“I was watching a video of a kilted unicycling bagpiper in a Darth Vader costume playing the Star Wars theme whilst riding around a car park, when I used the ‘B’ keyboard shortcut to open the page in a browser so I could copy the URL (because some things just have to be shared) when Reeder crashed. To replicate: http://theborderlinesociopathicblogforboys.blogspot.com/2012/03/last-page-of-internet.html

A very happy new year to all of my readers.

Here’s a dachshund.

Almost two years ago my elder brother and I bought a Dell laptop for my mother.

She had seen the rest of the family using their various laptops and decided it was time for her to finally dip a toe into the technological world.

Things did not go well.

The machine itself was underpowered, boasting a Celeron processor which just about ran Vista. It limped along, noisily spinning up its fan at the slightest suspicion of activity.

Worse, far worse, was the blizzard of alerts which greeted my mum every time she dared to open the lid. Windows updates, the Windows security centre, AVG Antivirus (which replaced the at first shrill and then actively threatening anti-virus application which originally infested the machine), Dell alerts telling her to create a back-up disk, and many many more.

As a result any session comprised 80% fighting with the laptop and 20% actually achieving anything useful, if she was lucky.

She cried.

The longer she left between attempts to use the laptop, the greater the number and urgency of the alerts which appeared when she finally logged-in. Eventually she gave up. The laptop gathered dust, and was only booted-up when I visited her and ran various updates.

Recently I was chatting with a friend who asked the obvious question: Why don’t you install Linux on it? I had no answer.

I bought a magazine with a couple of Linux distributions on a DVD on the cover.

At this point I’m sure Windows Vista realised what my plans were. Like HAL in 2001: A Space Odyssey, it became a battle to the death. I spent an evening fruitlessly trying to persuade the machine to look to the DVD player to find an operating system. (In case you need to do this, try not using the ‘Fn’ key when using a function key to interrupt the Windows boot sequence).

Eventually, like the T-1000 in Terminator 2, it melted into a vat of molten steel and was replaced by Fedora 16.

I did a quick system update and installed drivers for the wireless card.

Now it is perfectly nippy and spends its time DOING WHAT THE USER WANTS IT TO DO.

It’s like a new PC, for the cost of a magazine. My mum is happily learning how to use it.

I should have done this months ago.

the snailr project realises that the web is in real life now

Anna Pickard has send me this postcard, part of her very excellent snailr project, an epic rail journey around the USA.

She writes:

We’re rolling into the Twin Cities – Minneapolis and St Paul, Minnesota – and we’re sitting in the observation lounge car; him writing an article, me postcarding.

Like the entry to most cities on this trip, it has been flat–flat–flat–flat–SPOING! suddenly, skyscrapers, offices, cityness.

At the edge of this one, though, one of the skyscrapers has a sign picked out in red bulbs, flashing. No.1! it says, from a few miles away. No. 1 at WHAT? exactly? “Ah.” he says, sagely. “In the comment box of the world, it would seem that Minneapolis is *that* guy.”

Time for my annual fungus photo.

Rest in peace, little Maggie.