basic stuff and the remainder of the installation was completed over the Internet from a local mirror site.

At the time of this installation, squeeze was using the 2.6.26 kernel. A little Googling had told me that although the Atheros wireless chipset was fully supported with the ath5k driver in the 2.6.29 kernel, the 2.6.26 one would involve a bit of fiddling with madwifi, so I opted to complete the installation using a wired network connection.

It’s worth adding at this point that preferring KDE to Gnome, the default desktop environment, I used the “desktop=kde” command line option when beginning to start the installation.

The next step was to upgrade to the 2.6.29 kernel, which was available from the “unstable” (aka “sid”) Debian repository, and wireless immediately ‘just worked’.

Well, it almost did. I had problems with seamlessly switching from wired to wireless LAN and this was cured by removing all traces of network-manager and installing wicd - which has been really excellent.

Samsung NC10, Debian Linux and KDE

Almost everything else worked properly apart from a few of the special function keys. Suspend to disk and suspend to RAM are both fine. Just shutting the lid also triggers suspend to RAM.

I have mapped several of the function keys to control the backlight brightness, switch the display off and on and also control sound. These key bindings make use of xbindkeys together with xbacklight, xset and amixer. I have had to write a couple of small shell scripts to get things just as I like them, but none of these was strictly necessary.

Battery life is a genuine six hours using wireless 100% of the time, but with the screen brightness set quite low (xbacklight set to 15-20%).

The keypad is a bit fiddly to use and a separate mouse/trackball does make life much easier, but so far, overall, I have been very pleased indeed with the NC10.

I’m ashamed to say I have started using Facebook a bit. Mainly to keep in touch with my daughters and other young people I know. I won’t ramble on about how it awful it is in general because this is much more specific rant. What really annoys me is how FB mangles the quality of my uploaded photos. They’re not just compressed a bit more, somehow they fiddle with the colour balance as well.

Here is a picture of Holley on Bella exactly as I uploaded it to Facebook, and here is the same image after Facebook had a go at it.

Ok, the difference may appear to be subtle, but I still find it very annoying.

By the way, you can stop them resizing images by keeping the width and height of uploaded images to a maximum of 604 pixels, which is at least something.

I took Annabel to a large car supermarket on the outskirts of Newport yesterday to collect her new (well, one year old) car. This is the first time she has owned a car and it’s fair to say she was very excited indeed.

Here are some more pictures.

A couple of days ago the old Land Rover and I were persuaded to tow a hired horsebox, with both of Holley’s ponies on board, to the New Forest and back for her and Claire to ride. Although I was terrified at the thought of the responsibility involved, it was a very successful day and we all had a really good time

The Ifor Williams horsebox was excellent. It was smoother to tow than the caravan, probably because of the twin axles. Although much smaller than the caravan, its weight, with both ponies on board, was every bit as obvious and unfortunately it turns out we barely managed 20 mpg overall.

Here are some more pictures and also a short YouTube video of our day out. (That URL has the “&fmt=18″ appended so it should open in their so-called high quality mode).

I run Debian Linux on three separate Linksys NSLU2 “slugs” and these are used here as (1) file, mail and webservers, (2) backups for (1) - and (3) webcam motion detection and webserver.

The NSLU2 was originally intended as a simple NAS device, but can easily be made into a “headless” computer running (amongst other possibilities) Debian Linux and that is what I do with my NSLU2s, connecting to them using SSH via the LAN and also the Internet.

Unfortunately, the NSLU2 is no longer made and its performance is somewhat limited by its 266 MHz CPU and the 32 MB of RAM; although the latter can be increased, but not easily.

A possible replacement is the recently announced Marvell SheevaPlug:

This device is a Plug Computer and uses a 1.2 GHz processor and has 512 MB of DRAM plus 512 MB of flash storage. As with the NSLU2, connection with the outside world is via ethernet and USB sockets. Or rather, socket. The NSLU2 has two USB sockets; the SheevaPlug has just one mini-USB socket, but does have an SD memory card slot.

At present it is available from the US for $99 plus shipping, but before spending my valuable drinking vouchers, I need to find out how practical it will be to get Debian Linux installed. Apparently the latest Linux kernel will include support for the SheevaPlug’s Kirkwood CPU, so it is all looking promising. It ships with Ubuntu installed already and the documentation, at a first glance, looks very comprehensive.

Links:
SheevaPlug Development Kit - Manufacturer’s website
Review/information - T3.com
Review/information - linuxdevices.com

This is Holley with Blossom aka Blossie. Holley owns Blossie and Bella and Claire helps a bit with Blossie and takes her for rides a couple of times each week.

Today I paid them all a visit in their field on the outskirts of Bristol and took a few pictures.
Here are some more of these images of Holley, Claire and both horses.

A blackbird on Claire’s snow-covered Acer Palmatum Dissectum (aka the Expensive Twig, which is exactly what it was some 25+ years ago) in the back garden. Probably waiting for me to put yet more food out for him and his good lady. It’s still snowing a bit.

It snowed again last night. The webcam (see previous post) had been left on overnight - usually this is a bit of a waste of time because there is insufficient light to see very much.

For instance, this was the scene at midnight:

However, by 3am it was snowing hard.

Notice how the overall light level has been increased by all the white stuff despite it still being the middle of the night:

Shortly after 5am, I was weird enough to get up early and try to take some photos with streetlamps the only illumination: