It got me thinking that since as long as I can remember and probably a lot longer than that, I have never gone much time without being exposed to some kind of digital entertainment. The longest I can think of is three days and that was because I was in fields at music festivals, which is a surreal experience so can’t really count as ‘real life’. In real life I can’t remember a day without using a TV or PC or both for some kind of entertainment even if it was briefly.

So I am going to turn it all off and go without it for a week to see what happens.

Why?

I want to see in my normal home environment what effect it’ll have on me to not have these things to keep me entertained/occupied. I want to see what emotions it produces and how i cope with them. I want to see how much of that ‘stuff’ you always put off to get done will actually get done. Plus, I am also an idiot.

The rules

• I will have to use a PC at work (I make websites!) but it will be used only for work, no YouTube/Facebook/RSS feeds/Iplayer etc on lunch and breaks.
• If I need to do something (e.g. pay a bill) and the only option is to use a website to do it then I will, but it will be done at work during lunch/break.
• I can use my phone but only to call people, no texts or internet or apps etc…
• I can use my Kindle to read books that are already on it, no internet or downloading new books. (Anyone who has used a Kindle knows its pretty much just like a normal book) Forget that, on second thoughts no Kindle, its still digital entertainment so normal books it is.
• I can use my camera to record the experience.

Other than that I am going to avoid all forms of digital entertainment, no PC, PS3, MP3′s, TV, Laptop etc…

When?

As soon as I press the Publish button on this blog post. I will write about the experience but I guess its gonna have to be on paper and i’ll transcribe it to a blog post or two later on… argh, not sure I’v thought this through.

So Goodbye, see you in seven days.

Anyway I never sell/chuck devices away because i’m weird like that and thought this little Asus might come in handy one day and sure enough a couple of days ago a opportunity for it to get some love after being turned off for a couple of years reared its head.

I am going away on holiday and I was uming and aring about taking the Samsung with me for fear of damage or it getting nicked etc, so i thought i’ll bang Linux on the old Asus that i’m not too fussed about and roll with that for dumping pics on and checking email etc. Should be pretty straight forward i told my self…. haha how naive.

So i knew the little Asus was not a power house so I decided to go for a distribution of Linux call Xubuntu, this is basically a version of Ubuntu for less powerful machines, even better I found one called eeeXubuntu which was created a few years back especially for the Asus netbook I have.

So first thing I had to do was download it and burn it onto a CD, then boot up a PC using the CD (basically runs the operating system without having to install it) and then use that machine to make a USB stick with the OS on to install on the Asus, confused yet? you aint seen nothing yet home boyyy.

I put the CD one of my PCs and:

Great start, what does all that mean? i’m sure someone knows. I put it down to a dodgy CD burn and I was right, I reburnt the CD booted again and then followed a process of  creating the USB installer, seconds in and in order to do this we need to load a Linux terminal window and physically punch in commands along the lines of:

...sudo mount eeeXubuntu.iso /cdrom/ -o loop
cd /cdrom/
sudo /cdrom/mkusbinstall.sh --autodetect...

blah blah blah. Long story short this process worked and I put the USB stick into the Asus and turned her on (unintentionally filthy).

Whey it works, we install eeeXubuntu and life is grand, I can now play Mahjonng and shit wheyy… what about YouTube? Movie player to watch some films? not installed or supported, I need to update? ok cool.

So I run the updater so I dont have software etc from 2007 and it ticks away downloading 800 and something files to update to the latest version gusty fire badger 8.09 or some such. Reboot and low and behold the wireless no longer works… but it did the first time. It appears the eeeXubuntu has been shot dead and normal Xubuntu has taken over. This is cool at least I am up to date, i’ll just install the driver for the wireless card, cant be that hard…. ha.

So I Google like I have never Googled before and eventually hit a site that tells me this might work:

...
sudo apt-get install build-essential
wget 'http://snapshots.madwifi.org/madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz'
tar zxvf madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-current.tar.gz
cd madwifi-hal-0.10.5.6-*
make clean
make
sudo ma..

blah blah blah more typing commands into a console. The above did not work first time because the link mentioned to the file was broken so I had to google again to find the newer one and type that in instead, the newer file name was the same as the old one but of course they added in a few more numbers to make it more of a pain somin like madwiif66456-82374234.78..333/hahafuck you/.beta5.6667.3 3. I realise there is no doubt a way to cut’n'paste into the terminal window but I dont know how and was not gonna waste more time googling.

