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Unless you’ve been completely off the grid in the last few days, you’ll have heard all about the iPhone 4G prototype that was left in a bar in Redwood City, California. The phone was found and subsequently sold to Gizmodo.com for $5,000. Gizmodo, a massive gadget news site, who’s posts frequently top 10,000 hits in a few hours, had to turn off their comment system because they were getting such a hammering.

The question that most people are asking is, is this the new iPhone?

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I just installed the beta of the new Ubuntu release, 10.04. As I usually like to do, I opted for a clean install and then set about doing all the things I usually do after a clean install. This time, I decided to document exactly what these things are so that other people can get their systems up and running smoothly. Hit the more button to see these steps. Continue reading »

In the latest Ubuntu, the team have made the decision to move the window buttons (minimize, maximize and close) from the right to the left. I don’t agree with this change, so thankfully it’s not a difficult one to reverse.

To relocate the buttons back to their rightful place on the right, follow these steps. Continue reading »

I occasionaly get asked why I am so hostile to religion. Well. It’s things like this that turn my stomach.

The leader of a religious cult was “outraged” when a 1-year-old boy did not say “Amen” before a meal and ordered her followers to deprive him of food and water until he died

I mean what the heck?! The cult is now defunct, thankfully, but this child should not have died. It is because of someones religious beliefs that this child suffered and died. Meaningless. It’s just sickening.

Full story here. More information available here.

Just a quick post here, if you use Ubuntu, there are a few places you can keep up with the latest news, most popular and often mentioned is Planet Ubuntu, which aggregates Ubuntu members blogs. It’s often a little too developer heavy and in depth for normal users.

I recently found a great blog solely for users, it highlights the latest updates and news about applications and is a great way to discover new cool apps, like Ubuntu Tweak, Docky, Gwibber and loads others.

That blog is OMG! Ubuntu!, I’m not a huge fan of the name either, but the content can’t be beat. It’s updated several times a day which is incredible, I never knew there was enough Ubuntu news to fill several posts a day!

Anyway, check it out, you won’t be disappointed – http://www.omgubuntu.co.uk/

Since its exam time, of course I’m spending my time doing anything but studying. So, I’ve completely redone my Ubuntu desktop.

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For a long time I’ve been interested in tech podcasting, I’m an avid listener of these fine shows, http://bol.cnet.com and http://twit.tv.

I was recently asked to join the panel of a radio show being broadcast on my local college radio station, called ITFreely, the show is a continuation of a podcast that is now being recorded in a proper radio studio and being broadcast on FlirtFm, at 12.30 every Wednesday. So far there have been 2 shows broadcast, which are available online here and here

Running parallel to this, I also started to contribute to the Tech In Hiding Netcast, a podcast by bloggers on the TechInHiding.com website. I’ve done one episode so far, and it can be found here

So, if you want to listen to me blather on about technology, check the links out, and leave some feedback. I’m new to all this, so any comments are appreciated.

I love Songbird, it’s a great music playing program and I’ve been using it since it hit it’s 0.6 release. Anyway, today I discovered 2 cool little things that have made my Songbird experience much better.

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UPDATE – Tyler in the comments notes that this is also a problem in 32 bit versions, so I’ve modified the title accordingly

Last night I performed a fresh install of Ubuntu 9.10. One of the first things I did was to install the BOINC manager so I could continue contributing to the World Community Grid

I fired up the BOINC manager and for some reason, the blasted thing wouldn’t connect and download new jobs. I switched to ‘Advanced View’ and had a look under the ‘Messages’ tab. There was the following error message -

"Scheduler request failed: peer certificate cannot be authenticated with known CA certificates"

What the hell does that mean, well, I found some information on this really helpful site.

The issue appeared to be that the file ca-bundle.crt was not included on the installation of the BOINC software.

So, the instuctions were to download the file, and add it to the BOINC data directory. Where the heck is the BOINC data directory? Well, after a little poking, I found it. This is only an issue if you installed the package from the repositories, otherwise, the data directory is easy to find, as it’s in your home folder.

To fix the problem,

1. Download this file

2. Copy the file to the BOINC data directory,

sudo mv /path/to/the/file/ca-bundle.crt /var/lib/boinc-client

3. Now, to get the client to recognise the new file, you need to stop the daemon, restart it, then restart the manager. If this all sounds like a pain in the arse, just reboot your PC and it will do all this for you. If you don’t want to reboot, run

sudo /etc/init.d/boinc-client restart

Then start the BOINC manager again, you should be up and running.

Recently I sent a letter to the office of Dermot Ahern TD, expressing my concerns regarding the new Defamation Act and the articles contained referring to blasphemy. You can see the letter I sent here

After quite a long wait, apparently due to some email routing problems, I received a reply from Conor R. Savage, Private Secretary to the minister, who writes that….

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