corenominal

Yesterday I invested in a new USB mobile broadband modem from Three, a Huawei E620. I have only been using it for a day, but I am already totally impressed with it. The device was super easy to set-up, all I had to do was plug it in and select my service provider, it was then ready to use with my CrunchBang/Ubuntu Intrepid system. As well as being impressed with the ease of set-up, I am also impressed with its connection quality; the connection has not dropped all day and the device has maintained an average speed of about 1MB. If anyone out there is looking to buy a mobile modem for use with Ubuntu Linux, I can recommend the E620.

My only concern with using my new device is that I want to be able to keep track of the amount of bandwidth I am using; I have a monthly contract with an allowance of 15GB per month and I would prefer it if I did not incurr any additional fees for exceeding my allowance. The shop assistant who dealt with me seemed to think 15GB was ample, I am not so sure. I have never previously had to worry about such things as I have always had unmetered access, but I believe I could quite easily burn through 15GB. So, I have decided to keep a log of my bandwidth usage. I am using vnStat to achieve this, a handy console based application for recording bandwidth usage for any given device. vnStat is fairly straightfoward to use and I have written some usage notes on my wiki for future reference.

P.S. Happy New Year!

I was quite surprised yesterday when somebody said my avatar, the one I use on my web profile pages, made me look like a serial killer! So, today I decided to update my avatar, a task which I thought would take all of 5 minutes, at least that is what I thought when I started.

To begin with I had to select an image, this in itself caused me much angst as I am not very photogenic. Anyhow, I could not find a picture of myself which I was comfortable using, so I thought it would be best to take a new photograph. Unfortunately, I snapped the picture outside where it was bloomin’ freezing; I had no option but to wear my woolly hat, not ideal. Also, the sun was shining, go figure, and my glasses decided it was far too bright for my delicate eyes; initiate dimmer mode. Again, not ideal. Oh well.

Next came the actual updating of the avatar, I had no idea that my avatar existed in so many different places! And in so many different sizes! Gravatar, Last.fm, Identi.ca, FriendFeed, Twitter, Launchpad, CrunchBang forums, Linux Outlaws forums, etc. etc. I am sure I have probably missed a few.

So anyway, what I thought would be a 5 minute job turned into a morning’s worth of faffing about. Be warned!

P.S. When having one’s photograph taken for an avatar, does one smile? I think not.

Update 29/12/08: Having slept on it, I have now decided that I would prefer it if my ugly mug was not plastered all over the web. I have updated my avatar accordingly.

Sometimes you just need to start afresh. This new weblog is my attempt at doing just that. I have decided to close/archive my blog and wiki on my crunchbang.org domain in favour of moving to this domain, which is actually my common username. I have been thinking about making the switch for a while and my reasons for doing so are numerous, to list a few:

• Since creating the new CrunchBang Linux site, I have really come to appreciate WordPress and DokuWiki for being the excellent web applications that they are. While I enjoyed working on my own custom blog/wiki, recently I have not really had any time to devote to developing/improving it.
• I am now managing my own Virtual Private Server on the Linode.com network. Using this new domain was much easier than trying to move my old domain.
• I wanted to separate and create some distance between my personal stuff and CrunchBang Linux. Hopefully, by using this new domain, the separation will be somewhat more defined, in my own head at least.

Regarding the old domain/website, over the next week or so I will disable all commenting and permanently archive it in a read-only state. I will also implement a few redirects and write a final short post detailing the move. I am really looking forward to using my new virtual home!