Chris's Random Ramblings
Christmas came early this year when Kelly bought me a Playstation Portable. I've never owned a console before (portable or otherwise) and have always played games on my PC, but I absolutely love the PSP. The quality of the screen is really nice and big enough to watch movies on. I'm also really impressed by the quality of the graphics on the system. Will definitely be very useful on the long drives from Canberra to Adelaide to Melbourne and back to Canberra over Christmas as we visit all the relatives. The 802.11b wiki support also makes it a nice little web browser as well. Now I just need to find someone else locally to play network games with.
The disk in my laptop died last Thursday. Luckily it was alive enough to be able to get most of my data off and together with backups a few months old I don't think I lost anything too important. I spent all day and most of the evening recovering data off the hard drive onto an old T22 laptop. The disk in the T22 hadn't been used for about 18 months, so the distro required a bit of upgrading as well. Took a while to convince the old Debian unstable to upgrade to a recent version of unstable, including having to temporarily uninstall important packages like e2fsprogs.
Woke up on Friday morning to discover the disk in the T22 is also in the process of dying! It turns out the disk no longer likes to get too warm (which inevitably happens in a laptop). Scrounged around for another disk and managed to borrow a blank one off Martin, that happily also fits in my T41p (the T22 disks are slightly thicker than the T41 ones and so don't fit in). So I've spent most of Friday and part of the weekend reinstalling and recovering data. Have finally got to the point where I can send and receive email, but haven't got my development environment up fully yet. I did take the opportunity to install Ubuntu instead of Debian. So far I'm really happy with it - the installation was much easier and faster than previous experiences with Debian, though there were few glitches, probably specific to the type of laptop I have (had to switch between external and LCD display a couple of times when the screen went blank).
Will see how it well it handles installing a decent window manager, but so far I think I'll stick with it. Of course, when my replacement disk arrives this week (hopefully!) I'll be going through the whole installation process again.