Reasons for not posting for a while
I’ve not been posting on my main site for a while. I guess the main reason is the house renovation. Follow this on my house blog. Secondly I’ve also been blogging for work. Nothing earth shattering, but it was about time.
In the meantime here’s a newt I found in the new garden:
I never noticed, but somebody rightly pointed out it is missing a leg. Poor thing.
Radio controlled hellicopters
Here’s A hapless fool’s foray into the world of radio controlled helicopters. Obviously far too much money than sense!
Jesus Green lock in high water
The melting snow put a lot of water into the Cam today. I’ve never seen Jesus Lock so full. There was only a 0.5 metre difference between above and below the lock gates.
As a kayakist in my past, I used to pray (figuratively speaking) for days like this. Seeing a river in spate used to get me excited, and watching the normally placid Cam, look ever so slightly turbulent was very reminiscent of that.
Here’s looking downstream. Note the boats alongside the flooded banks.
Google beta of Sync for mobile contacts & calendar is live
Google beta of Sync for mobile contacts & calendar is live: “
That thudding sound you’re hearing is the head-to-keyboard collision of everyone who, for the purposes of wireless PIM sync to an iPhone, renewed a MobileMe subscription last week. Google announced today that the beta Google Sync for Mobile capability, long a feature on the Blackberry, has now been extended to iPhones (via Microsoft’s ActiveSync), and also to other devices that support the SyncML standard. You can sync your Google-side calendar and contacts to your device of choice, free, bidirectionally, starting today.
There are a few caveats with this beta, as one might expect: the main one is that you cannot use the sync capability if you already synchronize with an Exchange account, as there can be only one ActiveSync config on the iPhone or iPod touch at any time. Setting up sync with Google will also nuke your local contacts and calendar on the device, so back up before you proceed. Still, this represents a big step forward in the delicate dance of Google services in cooperation with Apple’s mobile gear.
If you configure sync for your device, let us know how it goes! Early comments note that the lack of multiple calendar support is a showstopper — if that applies to you, check out the NuevaSync option. Update: You can apparently sync up to five calendars to the phone, see here for details.
[via Engadget]
TUAWGoogle beta of Sync for mobile contacts & calendar is live originally appeared on The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW) on Mon, 09 Feb 2009 14:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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(Via The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW).)
old-fashioned kernel upgrading
I keep the kernel on my Linux box fairly up to date. With more or less every point release, after my distro, Gentoo, has released a fairly ‘mature’ patched version, I upgrade. However, I’m thinking that I’m using some pretty old fashioned technqiues in doing so. For example I manually configure the kernel, my boot loader is LILO, and I do not use any of the distro’s helpers.
My usual procedure is:
copy the old config direct from /PROC and using the ‘oldconfig’ option update the config with all new options for the new kernel. Since I rarely leave this more than 1 version difference there’s generally only 20 or so differences:
cp /proc/config.gz gunzip config.gz cp config /usr/src/NEWKERNEL/.config cd /usr/src/NEWKERNEL make oldconfig
Once that’s done I compile the kernel using the bzImage image, and compile the modules and install them at the same time.
make bzImage && make modules && make modules_install
Incidentally that double ampersand is a cool shortcut. If the previous command ends with an error it does not run.
Once compiled, I change the /usr/src/linux link to the new kernel, copy it to the boot folder, add the new kernel to the lilo.conf file, run lilo, n reboot with prayer to whatever humanist non-deity you don’t believe in!
rm /usr/src/linux ln -s /usr/src/NEWKERNEL linux vi /etc/lilo.conf lilo reboot
Incidentally if you use a distro that stores the Linux headers, or rather iuses the kernel ones, in /usr/src/linux, then be careful changing this link. Luckily the distro I use stores these in another place, so you can upgrade kernels willy nilly, without affecting what glibc is compiled with.
New House New blog? How 2008 is that?
