mattjones.me.uk

Opentech 2009 is being held in London on the 4th July 2009.  I will be going if everything goes to plan, based on the talks from previous years it certainly looks very interesting. It’s only a fiver too.

What did you do with the The Big Picture? I made a laptop skin/sticker. This was the third attempt, its still a little rough(A signmaker I am not). I will see how it lasts.

I did have to alter the image slightly, moving the ORG and NO2ID logos up a bit. For the altered version sized version, just email me and I will happily provide it, I don’t have a great deal of bandwidth available at the moment! It is under the Creative commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic, the same as the original image.

Freedom Not Fear

 I am typing this post from my newest purchase, an Asus Eee PC 701. For those of you who have not heard of this, which stone have you been hiding under?

This is a very small latop with a seven inch LED screen, a 900(sort of) celeron processor, and 512 Mb of ram.

The form factor of the laptop is excellent, despite the diminutive size, the keyboard is actually quite good, the keys feel like they are where they should be, so typing for a long time is actually quite easy.

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I picked the Brother DCP 330c up in Stationery Box for £45(with student discount It is a all in one printer, that has direct printing and sojme other nice features, such as 4 individal cartridges (which are not chipped in anyway, they are just an ink tank.)

Here are the Instructions to get it working easily in Ubuntu (These instructions are based around Gutsy, but should work in earlier versions similarly)

First, you need to download the drivers from the Brother website. They need to be done in the following order.

1. dcp330clpr-1.0.0-9.i386.deb

Download this to the desktop, and double click to install using Gdebi.

2. dcp330ccupswrapper-1.0.0-10.i386.deb

Download this to the desktop, and double click to install using Gdebi.

Once these are installed, you need to open the Printing Configuration program, under System>administration>Printing.

Enter your password

The driver installation will have already install a printer named dcp330c. However, this does not work properly

To fix this,

1. Click “New printer”
2. The System will search for attached Printers.
3. In the next window, select Brother DCP-330c USB#1
4. In the next window, select Brother as the manufacturer if it is not already selected.
5. In the next window, Select DCP-330c CUPS as model, then select the reccomended driver in the right hand pane.
6. In the next window, you can change the name of the printer if you want, and then click apply.
7. Job done, The printer works like a charm.

I have not investigated using the scanner yet, but It looks like there are SANE drivers on the Brother website

I was trying to transfer some photos that I had taken from my windows 2000 laptop(Yes, I know I’m a Heathen who hates freedom, but I haven’t got Ubuntu to start up on it yet) to My Ubuntu Studio graphics machine(and vice-versa) to do some processing. I am using a Disgo 1gb U3 drive. This caused some problems when I bought it as it contains software that installs on every PC you plug it into. A quick removal of the U3 Software quickly sorted that out.

When I tried to copy the files over, the Ubuntu studio machine popped up an error message about having no free space, yet showed as being an empty drive. When plugged into the windows 2000 laptop, it showed up all the deleted files in .trash-matt. obviously this is not being emptied on ejecting the drive. This is common across the couple of drives I have tried. This is really annoying, surely it would be easier to show the trash folder, as then the user could decide to delete it. Another solution would be to empty the trash folder on eject so that it is cleaned out. Any solution to this problem would be greatly appreciated.

This is not some deep philosophical post, but to serve as a reminder of how easily other people can find you, or me, or anyone else. Prompted by a discussion on a forum, I searched google for the handle that I commonly used on various sites. The results were somewhat startling, as It brought up what I listened to, What I had watched and commented on on youtube, where I had shopped and reviewed the products, and other hobbies I did.

I have another name that I use on sites that I want to remain fairly anonymous, and if you searched for that you would get a bazillion hits, but the photobucket account that I used is one that I use for all sites, so served as a link between the two. This serves to show that someone given a name that I used to get support on a piece of software that I used, can find out a huge amount about my life. I recommend using a variety of different names on the internet, and to pick names that will not stand out in a google search.

