Dom Barnes’s Blog

The other day I was on the train past the Hawthorns and Jewellery Quarter going into Birmingham and saw all the abandoned warehouses and factories just sitting there doing nothing. It got me to thinking about a good use of these buildings and came up with a few ideas with Katie. Some of these were

• Vegan/Vegetarian cafe
• Recording studio for musicians
• Office space for small companies/design firms that need somewhere cheap and easy to work
• Bloggers cafe/lounge

The last item is the one I thought the most about. I have an idea that I would love to get open one day. Allow me to expand if you will.

The idea is a basic one. Its a coffee lounge that’s more aimed towards the home workers/mobile workers, the people who work from laptops where ever Wifi is available. Its a place where there are plenty of large tables to sit down at, comfy seats, power sockets, wifi (perhaps free). And you could expand that really. Have lockers for people to put their laptops if they need to pop out for half an hour, offer printing facilities at a small cost, offer PO box services, allowing people to get packages delivered.

The theory behind this was that people who can work anywhere, may not want to work from home, they might want to spend it somewhere else, with other people, but still be able to get everything done that they need to. You could come here and spend the whole day working away, get food and drink, and get that project or web page sorted.

Now this may not be a great idea. But the theory is to play on not the people on their way to work, but the people who want to sit and work in a friendly environment, where they can feel safe, and be surrounded by similar people.

I suppose my hopes are that some of these buildings could be reused and help to build up a strong sense of independence in Birmingham, where small businesses can get a good start. It could be a hive of artistic, musical, creative thinking folks. You could have community centres for groups to meet, have a flea market for people to swap and sell things to people who would appreciate them.

I realise that this is difficult to get started. You need capital to buy these buildings, make sure they’re safe, kit them out with all the necessary gear, and of course get the work out to the people you are targetting to get people to come. I would like to build on this idea if possible.

If anyone has any ideas, suggestions, or information that would be useful, please do leave me a comment.

Day 4

I’ve made some progress since my last blog post. I was having issues with installing Ubuntu while hooked up to TV via the TV-out port on my ATI Radeon 7000. So I went over to my gf’s parents house and hooked the machine up to an LCD monitor. I have a bit more sucess this time. I got the installer working.
I was using the alternative install for my install as i didn’t need the LiveCD part. I booted up, and started to go through the install process. I got as far as copying and setting up the system and then it hung at 6% progress. I waited and finally got an error message which was no help at all. I tried once again and got the same thing.
This whole process took about 30 mins each time so I had just wasted an hour on this. My only solution was to go home and look into things.

After a bit of googling I found a possible issue. It might’ve been a bad burn. I checked my MD5 checksums on the ISO and CD after burning and had no issues. They were fine. I decided that I would try the 8.06 beta version as well. So I downloaded the ISO via BitTorrent (one of the many LEGAL uses!) and did a trial install in VMWare on my Macbook Pro. It went fine so I burnt a disc.

Day 5
Back at Katie’s parents house now. Trying the disc I just burnt. After a long wait, still no luck. Failed. So I tried one last thing. It was suggested that sometimes fast CD burns can cause problems, so I quickly burnt a new version of the 8.06 beta onto a CD with Disk Utility, this time selecting a 10X burn speed compared to the normal 24X.
I waited for the burn to finish and booted off the disc. All I can say is the difference was very noticable. The boot was a lot quicker this time. I launched the LiveCD and installed from there. Install didn’t take that long and I was soon happy to be greated by the Ubuntu login screen.

By this time it was late and almost time to go home. I did a quick update and also turned on VNC so I could manage this from remote.

I got home, and hooked the PC up to the TV again. No signal what so ever. So I fired up Chicken of the VNC and tried to log on. Now, I had reason to think it should work. I tried it back at the other house, and had no trouble. But for some reason, back home there was no luck.

So now I’m stuck again. I’ve bought a VGA to S-video and composite cable from eBay and will hopefully be able to get a picture on screen with that, at least long enough to get auto login set up and vnc working. Once thats done, I’ll get MythTV installed and get working.
I also need to get a new hard drive. I’ve got a 40GB drive in there now, and obviously need a bigger one. I’ll probably get a 200GB drive, and maybe clone Ubuntu across to it rather than clean install. That then gives me a a spare IDE connection for another drive.

Again we wait to fix unforseen issues.

Day two

Got a keyboard and USB adapter. Plugged in and boot. Blank screen. Lovely.

Need to check boot order. F2 to launch BIOS  - no effect. Pulled out CMOS battery and boot.

We’re in. OK, hard drive detected, cd drive detected. Check boot order.  Floppy, CD, Hard disk. Good. Reboot. Problem with CD drive. Change BIOS to ignore and swap cd to other drive. Works.

Install Ubuntu. Loading screen.
SQUASHFS error: Unable to read page, block 15df9320

Google. Reboot and check disc. (This may take some time) - Errors found in 1 files Tried CD in different drive.

“Cannot operate in Low Graphics Mode” - Now I need to select my monitor.  Well its a TV, so I’ll just try a monitor at 800×600. OK. Blank screen.

Damn, Reboot.  Try again.  Different resolution.  Blank screen.

Damn. This isn’t looking good.So maybe the disk is bad. Heaven forgive me, I’ll install XP.
1 hour later and I’m downloading the first of 88 software patches, but I’m installed.  I guess the disk is fine.

