I’ve recently taken delivery of a new XPS M1530 notebook that I’ve lusted after for ages.  I decided to opt for one of the XPS models as Dell are offering the M1330 with Ubuntu 7.04, and the M1530 uses largely the same components, so I figured that I’d be able to install Ubuntu easily enough.

Well, after making sure that I’d backed up everything on Vista, I resized the partition using Acronis Disk Director to create some unformatted free space & put in the Ubuntu CD.

Everything went well, though I had to opt for the manual partitioning option as I wanted a separate /usr partition.

On starting the machine up, the first problem was the well documented touchpad issue (my unit shipped with revision A08 of the BIOS), but that was simply remedied by adding the following to the lines pointing to the Linux kernel in the grub menu.lst file.

i8042.nomux=1

Rebooting again revealed a fixed touchpad :o)

Next issue was installing a bluetooth mouse, the instructions for which were easily found using Google.

Finally I needed to configure the internal microphone as although it is installed, its not turned on by default.

I’ve now got a functioning laptop (I’m not too bothered that there are problems with the fingerprint reader & multimedia keys as I seldom use the latter & I’m sure that there will soon be fixes for the biometric sensor.

So far everything has been stable, it boots in half the time that it takes Vista & even with all of the graphical bells & whistles of Compiz installed, it still runs much better than Vista.

I’m by no means a Linux afficionado, but if I can manage to get a laptop configured with a minimum of hassle, then I have high hopes for the rise of Ubuntu & the fall of the MS Windows Bloatware.

Two words describe this film “Bloody” & “Brilliant.”

I was a little sceptical about going to see a musical, but then I thought that Moulin Rouge was brilliant so I thought I’ve give it a go, and I wasn’t disappointed.

The combination of Johnny Depp, Helena Bonham Carter and Tim Burton worked out brilliantly, and even the inclusion of Sacha Baron Cohen (which I dreaded) was well done and didn’t let the film down.  Alan Rickman plays a very good Judge Turpin, and there is even a cameo by Tony Head who congratulates Benjamin Barker at winning the competition.

The biggest surprise to me was that Johnny Depp can actually sing very well, I loved the performance he gave when crooning to his razors in “My Friends.”

Although Depp does a good cockney accent, I have to say that being a Pirates of the Carribbean fan, I kept expecting captain Jack Sparrow to pop up when he was talking.

I would highly recommend this film, its much more worthy of you time than Cloverfield.

I was a bit gutted when I got into Paddington, only to find that the Hammersmith & City, Circle & District lines were closed, that’ll teach me to check before I leave.

Anyway, that meant that I had a bit of a tedious journey down to Piccadilly Circus on the Bakerloo line, then onto the Piccadilly line to Hammersmith.  The bus to the Wetlands centre is the 283, and leaves regularly from the bus station, and takes you right to the front door.

The weather was great, clear skies, with just patchy clouds, but it was COLD.

The collections of captive birds in London aren’t as large as at Slimbridge, but I still had great fun trying to get a shot of a diving duck poised in mid air as it dives, unsuccessfully I might add.

There were however impressive flocks of Shoveler which were doing some kind of baitball thing that I’ve never seen before.  Lovely views of little grebes and the highlight of the day was seeing a great crested Grebe hunt and devour a small perch at close proximity near the Peacock Tower.  There were some good views of the very noisy Ring Necked Parakeets, but I finished off the day with excellent views of a snipe, thanks to the kind Canon Photographer who loaned me his 500mm lens and 2x convertor for a few minutes.

Trouble is that I now want one, but at £4k, its more than my car cost :o(

I hope to have my best images up on the website soon.

Today, as the weather forecast was good, I took a trip to the WWT reserve at Slimbridge.

The weather was cold with sunshine and broken cloud with a cold wind.

I managed to get some good images of the captive birds, and enjoyed going to the hides to watch the massive flocks of waders.  There were very large flocks of Lapwing and Golden Plover, but the star sightings were definitely some Spotted Redshanks and Ruff, but to cap it all off, we had a great sighting of a male Sparrowhawk from the Holden Tower.

I was hoping to get some good photographs of Starling flocks coming home to roost, but they are apparently not roosting at the reserve this year.

The sight of the Bewicks swans coming in to the reserve when the feeding starts is always impressive.

Overall I’ve been impressed with the Bug, and although I’d got full strength on the Digital1 stations, the BBC stations were a bit hit and miss, and as I’m a keen listener of Radio 1, 2 & 4, I was a bit disappointed.

I got some improvement by moving my DECT phone base station to the other side of the room, then as I have a Freeview PVR, I thought I’s plu into the rooftop Aerial and see what happened.

Wow, what a difference this made.  Now I have 98% signal strength for all of the BBC channels, and my channel count increased from 18 to 50!!!  I can now get many stations from London (some 50 miles away).

A quick trip to Maplins got me a couple of satellite cables with F connectors, a F splitter and a  couple of fittings to convert the F type cable into a conventional coax plug.

This cost about £20 in all, but its worth it, and I don’t have to worry about the BBC channels dropping out now.

Result.

My clock radio has been on the blink for a while now, so tonight I wandered into John Lewis to have a look at the DAB clock radios.

On the clearance shelf I found a Pure Bug Too.  I’ve wanted one of these since they first came out, but they’re now about half the price the were when launched, and as the one I got was a return with all manuals and cables, but no box, there was £20 off, so I got it here and then.

