The lovely Jayne and myself took a week off last week. She started the week off in London, visiting friend and former flatmate Sairah, before coming back and bringing to an end my zombie movie festival. Anyway, here's some things What I Done.
I recently got my hands on our old work Mac, a G4-400 PowerMac. 320Mb RAM, 10Gb hard drive and the hugely sucky MacOS 9. My plan was to install Linux on it, but after much wrangling (and I really do mean much) I couldn't get X to play ball with the graphics card properly. In the end I decided to try Mac OSX, and was blown away - everything that was so abysmal (from a techy point of view) in MacOS 9 was fixed - and not just fixed, but made so good it hurt. This is, of course, 'cos it's built on lots of open source software (the kernel is FreeBSD-based - a Unix inspired OS - and it uses Samba to see the Windows-orientated network, something completely unheard of in MacOS 9). It's annoyingly good. Basts. Anyway, during the time I spent wrangling with kernel modules to get the sound working, and the hands-on X configuration and the like, I learnt a load more about Linux, which is good. Still my favourite OS on x86 hardware.
I started (but didn't finish) my Pokia clone. What you're looking at here is the handset rigged up with handsfree earpiece and microphone, and the pick-up/hang-up button, all in place. Doesn't look bad, does it? I got annoyed with having to solder onto 26-year-old wires with cotton reinforcement though, so I've not finished it yet. When I do, there will be full details of the build.
We visited the Museum of Welsh Life with Jayne's mum and sister. If you've never been there, you must. It's awesome. Lots of old buildings from around Wales have been taken apart, piece by piece, and rebuilt in the grounds of St Fagans Castle (which is actually just a manor house, but let's not be picky). Here you can see the castle/manor house itself, and some of its gardens, but we spent far more time going around the more modest cottages and things that make up the bulk of the site. It was our third visit and we still haven't seen it all!
We visited besht fwend Gareth and besht fwend's wife Rainey in Overbury, and walked to the nearby lake, which was nice but knackering. (Much long grass to trample through.)
We also met their new cat, Monkey. He was called Fluff before they got him, despite being wholly unfluffy (not like our Fluff is). He has absurdly long limbs. I wanted them to call him Johnny Legs, but Monkey it is.
Finally for this little lot - and last thing in the week, for that matter - I laid a new floor in our bathroom. Not bad, eh? It's vinyl planks - it cost about �30 to do the room (with half a pack to spare). I might use the leftovers to cover a PC case, because that's the sort of thing I do.
Oh, before I forget - how's this for a company name, eh?
