Of Penguins & Coffee

As was noted in my LENOVO ROCKS post, I recieved a virgin hard drive for a laptop with no disk drives.

This is a problem that has been long solved in Linux Distros but is not so good for Windows, but i did find this brilliant guide by Sandip from earlier this year, i just wanted to point out a few difference that i made to the process that i think make it slightly more transparent whats going on.

1. Get a USB drive > 4GB
2. Use The Disk Managment pane in Computer Managment (Control Panel > Administrative tools)
3. Find your drive and right-click > Format the partition as NTFS
4. Once its formatted, right click it again and ‘Mark Partition as Active’
5. Use a image mounter such as WinCDEmu to mount the Windows 7 image
6. Drop into a cmd prompt and navigate to the drive where the Window7 image is mounted, cd to ‘boot’ and execute ‘bootsect /nt60 X:’ where X: is the drive letter the target partition is mounted on.
7. Copy the contents of the mounted Windows 7 image to ‘X:’
8. Reboot and if you dont know how to boot from a USB drive, you probably arn’t reading this, but if not…

I know  there are alternative methods for doing this in Linux, but since i didnt use them in this instance, i cant comment on them.

FYI: Windows 7 is now my full time OS, and frankly im suprised; Theres a few things I miss, like a nice easy command line networking, SSH built in, a decent X11 server, but for a  all round notes/documentation/lil-bit-o-code machine, the Tableting pros few  out-weigh the cons. E.G The wonderous marvelous stupendous Math Input Panel that outputs in MathML!

I’ll try and keep this as short and sweet as possible.

From the looks of my google analytics page(if anyone has a blog or site, i hightly recommend it) people were very interested in my experiences with lenovo, and I’m sorry for not updating.

About a week after my previous post, the problem continued to get worse until it simply wouldn’t boot. I called Lenovo Ireland and (after a suprisingly short hold time) as soon as i said the magic number “2100″ I was asked for my product and serial numbers and an address i wanted the new hard drive shipped to. Now, there was a slight hiccup where the outsourced phone operator recorded my serial number incorrectly, but that was fixed very speedily.

That was on a Friday at around 4:30. By 10am Tuesday, a fresh and shiny harddrive was on my desk.

Something that I should point out is that I got this machine from Lenovo America, with no extra fancy warrenties or anything, and they STILL gave me a great quality of service. I dont want to come across as ‘glowing’ or anything, but my next machine after this is going to be a Lenovo.

My only qualm about the experience was that there is no realistic way to ‘restore to factory settings’ for a blank drive on a machine with on Disk Drive  but I wanted to try out Windows 7 RC anyway and installed it from USB. But thats for a different post.

Recently the only additions I’ve been making to this blog are presumptious ‘
I’ll be doing this’ messages, and this is no excection.

I’ve been living and working in Athlone, Ireland for the past year and have really learnt alot and very much enjoyed myself, but however much I will miss the place, academia drags on; it sounds like a campaign slogan but I’m back in Queens for ‘TWO MORE YEARS…TWO MORE YEARS’

Anyway, as such i will be moving in to a house in Ebor St in Belfast with my long term partner and my little brother (in this economy who can blame him for grabbing coattails?) .

Now, while that will make for many personal and social changes, those are outside the scope of this blog; what it REALLY means is that for the first time, I’ll have a hackable (within partners aesthetic reasoning) house. Were planning on holding on the the place for 2 years so i can justify the investment.

This is the plan of things i want to set up, and I will be updating this page with some extra links and notes as i make them.

In no particular order

1. Shared media storage area for the whole house (probably using my MyBook) that will work with games consoles aswell as laptops/desktops internally and externally.
2. Shared calendars and timetables availiable.
3. Festival based alarm clock with dynamic alarm times based on respective timetables. (2)
4. VPN access for all housemates.
5. Some form of SFF pc in the living room to act as a Skype box attached to big-screen (My partner has ‘attentive’ parents that will be 3000  miles away, and mine will be about 500 miles away, i expect them to be in contact somehow, so it may as well make it as inexpensive as possible…)
6. Secure wireless (obv)
7. Centralised logging (syslog/snmp trap) across all ‘applicable’ machines, with some form of visualisation (mrtg)
8. X10 automation of (at least) lights, could be augmented by basic motion detectors and environmental montiors
9. Remote webcam (may turn this into a robotics/machine learning/machine vision project with the old eeepc and have a kinda roomba on steroids)

Its a big list and i dont expect to finish half of them, but what gets done will be documented here!