Something cropped up in a newsgroup today, specifically one which goes by the acronym ucsm and is dedicated to the discussion of Apple Macintosh computers. Someone mentioned that some sat nav owners are entering their home address as that of the local police station. The (dubious) logic being that if your sat nav is stolen the thief doesn’t then go and break into your house (why would he?). The navigational side of this logic is that the owner of the sat nav does know how to get from the local police station to their home.

What I was what kind of idiot puts their home into a sat nav, don’t these people know where they live? Read more…

The biggest hurdle I had installing Debian on my new server was getting the Debian Net Install ISO onto a USB stick in a way that would be bootable.

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Did you see the post regarding a Linux install to a Mac Mini? Well I’m not happy with it because it’s not as stable as I’d like. For some reason the partition information becomes corrupt; everything is OK after a reboot but I can’t figure out why it’s happening in the first place, there’s nothing in the logs I can put my finger on and blame.

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Markdown is a type of computer language… hold it, don’t switch off just yet, it’s not that dull. Those of us who write blogs sometimes have to deal with HTML, and that’s ugly and a whole lot more typing than we really need to do to say what we want to say. Markdown lets you avoid most of the HTML you are likely to need to type. Let me explain…

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vi, the unix text editor, is an incredibly useful and powerful piece of software. It is daunting to learn at first, but it’s the one piece of software that you can be 99.9% certain of finding on any *nix type system. And if the machine isn’t working right, it may be the only tool you have to fix it, so it’s useful to know how to use it.

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I found installing Debian on a Mac Mini very difficult, but it needn’t be. There are many instructions and suggestions around the web, but I couldn’t find all the information in one place, and when things went wrong I could find no help. So, now that I’ve got a working install I thought I’d blog it in the hope to help other avoid the problems I had.

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The forecast was 3 to 4, North / North-west. Great for sailing in Pevensey Bay. Except I don’t think we got more than f2.

My wife isn’t always available to sail with me, and friends sometimes have other commitments, so finding crew isn’t always easy. So I’ve been wanting to give single-handing a try for a while, but didn’t want to attempt it with another pair of hands just-in-case. So today I took my wife and she agreed to do nothing while I tried to single-hand.

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Below is a link to a web-page that tells of one sailors experience in Samoa at the time of the recent tsunami. The tale is both wonderful and tragic but is written in a straightforward and gripping way. I think it should be widely read, so I am linking to it here.

I can’t say that I hope you enjoy it because it’s not that sort of article. But it will make you think.

Today it was announced that Dutch authorities have taken into care a thirteen-year-old girl who wants to be the youngest person to sail solo around the world. What business is it of social services (or the Dutch equivalent)? I don’t condone parents sending children off to take part in dangerous activities, to live their own dreams through their children, but if the child has the necessary skills then why shouldn’t they attempt something like this?

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I came across Alex Payne’s Rules For Computing Happiness today, and I think they should be shared, so I’m going to tell you about them here.

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