My first 160 GB hard drive (made by Maxtor, for the record) just messed up again and it’s essentially decided that there’s no boot sector on it.

Now this has happened many times before, so I’m not too worried for the data. Usually, you just switch the PC off for an hour or so and it works again. Needless to say, I’ll be backing everything up asap (if I can boot back in, that is). I also have last month’s backups from about the 13-18th – can’t remember exactly. Why is it that they never fail right after a backup??

So I’m bringing you this post from my server/development machine, which is, ironically, running second-hand hard drives thrown around from machine to machine until they made it here.

Oh, and we have a 75 MHz Pentium 1 lying around here that has hard drives that are probably close to or even over 10 years old. Those hard drives (1.2 GB and 800 MB HDs) are still running without a hitch. I suppose it’s the high capacities that bring the low reliabilities…

This Maxtor is a couple of years old, by the way – and a replacement for the first one I got, which was so faulty Windows wouldn’t install.

OK, rant over.

EDIT: About 30 minutes later, it boots fine, and I start backing up. Sigh.

I’ve pushed out a few updates to my homepage.

It’s now got its own navbar (now integrated with the blog) and there are some new pages up and online.

Check it out now!

New version of WPGet available too.

Enjoy!

It’s out! Kudos to Chris for the very quick editing.

• See the original post
• Listen now on Odeo
• Listen now with iTunes

Or listen directly below!

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Just found this out and thought it might be useful to someone else.

If you’re running KDE and using the GTK-QT Engine to run GTK applications (e.g. Firefox) with your native KDE styles like I am, you may notice that after upgrading your software or changing your KDE colour scheme that certain bits of GTK apps suddenly turn grey.

Well, easy solution.

K Menu > Control Centre (sometimes also Personal Settings or something similar) > Appearance and Themes > Colours. Then make sure ‘Apply colours to non-KDE applications‘ is ticked. Apply and restart your GTK apps (make sure the appropriate GTK Styles and Themes settings are correct).

Colours KDE Control Centre module Hosted on Zooomr

Hope this helps someone!

A couple of things today.

Gizbuzz has been given a fancy new redesign by our good friend Chris Van Patten (of PodDev and Comitar fame). The new theme is awesome and big thanks to Chris for the redesign!

And in other news, PodDev Episode 2 was recorded last night (after last week’s technical problems), so once it’s been through post production it will be ready for listening.

Until then…

I’ve played around a bit and now it’s time for the review, of Google Reader.

Check it out at Gizbuzz now (with screenshots!).

Now I love my Xgl, Compiz and KDE combination, but a few (minor) things have been broken in KDE since Xgl and Compiz took over my machine.

One of these things is the screensaver. You can set a screensaver with KDE’s tools and manually launch it by choosing Lock Screen, but the screensaver would no longer come on by itself regardless of what settings you chose.

Well, there is a solution. Thanks to Noiesmo’s Website for the tip. It actually requires bypassing the KDE screensaver handling and use the older, but Xgl-aware xscreensaver. So the first thing you need to do is install that. Check your distribution’s software management tools and search for and install xscreensaver. A couple of commands for popular distros:

Fedora:

$ su -c "yum install xscreensaver"

(K)ubuntu:

$ sudo apt-get install xscreensaver

Once that’s installed we need to make a script that starts the xscreensaver program when we log in so it can run the screensaver after the timeout. Copy and paste the following into your favourite text editor.

#!/bin/sh
xscreensaver -nosplash &

Save that as ~/.kde/Autostart/xscreen.sh (you might need to show hidden folders to see .kde). Now we need to make that script executable. Browse to ~/.kde/Autostart in the file manager Konqueror and right-click your new xscreen.sh script. Choose Properties, click the Permissions tab and tick ‘is executable’ before clicking OK.

Now we need to start xscreensaver in this session, so press Alt-F2 and type xscreensaver -nosplash & and press Enter. Now press Alt-F2 again and type xscreensaver-demo and press Enter again.
Here is where you choose your screensaver, set timeout options and settings etc. Choose your desired settings and close the program.

Your screensaver should now run after the timeout you specified in xscreensaver-demo. Fixed!

Watch out for the ugly unlocking screen, though, it’s not quite as pretty as KDE’s one.

No other word to describe this…

[via]

As part of my feed reader quest, I’m trying out Google’s Reader, which is a bit more fully featured than Personalised Home. I’m going to use it for a few days and then post a review at Gizbuzz about my thoughts.

In the meantime, you can see which feed items I’ve found interesting below:

(Apologies to anyone who came to an old, broken version of this post via the feed – I messed up the publish somehow and had to pull the old post and rewrite it)

It’s here. After some time of actually finding a free moment in which to do this, finding the strength to carry on despite my apparent inability to understand the stylesheet of this WordPress theme and finding the strength to avoid having an anti-Microsoft week following IE’s refusal to correctly render some of my tweaked CSS, it is here.

What am I talking about? Well, as you might have noticed, this blog is on peter.upfold.org.uk/blog. Not just peter.upfold.org.uk/. There was a reason, and this is it.

My homepage. It’s amazing to think how long I have been doing web design/development and still I haven’t actually ever had a homepage of my own, only a blog. So I built it and integrated it with the blog and used the WordPress style to help me a bit.

I’ll stop rambling and let you see it – my new shiny homepage.

What do you think? (I know, there’s an annoying message, but it can’t be called finished yet, can it? And “Peter Upfold Beta” sounds a bit too Web 2.0)

I guess one of the reasons I haven’t had a homepage per se up until now was lack of content. Website without content is a rubbish website, and eventually my homepage will have my blog, projects and scripts and stuff and various other content (“Me around the web” will get bigger) until it is in a state where it can be called 1.0.

Well, I’ll keep you posted on the upgrades as and when they happen, and any feedback is greatly appreciated.