When I first set it up, I couldn’t get any of the national BBC stations, but after playing with the aerial length and moving the DECT phone base station, I could get everything from the BBC.

The unit, has a quirky appearance, reminding me of the Martians in the 1953 version of War of the Worlds, the radio even has eyes.

The LCD screen in large, and easily visible, it has the facility for multiple alarms and you can select what radio station you wake up to.  It has an SD card slot so that you can record programs and listen to them later, and it also supports the DAB EPG, so that you can view the schedules for the next 7 days.

You can also pause and rewind live radio for up to 4 minutes so you don’t miss anything when the phone rings.   The Bug Too has most of the features of the Pure Evoke 3, but at less than half the price.

I’ve read reviews complaining that the LCD backlight is too bright to use this unit as a clock radio, but I do not have an issue with the lowest brightness setting, and it does not light up the room like the reviews suggest.

One of my New Years resolutions this year was to watch less TV, listen to more radio and read more, and this is certainly helping me to do that.

If you can live with the quirky looks, then get one of these units, they’re fantastic.

I’ve been playing with the Garmin 660T that I got for Christmas, and have been very impressed.

Initially, I was annoyed to find that the unit didn’t have the integral FM transmitter, but £6 later and a trip to Amazon gets me a FM transmitter that plugs into the headphone socket and works a treat.

The FM Traffic signal is a bit dodgy, and doesn’t work very well, as a recent trip to Reading showed, but thats why I have the Trafficmaster unit as backup.  I got a signal for part of the way, but not for the most part.

I’ve tried uploading the SMC Contours (http://www.smc.org.uk/ContourMaps.htm), but these don’t seem to work on this unit, though they work well on Dad’s Nuvi 350 unit.

However, I have been playing with making Garmin TourGuide files.  I found a great guide on the Zumo Forums (http://www.zumoforums.com/index.php?topic=1566.0), but have found that the whole process is made much simpler by using a piece of software called GeePeeEx Editor, which only costs about £8 to register (http://geepeeex.googlepages.com/downloadlinks).

This has proved to be fun, and I have already created Tourguide files for the WWT Reserves, and also for BBOWT reserves, and I hope to do some more soon, and get them listed to my website, now that I have moved to my own hosting account.

After finding that my new phone gave me a signal where I previously couldn’t make a call, I decided to stay with Orange after all.

I now get 225 anytime minutes, 100 texts and unlimited evening/weekend calls to landlines, which suits me fine, and for £5 less per month than I was paying.

I decided that I wanted a new phone, as I’ve had the Samsung D600 for a couple of years now.

I’ve got several PAYG Sim cards to try out, as I haven’t been too impressed with Orange where I live, so might change.

I decided that I wanted a Sony Ericsson K800i, and picked one up from Carphone Warehouse today for £80, with £10 O2 credit.  The great thing is that because it came from Carphone Warehouse, it was essentially a Sim Free phone, so Mum can have the new sim card, and I’ll carry on using it with my Orange Sim.

An added bonus is that with the K800i, where I couldn’t get a signal with the D600, I now get a decent signal, so I think I will stay with Orange for the time being.

Phone is great, with a 3.2mp camera to boot.

Well, the day started badly.  When we got up at 08:00, we were greeted by news reportsn that there had been a huge amount of rain, and that parts of Boston were at a standstill due to roads being flooded.

We aimed to catch the 09:00 Airport Shuttle, but it didn’t turn up until 09:30, and our flight was at 10:30, so we were cutting it a bit fine, but luckily the journey only took about 10 minutes.  However, it got better.

We tried to use the electronic check-in, got to the stage of telling the system how many bags that we had, and it crashed out with an error.  We wend to a check-in desk, and were told that we needed to use the phone to the help line, but whilst we were waiting for an answer, our names were called out to put our baggage through, as the baggage tags had printed, but the boarding passes had not.

We had to join another queue, where some inconsiderate bastard was rebooking his entire flight, when everyone else in the queue only wanted their boarding pass.

We eventually got our boarding passes, and had to run to the gate, getting there just before it closed, phew.

We had a bit of a wait for the shuttle between La Guardia and JFK airports, but once we got to JFK, we had a 5 hour wait for our flight to Madrid.  Luckily I had the latest Potter to keep me occupied, and Alice had her Ipod, so it wasn’t too bad.

However, when we finally boarded, we found that we had a family of about 7 that included a SCREAMING baby, which was sat with its mum, next to Alice :o(

The mother eventually swapped seats with one of the kids, but the bloody baby spent a lot of the journey crying, meaning that not a lot of sleep was obtained.

Why the hell do people with small babies insist on flying, its not like the baby is going to remember anything from the trip, they should be banned for the sanity of the rest of the passengers.

Didn’t get much sleep, then had to put up with about 3 different passport and security checks at Madrid, and I thought that the US were paranoid.  In Spain, we had 2 people check our passport and boarding passes within about 6 feet of each other, I think thts a bit unnecessary!!!!

Eventually got back to the house at 11:45, only to find the front of our house still littered with the remains of the back boiler.  I checked my phone, and found that I had a voicemail from a British Gas person, and needless to say, I left them a message saying how disappointed I was at their service, I was absolutely furious.

Now been up for probably 26 hours straight.  Alice has gone to bed to get some sleep, but I’m going to try and stay up, and just get an early night tonight, but its not easy as I am bloody knackered.