Brother Bear

Kristen has just watched Brother Bear on dvd. I spent the entire time catching up on my rss feeds. After she finished the film, she realised that the canadian moose provide a commentary for the film which we are now watching/listening to. It’s really funny and the best thing is that I don’t need to watch the screen – I can just listen to it.

Mandrake 10

Saw a mag with mandrake 10 on it in WHSmiths, so purchased it to upgrade….bad decision! At least in september I was able to get Mandrake on the laptop but this time its installed and working – but not in a gui interface (and the wifi card still doesn’t work). When I try to run startx I get “failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module”. The weird thing is that there is a nice 10 with a star logo in the right hand side of the screen, and it is using a graphical logo to boot up……
Update Turns out I needed to install the latest driver, so a wget http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-5336/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run downloaded the file.
Then a sh NVIDIA…..run complained it couldn’t find a kernel and that I needed it compiled or something BUT I didn’t have the kernel sources loaded.
rpm on kernel-source said that I needed gcc and a few more dependencies loaded.
Once I had loaded them all, ncurses, gcc, nlibsomethingorother I was then able to startx and get a graphical screen! Talk about complicated!

Dishwasher

Well I feel like a fully fledged plumber tonight. Wednesday night I brought home the dishwasher from work as we had no room to put it in the new offices. We gave it a good clean outside (after the clean it got in the office too!) and I wisely decided not to tell Kristen that there was a dead mouse under it when we moved it from under the sink – that brought the grand total to 3. Anyway, I stopped off at Wickes on the way home and for under £9 I got a splitter for the cold water outlet and a self cutting waste outlet clamp. Both are now firmly in place with no leaks….yet. I did manage to get wet putting the splitter on the cold water pipe as I foolishly decided to let the stopcock on the join stop the water – it didn’t. As I called Kristen to give me some help she went into the loo – I thought she was going to turn the main stopcock off, but no – she just needed the loo! Afterwards she turned the water off and I was able to adjust the nonworking stop cock into more of an off position. Then it was a quick attachment of the washing machine and dishwasher, turn on the main stopcock and then struggle to turn the little splitter stopcock back to the on position. Then it was loading the dishwasher – which started the arguments off already – and we’re now sitting up waiting for it to finish, neither of knowing how long it will take – to ensure that the waste outlet doesn’t leak. Oh and Kristen says that I am a fully fledged plumber 😉

Finally got bluetooth synching with my mobile.

I’ve never quite managed to get outlook to synch with the mobile via bluetooth. Infrared works fine and dial up networking over bluetooth worked fine too. In order to get it working I have to do the following.
Enable Bluetooth on the phone. Enable Bluetooth Manager on the laptop.
Select Nokia PC Suite in the bluetooth service manager and hit connect.Select a free com port,(2 in my case). Accept the connection on the phone. At this point the phone will show connecting. THEN go into the pcsynch application and connect using bluetooth. Choose the com port from above and the phone stops showing connecting and you are then connected. At this point you can synch away.
Now that I’ve blogged this, I’ll be able to do it again next time I need to synch!