I never thought I’d see, or rather hear this.

I was flicking around the music channels on Sky and happened by Kerrang. After listening for a couple of seconds to the song I thought I recognised the theme, but it definitely wasn’t from any heavy rock song… I was sure I was wrong, it couldn’t be.. it’s not Neil Diamond’s “Solitary Man” which my mum plays on her old Neil Diamond Greatest Hits cassette. But it was!

Yes, a band called “Him” have done a cover of this Neil Diamond song from the late 60’s. Of course, they’re dressed it up a little in rock clothes, but not much. It just seemed a bit inconguous that a band who’s lead singer seems to model himself on Marilyn Manson would be doing a lightly made over cover of such an “easy listening” song.

Well, well. I’m sure we’ll get a Bing Crosby ballad made over as an urban beat soon. Anyone for Eminem singing “White Christmas?” Or maybe a rap take on “Inch Worm?”

There were loads of people in the University Parks.

There were three telescopes in operation using filters and one with a projections screen, along with various posters and things.

The queues for the direct observation telescopes were rather long, so I just haddled around the projection telescope.

The weather on the Sun today is clear and calm with only a few small spots.

This morning I tried the old pin-hole camera trick to view the transit of venus.. I failed.

I could either get a very small image of the sun on which I could see nothing or a larger, far more dim image which was far too dim to see anything on. Oh well.

I think I’ll pop over to the University Parks in a bit to see if I can find the public viewing thingy they’re having.

OK, I missed spring, OK?!

This was the first useful weekend since Easter I’ve had the chance of doing much in the way of really good house work. It’s amazing how filthy a house can get when you have visitors and can’t get to do things.

Anyway, I’ve started on the mamoth job. For a start I washed out the fridge, the kitchen worktops and the tiles along with hoovering and stuff. I still have plenty to do such as washing the kitchen floor and de-icing the freezer though.

Saturday I also managed to get to the barber to get a hair cut. I’ve not had a chance to do that since about mid March so there was quite a bit to get cut off.

Other than those things I did very little over the weekend. On Saturday I was feeling really shattered through lack of a decent sleep since about Wednesday night. I was basically in a daze and forgot loads of things when I went to Sainsbury’s to do my shopping.

Anyway, today is the start of another week.. and the weather is projected to be unbarably hot. Oh well.

Well, I enjoyed the film and the food afterwards.

Grim, Holly and Matt all enjoyed it too but had far more to say about it ‘cos they’ve read the books, which I have not.

Anyway, nice evening out.

Now I think I’ll trundle off to bed and try to sleep.

Tonight I’m off to see the new Harry Potter film in Reading along with sleipnir_, reverendgrim and h0llym0nst3r. I do hope it’s as good as they say it is as I’m going to have to do some major rushing to get to the cinema by 7pm.

Oh, and by the way… Where’s the sunshine gone?!!!

Well, if you want to put linux on an Acer Aspire 1500 you can.

Good points:-

• Not as big as I thought.
• Not as heavy as I thought.
• Everything works well under Windows (as expected).
• Most things work nicely under Linux with a little tweeking.
• The screen is pretty decent (though not as good as the really high priced standalone LCD displays).
• In normal usage it doesn’t get very warm, especially in powersave mode.
• It’s flippin fast in performance mode!
• The keyboard’s nice.
• The touchpad works well.

Bad points:-

• The fan when it does come on is quite loud.
• They didn’t include Bluetooth chip but left the (now useless) bluetooth button on the machine. (This is the top of the range model in the UK.)
• Stand-by, suspend and hibernate don’t work under Linux.
• The power supply cable (manufactured by Lite-On) is big and bulky.
• The power cable has a right-angled plug but the power socket is on the back of the machine. This causes the cable to obscure the parallel port and makes it all too easy to accidently pull the cable from the socket when moving the machine.
• The 3-in-1 SD/MMC/Memory Stick interface is not supported under Linux at all. (It uses the I2C bus attached to the ISA bus as it’s part of the Winbond monitoring chip.)
• The Intel softmodem is only supported under the 2.4.x kernel by the Intel drivers.

Well, I’ve managed to resolve pretty well all the issues. The only issue left is caused by Linux’s ACPI sub-system not being able to properly suspend without crashing the machine.

On my old laptop I got around this by using APM rather than ACPI for power management. Unfortunately, the NDIS windows driver running under ndiswrapper won’t run unless ACPI is fully in control.

I’ve upgraded the system to the latest Linus kernel, 2.6.6, and made sure all the optimisations for the Athlon 64, including the PowerNow! power control options. Now the CPU fan runs quietly when it runs at all and the battery lasts a very much longer time.

I’m typing this on my new laptop. It’s running Linux, the WiFi interface is working using a combination of ndiswrapper and the windows device driver and everything’s hunky dory.

Well, not quite. Citylink didn’t deliver the machine until midday yesterday even though I paid for before 10:30am delivery and the extended warranty pack wasn’t included. I’ll contact the vendor to sort these things out as the before 10:30am delivery cost an extra £10 and the extra warranty has to be registered within a fortnight. I’m sure this will all be sorted out.

As for the laptop itself, it turns out to be not that much heavier than my old one and is only a bit bigger. The fan runs quite a lot under Linux ‘cos the ACPI isn’t as advanced as under Windows, where the CPU fan just sort of ticks over. Remember, this is an AMD Athlon64 3200+ so it’s not a slow processor.

One thing I think Acer have made a mistake with is selling the machine in the UK without the Bluetooth chip and leaving the bluetooth button on the machine. I have the top of the range machine yet they’ve left out the bluetooth chip, which would probably cost about £10 to install. Now, £10 is an insignificant amount relative to the cost of the machine, so it’s a case of spoilling the ship for a ha’p’th of tar.

Otherwise, it’s a pretty impressive package and I’m very pleased with it.