So that process finished and after a restart the wireless was back up. EXCELSIOR!  well not quite.

Now the Internet connection is so slow I might as well train a fleet of carrier pigeons to carry data too an from my location. I grin and bare it for a while and decide to do some other tasks like install VLC to watch videos, chrome web browser and flash to watch YouTube etc…. hah all failed chrome error message of no sense and the other two, even using the GUI program installer… coudlent find either of these after ages of head scratching.

Abandoned that and went back to sorting the speed of the Wifi using google… what ensued was a series of forum posts on par with stuff from computer science lectures from my uni days, mixed in with the green code stream from the matrix. At this point I gave up turned the Asus off, put it back on the shelf where its been sat for two years and decided to take my Samsung with me and be extra careful.

The thing is i’m a geek! I know i could sit down for a couple of months maybe more an become a bearded sweaty Linux guru, i have that ability. What i do not have is the time to do that and lead a (somewhat) normal life! I’m sure once you understand what you are doing with something like Linux its great, for most people though…  not worth the hassle.

Pt 1

Pt 2

Pt 3

I’m not sure i like it, seemingly there is a growing backlash already of folks not liking the colour. Interestingly my theme in Gmail has a better looking bar, which I think has been up there for ages:

This style is wayyyyy better than the horrible google black bar of blackness. I like the idea in principle of being able to get to all your google stuff real quick but I think a style change is in order pretty quick.

Basically a news feed (commonly referred to as RSS)  is a means by which a website or blog can let you know about new content it has published without you having to visit said site or blog every so often to check up on it. This feed takes the form of a normal internet address that you can put into a news reader and from there on you can keep track on what is going on in all your favorite websites.

There are many different readers you can use to do this, I recommend Google Reader as its very simple to use and if you use gmail (if not you should!)  its easy to get to when checking email.

Here is an example of what it looks like once you have it setup and have added in some feeds:

So you can see I have loads of folders setup with feeds from all my favourite websites. Every time I log in I can immediately see what about 30 websites and blogs are up too. All you need to do is copy the link to a website’s feed and add it as a subscription in Google reader and ya on your way. I know a load of folks out there that’d benefit from this, it takes a few minutes it set up and really improves how you use the interwebs.

YouTube tip:

If you want to add in a feed of a specific channel from YouTube you can do it! Just copy the channel address and Google Reader will do the rest, e.g. ‘http://www.youtube.com/user/BBC‘

Today on facebook one of my chums on there wanted to know how to link his blog posts into facebook automatically. This is something i’v been wanting to do for a while and after a bit of searching the interwebs i found out how.

There are a lot of tutorials out there on how do do this but most of them focus on the old style layout of facebook not the new one. So without further adieu heres how you do it.

Find your feed

Every blogging site/software worth their salt has a mechanism to feed out posts in a format online readers can use to access the latest blog posts as they are published. The first thing you need to do is find out the link for yours, here are where Blogger and WordPress feeds are located:

Blogger:
http://blogname.blogspot.com/feeds/posts/default?alt=rss

WordPress:
http://blogname.wordpress.com/feed/  (or just http://your-blog-url/feed/ if you have WordPress on a webserver)

Once you have this link highlight and copy it.

Add your blog to facebook

Now you have your feed link all you need to do is login to facebook and in the top left hand corner of the screen go to settings -> Applications.

This will load a list of applications, one of which is called notes, click on the word notes.

This will load another screen with a link on the left that says Edit import settings, click on that.

This will load a further page with a text box, copy your blog feed code into that box and tick the agreement button that it wont be feeding horse porn and terrorist bomb making tips and after a bit of a wait it will now be setup!

Now whenever you add in a new blog item it will automatically show up in facebook. Think of all that time you’ll save pasting it in your status update as a link, at least 15 minutes a year

I found out a way of doing it thought using the Windows key:

I thought it might be interesting to do a blog post (more for me than anyone else) to do a little time line of the computers I have owned over the years, so here goes:

1. Acorn Electron – Late 80′s – early 90′s?

The Acorn electron was a bit like those old BBC Micro’s you used to get in schools if you were born in the early 80′s. If you were not born in the early 80′s you might wanna skip down the page a bit as you’ll prob have no idea what these clunky looking boxes are.