So the new house is ours (well 4 weeks now, but what with Crimbo etc….). Since this is going to be a fairly long renovation/rebuild there’s a blog to show it all! If you’re at all interested please visit, although you might want to wait until there’s some content!
In the meantime here’s a picture of my office to be! 
File under I did not know that about Finder #1001
You can easily mount an AFP network share by dragging the icon to Login items! I’ve wondered about this for years, but never enough to learn how! Bless Steve!
Nokia Email service graduates as part of Nokia Messaging
Nokia Mail graduates from the beta labs finally. I’ve been using this for a while now and it’s pretty good. I do not have the experience of a Blackberry to compare, but it surpasses all other mobile email I’ve ever used.
Nokia Email service graduates as part of Nokia Messaging: ”
Written by Davis Fields, Nokia Messaging team
Hello,
It’s Davis Fields and I’m happy to announce the official release of Nokia Messaging. Please go to http://email.nokia.com to download the latest version. I’m also proud to say that we are graduating the program from Beta Labs. The Nokia Messaging team has gained so much from you, our users, during our time here. We started our beta in August 2008 with the first release of Nokia Email service. We will be rolling out the service on a country by country basis starting with Australia, Finland, Germany, the Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, the United Kingdom and Venezuela. You are free to continue using the service until it’s commercially available in your location.
Here are the highlights of this release:
- Support for Yahoo! Mail
- Support for more Nokia S60 phones
- Support for up to ten email addresses
- Support for subfolders for IMAP email accounts
- Support for Google Apps hosted email and other vanity domain email addresses
- Flagged messages will automatically become starred messages in Gmail
- More intuitive inbox navigation via a discoverable control bar
- Faster opening of inbox
- Sent email will be synced to your webmail’s sent folder for all email addresses
I can say that most of these features came from your requests, and I hope you enjoy this new release. I can also say that we are by no means done with our work – this is the first official release but we will continue to regularly offer large updates to Nokia Messaging. I want to acknowledge specifically the omission of HTML in this release – we have spent plenty of time figuring out the best way to implement HTML and we are close to delivering it, but not in this release. It’s an important feature to us.
Finally, though we’re graduating from Beta Labs today, I will continue to be listening to your feedback and keeping up the dialogue. You will be able to find future postings from me regarding Nokia Messaging at the S60 Living blog. I will continue to read and reply to emails sent to nokiaemail [at] nokia [dot] com. As always, thanks for your feedback. Enjoy the holidays and the new release of Nokia Messaging!
- Davis Fields
Nokia Messaging
“
(Via Nokia Beta Labs blog.)
Hackers ‘aid’ Amazon logging scam
Hackers ‘aid’ Amazon logging scam: “Hi-tech criminals have helped Brazilian logging firms evade official limits on how much timber they can harvest, says a report.”
Quite amusingly when I first read this I thought that some crackers had hacked into the logs of some Amazon transactions, and grabbed credit card details….. Of course Amazon is not the only Amazon, and neither is it the largest or most important! 
(Via BBC News | Science & Environment | UK Edition.)
Resizing a Time machine backup
As spotted on this blog here’s a way to increase the maximum size used by sparse bundle.
I use Time Machine to backup to My Ready Nas. I found this thread and howto on the Infrant forums. It’s not supported by Appole but it works nicely. Although you’ve got to admit that using an usupported method for a backup is a little dodgy!
I had a problem where resizing was not supported. This post, and this post again on the Infrant forums and this post helped. Well they helped me realise that something Apple did with the OS X 10.5.2 update stopped AFP shares being supported 100% for HDIUTILS manipulation of Sparse/ bundles.
So this command line does not work 
sudo hdiutil create -size 320g -type SPARSEBUNDLE -nospotlight -volname "Backup of Morcheeba" -fs "Case-sensitive Journaled HFS+" -verbose ~/Desktop/test.sparsebundle
So I just started again. I have multiple backups anyway!
As far as I understand it Time machine backups use Rsync and link. Much in the same way that my
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