School Quotes

Child yesterday:What time is dinner?
Me: Same time it always is.
Child: But we went back an hour....

Made my morning.

Pimping XP

As usual I've been tinkering with windows, recently in effort to get it to be more Mac like than just having an apple sticker on it, and this week, much success has been had!
I have found windows expose (go to Descarga (Downloads) on the left and there it is along with a few other bits of goodness)
Other wonderment to make your XP look all shiny is Rocket Dock a very nice looking dock that does that nice mac looking thing when you move over an icon.  Try it, you might like it.  This can be used with another of those bits of goodness of Matias Moreno, the stacks doclet.  You can either get it direct from their site, or from the addons section of the Rocketdock site.  The stacks docklet lets you open folders from your rocket dock in a very cool Mac looking type way, download and put into your /Rocket Dock/Doclets folder and right click on the dock and it's all you need to get you started..  For even more eye candy Winflip gives you that vista/ coverflow feel for alt-tabbing, Ubericon from the rocketdock bods makes your icons do cool things when you click on them throughout windows, AND your dock.  From microsoft Taskswitch.exe makes even your standard alt-tab a bit more swish, and, finally a simple but very nice looking virtual desktop program Desk Hedron will make the eye candy goodness complete.  Maybe.  Enjoy.

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A New Blog...kinda

I stumbeled across this rather odd thing where a website checks the activity on your microsft gamer tag and then turns it into a blog for you 360 Xbox console.  Obviously I signed up, and now my XBox is blogging more than me.  Ah well.
It's early days et, but if you want to have a look here's the link.

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Summers gone

Well, it's back on the dole after spending the summer, well July and August, teaching Italian teenagers to speak better English as well as dragging them round Chester, Manchester and Nottingham. The job was in Sheffield where I was a residential teacher, or as my job description would have it...an EFL Entertainer. Things I've learned about Italians:
1) They walk soooooo slowly. Pensioners would overtake us as we meandered along through the drizzle.
2) They like their mothers cooking. English food was all potatoes, potatoes, potatoes and too spicy. This despite the fact that the food was usually of good quality and very tasty.
3)They actually do say mama mia!!! I was surprised.
4)They can't cross roads. The group starts to cross, a car comes round the corner, the students still cross, the car gets closer, closer...the students ignore it and keep crossing like lemmings over the cliff, out infront of the oncoming traffic they walk...
5)Three essential words in Italian: Regatzi, Andiamo, Velochi. Attention, lets go, quickly.
That's about it really.
In other news had a nice time at Greenbelt and went to Haworth for the weekend to do that Bronte thing. Even got to ride on a steam train!!

I'm going to get medieval

Before going to the bodyworlds exhibition today we went to Tatton park where there was a medieval weekend. As we were walking around I commented that it's the kind of thing Robin might be at, only to walk around the corner to see him in full battle dress. This pic is of him marching onto the field of battle while I heckled from the sideline.

 

Not Robin:

 

The pitched fight to the death.

 

New addition

All was excitement this morning when, upon looking out of the kitchen window I spotted a hedgehog in the garden. Upon further observation it seems to be setting up camp underneath the garden shed. Photographic evidence to follow.

 

Ubuntu Samba Server

The most exciting things this week have been the arrival of all my boxes from Korea, so I'll be joining Alex and John online this week in some Halo madness.  The other exciting news is that I've managed to do something with linux!  Rach had a dead pc upstairs, so after resurrecting it with a ten quid hard drive I've installed Ubuntu server, plugged all the external hard drives in it and now we can wirelessly access the many files on the many usb drives!!!
for anyone interested, and to help me to restart it all in the future when if all goes wrong...
here's what I did.

Download Ubuntu Server
Install it on the knacker ed machine in the corner.  This is a fairly painless process.

When asked install LAMP, SSH and Samba.

When it's all finished type: ifconfig

make a note of the number with lots of dots in it, 192.178.1.1. or something like it.  Switch off the monitor, unplug the keyboard and switch on your windows pc and download a program called putty.

In the host name box type that number

This should open a window that now controls your server!!!!

Log on.

type: sudo apt-get update
type: sudo apt-get upgrade

just to make sure alls up to date.

type: sudo fdisk -l

make a note of the names, eg sbd1 or sca3 or something like that. Next make directories where you want to find your hard drives, so something like /media/movies1 you'll need to do this for each usb drive you have connected to the server.

eg type: sudo mkdir /media/movies1

Next edit this file so that when you start up your server it will let you find your files in the directories you just made.

type:sudo nano -w /etc/fstab
nano is a simple text editor.
Add the following line for each drive:
/dev/sbd1   /mnt/media  auto    users,owner,rw,umask=000    0   0

changing sbd1 to the names you noted earlier.

type:sudo mount -a

Last step.
type: sudo nano -w /etc/samba/smb.conf

scroll down to the bottom of this document and add

[movies1]
   path = /media/movies1
   public = yes
   writable = yes

one for each drive, change the names from movies to whatever you called yours earlier.

Check your network neigbourhood on you windows pc and the drives should be there!!!
Now i just need to work out how to get the xbox to read them....

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