To be honest the Acorn electron was second hand, and in the late 80′s it was very out of date! but back then PC’s were not cheap like they are now and my parents were not exactly loaded so these things combined resulted in mr electron.

I’m glad I got it in retrospect because it opened the past up to me without it ‘seeming’ like the past if that makes sense. I was  pretty young so I didn’t know a whole lot about computers but it defo set me on the path to where I am now.  This little bad boy was so old you loaded up games from a tape! Many sunday afternoons were spent playing such classics as frogger, repton!, and the old old school classics like pac man and space invaders.

This was probably one of the last generations of Micro computers and to put it in perspective it could store and any one time 32K of data, These days a single MP3 is like 3000K plus! truly this machine is olde!

2. Amiga 1200 – Mid 90′s to Late 90′s

So after the electron I spent a few years being a console kid (like most teenagers do) until my folks decided I needed to learn more and do homework as well (poor misguided fools) so they bought me an Amiga 1200. Amiga were a family of computers that exisited in the 80′s and 90′s. They were produced by a company called Commodore and were separate from PC’s in their hardware and software (kinda like macs today).

The Amiga had a cult following back in the day, people loved them and I was no exception. At this time I even had a lexmark inkjet printer, truly I felt rather grown up.  I dabbled with programs like painting apps and word processing. The operating system was called Workbench and was fairly similar to Windows so it kinda set me up with a basic understanding of files, copying pasting and all that stuff.

Needless to say however at such a young age I was very much a fan of the games! (still am) and I literally had about 100 Amiga games. Games like ‘The Setterlers’, ‘Frontier Elite 2′, ‘Alien Breed’, ‘Monkey Island’, ‘Cannon Fodder’ ‘Syndicate’… the list goes on and on and I played them a lot! I feel a bit sorry for people who didn’t grow up with these kind of games/experiences because its so easy to take technology today for granted. These games were on floppy disks, the Internet was but a novelty… no one was actually ‘on it’, these were times when life was simple and I miss it sometimes.

3. PC: Nick1: 1997/8 – 2001

Woooooooo my first ‘PC’ computer with the Nick name (I’m on Nick5 now but we’ll get to those later).  This was a intel (dum dum dum dum) pentium 166Mhz with a whapping 32meg of ram and a 2GB hard drive.  It came with windows 95 and sported that classic off white case colour along with it’s 14″ monitor. This PC was another pressie from the folks for school and what have you. A bit more grown up now I did tend to use it for such things but of course games were never to far away, at last I could play Doom 2! which I did for months.

I  have fond memories of this machine but its funny looking back as to how times have changed in 10 years. To put things in perspective my current MP3 player stores 32 times! as much data as this PC’s entire hard drive did.  Imagine what that was like, you had to be really careful about what you stored.  My current PC has 4GB of ram which is 125 times more! Crazy just crazy.

The biggest impact this machine had was my own personal connection to teh Internetz. My mate John had had a similar new machine and was tinkering about on the Internet already and we used to have teenage nights of fucking about in chat rooms pissing off rednecks and other long forgotten shenanigans.

The Internet was a different beast then, still with a mild sterotype of geekyness and no where near the integration it plays in life today.  No Facebook, Google was just some new search engine a few folks used, Old sites now purchased and sucked into coporate machines existed like eGroups and CDNow, everything was very basic and fairly new still and I feel really proud to of experienced this time, its kinda like some weird digital history… like remembering your old house or old friends.

Back then I had a 36k modem which without going into the technicals, was slow. Webpages were a lot smaller (try loading facebook on a 36k modem now) so it wasent all bad and really thats all we had ever known so that long pause for a page to load was fine back then, now of course everyone uses broadband and you’d never expect one web page to take 30secs-2mins to load, you’d be ringing up ye isp!

Since I was on a modem back then it cost per minute to use the Internet like a normal phone call! Needless to say some tears were shed by my moms when a certain quaterly phone bill came in and was about 300 quid. Anyway going off topic, if you wanna checkout what the internet used to be like go here.

4. PC: Nick2: 2001 – 2006

Off to university now and this is the first PC I bought all by my self, almost actually grown fully up! This was an intel (dum dum dum dum) 1.5mhz pentium 4 with 512meg of ram a 32GB hard drive and a 128meg graphics card and Windows XP.