LUGRadio Live 2007 Arrives This July

People of the world, prepare yourselves for LUGRadio Live 2007 on the 7th and 8th July 2007 in Wolverhampton, UK. In its third year, the award-winning community-driven LUGRadio Live event brings together the finest minds in Open Source and free software from all over the world including:

* Chris diBona (Google)
* Alan Cox
* Nat Friedman (Novell and the Linux Desktop)
* Aaron Seigo (KDE4)
* Ted Haeger (TBC)
* Simon Willison (OpenID)
* Scott James Remnant (Ten Really Cool Things)
* Matthew Garrett (Linux Laptops)
* Rob McQueen (Telepathy)
* Thomas vander Stichele (Flumotion)
* Karl Lattimer (Wine-doors)
* Christian Schaller (Fluendo)
* John Leach (ELER: Kill Your Tribal Elders)
* Michael Sparks (BBC Research)
* Des Burley (I Am a Lawyer)
* John Alfred Knottenbelt (Making Linux games at Introversion)
* Malcolm Yates (ISVs and Ubuntu)
* Szilveszter Farkas and Jelmer Vernooij (bzr-gtk - Revision Control Made Easy)
* Laszlo Pandy (Inside Jokosher)
* Daniel James (Free software rocks)
* Ben Lamb (Konquering the Desktop with KDE4)
* Kat Goodwin (Alternative Advocacy: Taking it to the schools)
* Bruno Bord (The Great LUGRadio Quiz)
* Becky Hogge (Open Rights Group)
* Gervase Markham (How To Win Every Argument)
* Joe Born (The Path to the $100 Embedded Linux Media Center)
* Gareth Qually (OSS Graphic Design Tools)
* Michael Sheldon (SabreGL - Easy 3D Game Creation)
* Barbie (Selenium)
* Andy Davidson (Scaling up for Champions)
* Pablo Ruiz Múzquiz (Desktop migration in a Savings Bank)
* Dave Neary (OpenWengo Communication and Community)
* Michael Barker (Meldware and the Buni Dev. Community)
* Philip Coombes (Open Source Video + Domestic Security)

In addition to this fine selection of speakers,a number of special sessions are planned including:

* Adam Sweet’s Gong-a-Thong Lightbulb Talk Extravaganza - a number of three-minute sessions will be presented, compered by the newest member of the crew, Adam Sweet, in a “unique and very LUGRadio” way. Not to be missed, and we are looking for people to be a part of this hour - contact us at show AT lugradio DOT org if you want to get up and speak about something that interests your for three minutes.
* The Mass Debate - Once again we line up the great and good in the free software and Open Source community to battle it out in the legendary mass debate.
* The Hour Of Power - A big hit last year, we again have The Hour Of Power penned in this year in which a range of cool demos will wow and entertain you. If you have something cool to demo mail us at show AT lugradio DOT org and we can add you to this impressive hour. There are limited slots, so get in quick!

It has been announced today ,in several places, that the proposed scheme by the Chinese Government to force all bloggers to register on a central database has been toned down. People will now be only ‘encouraged’ to register their details. This is a promising sign that the Chinese Government is waking up to the fact that free speech on the internet is a crucial part of the way the internet works. The reason that this scheme has been reviewed has been mainly due to the technical difficulties, as Bloggers who used a service located outside of China would effectively be invisible.

Another reason may be that the Chinese Government were getting concerned about the negative press they were receiving from many of the countries who help to keep their economy afloat. I would like to think that they were thinking of the freedom issues surrounding their proposal, but this decision appears to be more of a technical issue.

As promised, the photos that I took on Friday are back online, Here. If you want a full high quality print, just send an email to matt@mattjones.me.uk and I will get one printed for you.

As you may have noticed(or not as the case may be) the site now looks substantially different as to before. This is because I have moved away from Joomla for my site, because, as brilliant as it is, it was a tad overkill for my small site, and required faffing around quite a bit. Wordpress is much simpler, and hopefully, I will add more content than before, as it is so much easier.