random thoughts to oil the mind

Month: July 2007

Skype for Oldies

There are times when I wonder how I ever survived without Knoppix as a tool for fixing PC problems on the fly. And give someone a CD and some basic instructions, and you can soon have a live terminal up ready to fix a whole host of problems. Yet I find being able to talk to the person on the other end often vital for solving problems, and more importantly, it can be a reassurance for when you make a cock up!

Normally I just install the latest version of Skype, sadly however the latest Skype 1.4 beta doesn’t work on Knoppix 5.1.1, and owing to legal issues previous versions have been pulled and replaced. Skype are prevented them hosting these prior releases, which meant I had to dig around a bit before I could find a copy of Skype 1.3, packaged for Ubuntu. Download this .deb package, and then run the usual command as root:

dpkg -i skype_debian-1.3.0.53-1_i386.deb

Voilà!

Quiet Moments

It’s been a full month since I last posted anything, which is a little too infrequent even for my liking. A combination of holidays, downtime and general idleness is to blame, but there are a few posts in the draft box which never quite got finished, and maybe one or two new things will crop up in the coming days. Also going to give the WPPA plugin a bigger trial and add a few more photos from around and abouts.

In the meantime, here’s something that’s been bugging me for a while. According to the UK’s highway code, and possibly many others, a vehicle overtaking a cyclist should allow the same distance as when overtaking a car, given the possibility that the cyclist might fall over, estimated at 2.0m or some such. But doesn’t that leave many cycle paths in the country technically in breach of this convention?

Powered by WordPress & Theme by Anders Norén