For its day it was not really top of the line but a significant upgrade on what I had before, I was a student afterall! over the years I think i upgraded it to 1gb of ram and put in a more powerful graphics card and a second 250GB hard drive.  Played the likes of Half Life and GTA III etc etc…

This PC lasted me a Looooooong time. Partly owing to being a poor student for 3 years but also due to the XP plateau. The XP plateau is an effect where by a PC just does what you need it too with no significant reason needed to upgrade. This is generally the case with PC’s that run Windows XP, they do everything you want and even to this day I would imagine that a significant number of desktop PCs running today are more or less the same as this one from 2001.

I could still be doing with a fair speed most of what I use a PC for on this machine with no issue, however I am a gamer and a geek and once I got an actual actual job it was time for an upgrade.

PC: Nick3: 2006 – Now

I decided to get a new PC in 2006 really for gaming and to have a bit of a speed boost all round. I went for a intel (dum dum dum dum) core 2 duo 2.67mhz, 2GB of Ram and an Nvidia 7950GT 512meg graphics card, 75GB raptor hard drive and a 300GB storage drive.

The silverstone case is a beast and it as about a million fans and dvd writers usb ports and ports I cant actually figure out to this day.  Again not the highest spec pc of its day but respectable and decent at running newer games from Doom3 up to Crysis.  I have added a 32″ TV to my desk and plugged that into it, I also have added a 19″ wide screen monitor. Inside I have bumped the ram up to 4GB and have added a more up to date graphics card.

I started out on old faithful windows XP, then had a brief fling with vista but we got divorced and now i’m fucking her sister windows 7 and life is gooood.

Hard to have nostalgia about this machine as its fairly new and not much to say about it as most folks know what modern PC’s are like.

Here is how my desk looks today:

I have upgraded this enough to keep me going a couple more years I think. Come 2010-2011 I think i’ll get another machine, problem is the case etc I have now are great quality, There isn’t really a need to go full whack and buy a totally new machine, methinks it will be more the case that Nick3 will just keep getting face lifts until he’s something totally different, bit like the late MJ.

Nick4/5

I was gonna write more but this post is getting far to bloody long (again!). Nick4 is a little asus eee netbook I bought that I never use because the times i’m out I wanna forget about pcs! lol. And Nick5 is a little desktop machine I have on 24/7 as a server so I don’t have to have my main machine chewing up power and dust.

Right so as some folks know I have just reinstalled my PC with Windows 7. Everything is great but I have noticed something online I was not seeing before on crappy Vista, adverts! lots and lots of flashing banner scummy adverts!

Then I remembered that on Vista I had modified one of my files to block those pesky swines.

Here is a guide on how to do it, If you are not at least 45% technical then maybe don’t bother with doing this as you might mess it up:

http://www.mvps.org/winhelp2002/hosts.htm

Before and After

So here is a print screen of the radio times website before changing a file (was worse online both the banner ad’s flashed like a fucking fireworks display):

And here is it after, No advets, looks great:

The Tech Bit

The link in the intro basically provides you with a list of domain names which websites use to embed adverts on their pages (kinda like a webpage inside a webpage). You add this list of domains to a file called hosts which is part of Windows. Each line looks something like this:

127.0.0.1  fr.a2dfp.net

Basically what this does is bypass how your computer normally tries to find a website and instead it redirects to 127.0.0.1 which is the address of your own machine! So basically you are tricking your PC to go to it’s self when ever your computer tries to access ‘fr.a2dfp.net’ and therefore the advert does not show! Simple yet genius. There are hundreds of these lines in the guide above which basically account for most of the ad servers on the Internet.

The Moral Bit

Some might argue that it is a bit rude to do this. These sites need adverts to stay running right?, fair enough. The truth is most people will get confused as to how to do this or are simply not Geeky enough to bother. These are the same people that probably click on these adverts in the first place, get infected by viruses and fall pray to email scams from Nigerian morons.

These people are the sheep of the Internet and like sheep they outnumber the badass Wolves. Sheep are simple and get fucked but they don’t cause trouble, Wolves eat sheep and don’t play by the rules but there will always be more sheep. What i’m basically saying is unless a sudden burst of intelligence sweeps the general Internet population these sites will lose no ad revenue, so fuckem.