jcm's blog

I’m thinking about having a little gathering before I leave the country at the end of the month. Depending upon the level of interest, I’ll either try to book somewhere or not. Anyway. If you’re interested in meeting up then send me an mail with some idea of when over the next few weeks you would be around.

Alternatively, I’m also visiting parts of the country in my spare time. Next weekend, I’m at the EMPEG meetup in Cambridge (with Mr MightyMouse) but aside from that, I’m more or less around on weekends. I’m back in the country to give a Masterclass at LinuxWorld London in October, but let’s try to have a leaving party before I actually leave. My preference is for London as a central venue.

Oh, new category on this blog “Living in the US“.

Jon.

So, I spent all of Friday sorting out the final paperwork. I was in London all day, and about 6 hours in or around the US Embassy at Grosvenor Square. And I’m now finally able to say that I’m definately leaving the country on October 1. Between now and then, I have a lot of final TODOs, visits to see friends (in what little free time there is), packing, and all that jazz. But I’m looking forward to it.

I bought an iPod nano to celebrate. They rock.

Jon.

So I upgraded Wordpress after playing with themes and deciding I’d get more mileage out of doing that. I’m experimenting with widgets as an alternative to the sidebar hacks that often appear in wp blogs. Let me know what you think…

Jon.

I bought my first WRT54GL last week. It arrived, I briefly marvelled at how well it was packaged, then turned it on, shoved OpenWRT on it and all was well. Now that’s what I call a cool Embedded Linux device. Not only does it run Linux, but it’s also flexible and very very hackable. Definately not the D-Link ADSL-cum-crappy-modem that’s now sitting in the corner looking very unhappy with the world, in a few pieces.

In fact, I’ve decided that the best thing I can do to help my parents out with connectivity is get a el cheapo Conexant firmware based DSL router and have it bridge all external traffic through to this blue box. That’ll give me the flexbility to setup port forwards for them, to setup VPNs and video conferencing but without having to use anything other than this yummy Linksys goodness to achieve all of that. Linksys rock.

Jon.

Something strange happened tonight. My gmail account had no messages in it for a change. I’ve been steadfastly using gmail for various emailing for quite a while now, but tonight, there’s no mail in there and everything else has been backed up seperately.

Although I really quite like a number of the Google services, I’ve reached a point where I don’t feel comfortable using a Google Account to track my life. I dislike hosting any email with a third party but I tollerated gmail – because it’s Google, right? Yet still, I’ve realized that the only email solution I feel comfortable with is one I run myself – and now I think I’ve almost got the reliability I need too.

Jon.

So, I figured I should do my bit to help publicize John’s latest endeavor. You might have heard of Magnatune (if not, go check it out, Creative Commons licensed music rocks!) but you probably haven’t heard of BookMooch (yet). This is doing for book reading what magnatune has done for music listening, well, as closely as possible.

I first heard about the concept quite a while before it really happened – and I’m so glad it’s been well received so far. Effectively, BookMooch allows you to trade your unwanted books for tokens that allow you to have other books. There’s a fairness system to handle differences in international postage and a lot of people have signed up already. Including me. I’ve not got any books on offer at the moment because I’m about to ship stuff to the States – if I get time, I’ll try to offload a few unwanted ones via BM before I leave to save on shipping.

Jon.

Photo: High-Resolution Portrait Photos taken by John Palmer.

So, I need some photos taken for one of the writing projects I’m working on. They needed a high resolution Black & White portrait, and I decided I might as well get some stock photos to use. So I swung by a local studio yesterday and had these taken.

Jon.