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Ruminations on Taxis

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Taxis in Manila do one of two things: If you're standing there waiting for a taxi to appear, they hide. Sometimes they'll drive by with the light on, but they won't stop, because that just means they forgot to switch the light off. You can wave your arms around, shout, whistle, whatever you like, but … Read more

Message from Above

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I was in Church the other weekend attending a mass. As I'm not a religious person, my attention was beginning to wander. Some birds had taken up residence in the roof, so I was watching them for a while, which struck me as mildly odd. Then the choir started up to lead the congregation in … Read more

Big Switch 5: Unplugged

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So now I had all the software installed and working correctly I could catch up with work, and just get used to using Linux on a day to day basis. I also had the security of a fully functional Windows installation to fall back on, should everything go wrong, or should I have forgotten to copy something across.

But up until now, I'd only been using a Wired connection. The built-in wireless on my Thinkpad R51e didn't work with Ubuntu, and a few attempts to fix it were not rewarded with success. I decided to wait until I had a weekend free to sort it all out. In the interim, if I needed wireless, I had a Buffalo Airport PCMCIA card which worked perfectly when I plugged it in.

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Twisted Logic

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I was walking back from the supermarket yesterday and saw a guy relieving himself against a fence. OK, so it was broad daylight, and its not an altogether uncommon phenomenon here. However … the fence was a chicken wire fence, and it separated him from a busy road – the one I was walking along. … Read more

Big Switch 4: Softly Softly

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Now we've got the box booting correctly its time to install some useful pieces of software, and fix a couple of things that don't work quite right out of the box. Your mileage may vary with this section, as some of the software choices are personal.

OK first golden rule of any Linux install, update all the existing software. As Linux Mint is based on Ubuntu, which is based on Debian (uh, that's enough …), then we use:

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade

… and go away and get a coffee, 'cos on a 47 kbyte connection this takes a while. Actually make that a coffee, a visit to the gym and lunch.

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