Day 3
I think that my issue is running it through a TV for install.  Maybe the X11 engine can’t load properly.  So I’ll download the alternative CD without the LiveCD and do a text based install. CD is inserted and I boot.

Install in text mode please. And now my screen is flickering like crazy. Its trying to display the image but its not got the right frequency.  So I’m stuck.

I tried frantically hitting Enter in the hopes that an installation would eventually start up. Not so true.
Solution: Friday I’m going to my gf’s parents house to borrow their monitor so I can get Ubuntu installed and get the necessary drivers for my ATI Radeon 7000 card. Hopefully it will work when I come back here.

Today I picked up my box which will soon become my MythTV box. I decided to build a PVR for myself a few months back but just needed the supplies.

So far I have the TV tuner card, an Hauppage Win-TV PCI card, a graphic card, Radeon ATI AGP. I just needed the box. Well today I picked up a Dell Optiplex GX300 which will become the nervecenter of the whole operation.

I started by removing the old SCSI drives, and SCSI card from the motherboard. Then stuck in the Ubuntu CD and booted the system up. And what did I see? Keyboard error. So of course I need a keyboard to boot.  So I went round to borrow a keyboard from my gf’s dad. Just my luck, he only had a USB keyboard, and this PC doesn’t seem to play well with USB keyboards. So I need to get a USB to PS/2 adapter from work tomorrow. I might get a keyboard too just in case.

Hopefully tomorrow I can get ubuntu installed and MythTV setup. If not, then I might have to look at another base pc to build from.

I just saw this pop up online from Dave Slusher who does the fantastic Evil Genius Chronicles blog and podcast. He’s got together with a group of locals to pull together their own new media event, to bring similar style activities you see at SXSW. In his own words, “the Grand Strand Bloggers are throwing themselves a party and seeing who dances.”

So I wanna spread the work about CreateSouth and urge you to attend if you’re nearby.

Dave’s done what I have recently though I would like to see in the UK as well. There are loads of these conferences in the US, SXSW, PodCamp, Bar Camp, Twitter Meetups, ConvergeSouth, and so many bloggers, podcasters, content creaters in the UK just don’t get to attend. This morning I thought it’d be good to see a WestByWestMidlands start up here, in the same suit as SXSW and CreateSouth that Dave has helped to get rolling. An event with something for everyone. Music, films, sociology, education, the whole works. Just somewhere you can come and listen to people speak about their industry, ask them how to get started them selves, get ideas and tips for improving your own business, blog, podcast or other. Somewhere to go and learn how to make a short video for Youtube or Viddler, to learn about digital photography from the beginning, to learn how to get blogging and podcasting, and generally share knowledge and have a good time.

I’m hoping one year I’ll have enough time and money to go to SXSW perhaps but for now, I’ll watch from afar and support Dave who’s bringing some of this to the South east.

So if you fancy it, go and get registered!

So tonight at the Midlands Mac User Group Richard, Ben and I were talking about the Fon AP that Ben had at Trilby. For some reason he (and others) were having trouble setting up their Fon router to work.
I bought one too for €8 and never got around to setting it up. So I figured I’d give it a try.

Firstly, my current setup. I have ADSL broadband from Virgin (not the cable service, the over the BT service). I have a Netgear DG834G Wireless ADSL Modem Router serving up wifi to my house (protected of course). I can also connect to one of the 4 10/100Mbps ports if needed. My DG834G currently serves up IP’s via DHCP all within one range. I have no other routers, switches, or anything else in the house. Oh but I do have a Airport Express which connects as a client to the DG834G to stream audio to my Hifi.

So here we go. I’ve taken every thing out of the box. I have my Fon AP (access point), power supply, installation guide, and network cable if needed.

According to the install guide I start by connnecting my ethernet cable from the adsl router to the Fon WAP.

Read the rest of this entry »

That title may not make much sense, and thats cos its a really far off simily (look it up) to my current work situation.

As I said before, I’m currently impending redundancy, and this week, we reached the end of the consultancy period. What does that mean? Well they are now at free liberty to give us our 30 days notice at any point. There has to be some formal dismissal hearing, and then 48 hours, but basically we’ll be going soon.

What does that mean for me? Well of course I’m looking for a new job. I wanna take this as an opportunity to get out of my industry and into IT. So I’m spending my time looking at IT Technician, Help desk jobs, anything that I can get for a good starting job, where I can do hardware and software repairs, and if possible, some travel.

I think I wanna get into network admin. At least that’s what I feel like I wanna do so I’ll follow that path unless my heart says otherwise.

So if you’re interested in hiring an aspiring IT Technician, who is A+ certified and working on his Network+, then please drop me a note and make me an offer.

Otherwise, I’ll keep trawling those online job search sites, and watching the hours tick away at work, as the share price drops, as well as my level of concentration and focus.

Until then, I’ll be working more on the new site, perfecting the theme for launch. Which hopefully won’t be too many more weeks away.

And speaking of that, is there anyway of getting my posts on the old blog to auto-forward to the new blog? Maybe not but worth asking. I’d just like to drive traffic away from the old, and make sure I’m still getting visitors to the new one for the same searches. Leave me a note in the comments.